On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction

by William Zinsser

The way to warm up any institution is to locate the missing “I.” Remember: “I” is the most interesting element in any story.

Humor is the secret weapon of the nonfiction writer. It’s secret because so few writers realize that humor is often their best tool—and sometimes their only tool—for making an important point.

What he created was an awareness that when the writer’s mind works by free association it can ricochet from the normal to the absurd and, by the unexpectedness of its angle, demolish whatever trite idea had been there before. Onto this element of constant surprise he grafted the dazzling wordplay that was his trademark, a rich and recondite vocabulary, and an erudition based on reading and travel. But even that mixture wouldn’t have sustained him if he hadn’t had a target. “All humor must be about something—it must touch concretely on life,”

Find the best writers in the fields that interest you and read their work aloud. Get their voice and their taste into your ear—their attitude toward language. Don’t worry that by imitating them you’ll lose your own voice and your own identity. Soon enough you will shed those skins and become who you are supposed to become.

After verbs, plain nouns are your strongest tools; they resonate with emotion.

“The reader has to feel that the writer is feeling good.” The sentence went off in my head like a Roman candle: it stated the entire case for enjoyment. Then he added: “Even if he isn’t.” That sentence hit me almost as hard, because I knew that Perelman’s life contained more than the usual share of depression and travail. Yet he went to his typewriter every day and made the English language dance. How could he not be feeling good? He cranked it up.

Writers have to jump-start themselves at the moment of performance, no less than actors and dancers and painters and musicians.

The blank piece of paper or the blank computer screen, waiting to be filled with our wonderful words, can freeze us into not writing any words at all, or writing words that are less than wonderful. I’m often dismayed by the sludge I see appearing on my screen if I approach writing as a task—the day’s work—and not with some enjoyment.

How can you fight off all those fears of disapproval and failure? One way to generate confidence is to write about subjects that interest you and that you care about.

If you write about subjects you think you would enjoy knowing about, your enjoyment will show in what you write. Learning is a tonic.

Writing is related to character. If your values are sound, your writing will be sound. It all begins with intention. Figure out what you want to do and how you want to do it, and work your way with humanity and integrity to the completed article.

All your clear and pleasing sentences will fall apart if you don’t keep remembering that writing is linear and sequential, that logic is the glue that holds it together, that tension must be maintained from one sentence to the next and from one paragraph to the next and from one section to the next, and that narrative—good old-fashioned storytelling—is what should pull your readers along without their noticing the tug. The only thing they should notice is that you have made a sensible plan for your journey. Every step should seem inevitable.

Much of the trouble that writers get into comes from trying to make one sentence do too much work. Never be afraid to break a long sentence into two short ones, or even three.

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

one very helpful question: “What is the piece really about?” (Not just “What is the piece about?”) Fondness for material you’ve gone to a lot of trouble to gather isn’t a good enough reason to include it if it’s not central to the story you’ve chosen to tell. Self-discipline bordering on masochism is required. The only consolation for the loss of so much material is that it isn’t totally lost; it remains in your writing as an intangible that the reader can sense. Readers should always feel that you know more about your subject than you’ve put in writing.

Remember this when you write your own family history. Don’t try to be a “writer.” It now occurs to me that my father was a more natural writer than I am, with my constant fiddling and fussing. Be yourself and your readers will follow you anywhere. Try to commit an act of writing and your readers will jump overboard to get away. Your product is you. The crucial transaction in memoir and personal history is the transaction between you and your remembered experiences and emotions.

My mother was also a woman of humor and optimism. These are lubricants in writing, as they are in life, and a writer lucky enough to have them in his baggage will start the day with an extra round of confidence.

But above all I remember those good editors for their generosity. They had an enthusiasm for whatever project we were trying to bring off together as writer and editor. Their confidence that I could make it work kept me going.

Clarity is what every editor owes the reader. An editor should never allow something to get into print that he doesn’t understand. If he doesn’t understand it, at least one other person won’t, and that’s one too many. The process, in short, is one in which the writer and the editor proceed through the manuscript together, finding for every problem the solution that best serves the finished article.