On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction

by William Zinsser

How can you overcome such fearful odds and write well about a place? My advice can be reduced to two principles—one of style, the other of substance. First, choose your words with unusual care. If a phrase comes to you easily, look at it with deep suspicion; it’s probably one of the countless clichés that have woven their way so tightly into the fabric of travel writing that you have to make a special effort not to use them.

As for substance, be intensely selective. If you are describing a beach, don’t write that “the shore was scattered with rocks” or that “occasionally a seagull flew over.” Shores have a tendency to be scattered with rocks and to be flown over by seagulls. Eliminate every such fact that is a known attribute:

Imagine Banyan Street first, because Banyan is where it happened.

Your main task as a travel writer is to find the central idea of the place you’re dealing with.

Whether the locale you write about is urban or rural, east or west, every place has a look, a population and a set of cultural assumptions unlike any other place. Find those distinctive traits.

A master of this feat of detection was the English author V. S. Pritchett, one of the best and most versatile of nonfiction writers.

Istanbul has meant so much to the imagination that the reality shocks most travelers.

The English (as Pritchett reminds me) have long excelled at a distinctive form of travel writing—the article that’s less notable for what a writer extracts from a place than for what the place extracts from him. New sights touch off thoughts that otherwise wouldn’t have entered the writer’s mind.

One of the richest travel books written by an American is Walden, though Thoreau only went a mile out of town.

Beware of waxing. If you’re writing about places that are sacred or meaningful, leave the waxing to someone else.

If you’re a writer, give yourself permission to tell us who you are.

The books I remember most vividly from my first reading of them tend to be memoirs: books such as André Aciman’s Out of Egypt, Michael J. Arlen’s Exiles, Russell Baker’s Growing Up, Vivian Gornick’s Fierce Attachments, Pete Hamill’s A Drinking Life, Moss Hart’s Act One, John Houseman’s Run-Through, Mary Karr’s The Liars’ Club, Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes, Vladimir Nabokov’s Speak, Memory, V. S. Pritchett’s A Cab at the Door, Eudora Welty’s One Writer’s Beginnings, Leonard Woolf’s Growing.

To write a good memoir you must become the editor of your own life, imposing on an untidy sprawl of half-remembered events a narrative shape and an organizing idea.

One secret of the art is detail. Any kind of detail will work—a sound or a smell or a song title—as long as it played a shaping role in the portion of your life you have chosen to distill.

By the end of his junior year he had written a how-to book that sold better than any book I had written. Many other fuzzy students tried the same cure and have written with clarity ever since. Try it. For the principle of scientific and technical writing applies to all nonfiction writing.

Charles Darwin’s The Voyage of the Beagle is not only a classic of natural history; it’s a classic of literature, its sentences striding forward with vividness and vigor.

Oliver Sacks (The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat),

S. M. Ulam (Adventures of a Mathematician),

How we write and how we talk is how we define ourselves.

Any organization that won’t take the trouble to be both clear and personal in its writing will lose friends, customers and money.

Still, plain talk will not be easily achieved in corporate America. Too much vanity is on the line.

Managers at every level are prisoners of the notion that a simple style reflects a simple mind. Actually a simple style is the result of hard work and hard thinking; a muddled style reflects a muddled thinker or a person too arrogant, or too dumb, or too lazy to organize his thoughts.

If you work for an institution, whatever your job, whatever your level, be yourself when you write. You will stand out as a real person among the robots,

Today the outlandish becomes routine overnight. The humorist is trying to say that it’s still outlandish.

Marquis achieves one of the classic functions of humor: to deflect anger into a channel where we can laugh at frailty instead of railing against it.

“A Look at Organized Crime,” a parody of all the articles ever written explaining the Mafia, is one of the funniest pieces I know, and “The Schmeed Memoirs”—the recollections of Hitler’s barber—is the ultimate jab at the “good German” who was just doing his

“My Financial Career,” in which he tries to open a bank account with $56—still seems the model piece of humor on how rattled we all become when dealing with banks, libraries and other uptight institutions. Rereading Leacock

Don’t alter your voice to fit your subject.

Not that clichés are easy to stamp out. They are everywhere in the air around us, familiar friends just waiting to be helpful, ready to express complex ideas for us in the shorthand form of metaphor. That’s how they became clichés in the first place, and even careful writers use quite a few on their first draft. But after that we are given a chance to clean them out.

Extend the point beyond individual clichés to your larger use of language. Again, freshness is crucial. Taste chooses words that have surprise, strength and precision.

Notice how many of the governor’s words are anything but vague: leaves, wind, frost, air, evening, earth, comforts, soil, labor, breath, body, justice, courage, peace, land, rites, home. They are homely words in the best sense—they catch the rhythm of the seasons and the dailiness of life. Also notice that all of them are nouns. After verbs, plain nouns are your strongest tools; they resonate with emotion.

Living is the trick. Writers who write interestingly tend to be men and women who keep themselves interested. That’s almost the whole point of becoming a writer. I’ve used writing to give myself an interesting life and a continuing education.

The reason he knows so much about his field is because it’s his field; you’re a generalist trying to make his work accessible to the public.

and at the end of my visit, as he was walking me out, I said, “Have I seen everything?” Often you’ll get your best material after you put your pencil away, in the chitchat of leave-taking.

The hardest decision about any article is how to begin it. The lead must grab the reader with a provocative idea and continue with each paragraph to hold him or her in a tight grip, gradually adding information.

Notice how simple those five sentences are: plain declarative sentences, not a comma in sight. Each sentence contains one thought—and only one. Readers can process only one idea at a time, and they do it in linear sequence. Much of the trouble that writers get into comes from trying to make one sentence do too much work.

Now, what do your readers want to know next? Ask yourself that question after every sentence.

That’s a typical example of how a writer can get other people to do helpful work for him—in their words, which are usually more revealing than the writer’s words. In this case the brochure not only tells the reader what kind of trip has been promised; its language is an amusement in itself and a window into the grandiosity of the promoters. Be on the watch for funny or self-serving quotes and use them with gratitude.

Both of the preceding paragraphs contain touches of humor—tiny jokes. Again, they are efforts to keep myself amused. But they are also a deliberate attempt to maintain a persona. One of the oldest strains in travel writing and humor writing is the eternal credulity of the narrator. Used in moderation, making yourself gullible—or downright stupid—gives the reader the enormous pleasure of feeling superior.

My book Writing to Learn was born because of one phone call from a stranger. It raised an educational idea so interesting that I got on the plane to Minnesota to pursue it.

Writers are the custodians of memory,

Writing is a powerful search mechanism,

When you write your family history, be a recording angel and record everything your descendants might want to know.

Remember that you are the protagonist in your memoir—the tour guide. You must find a narrative trajectory for the story you want to tell and never relinquish control. This means leaving out of your memoir many people who don’t need to be there.

My final reducing advice can be summed up in two words: Think small. Don’t rummage around in your past—or your family’s past—to find episodes that you think are “important” enough to be worthy of including in your memoir. Look for small self-contained incidents that are still vivid in your memory. If you still remember them it’s because they contain a universal truth that your readers will recognize from their own life.

They don’t identify with my baseball game; they identify with the idea of the game—a universal idea. Remember this when you write your memoir and worry that your story isn’t big enough to interest anyone else. The small stories that still stick in your memory have a resonance of their own. Trust them.

Remember: Your biggest stories will often have less to do with their subject than with their significance—not what you did in a certain situation, but how that situation affected you and shaped the person you became.

quality is its own reward.

that information has been around since the King James Bible. We know that verbs have more vigor than nouns, that active verbs are better than passive verbs, that short words and sentences are easier to read than long ones, that concrete details are easier to process than vague abstractions.

If you would like to write better than everybody else, you have to want to write better than everybody else. You must take an obsessive pride in the smallest details of your craft.