On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction

by William Zinsser

Red Smith, delivering the eulogy at the funeral of a fellow sports-writer, said, “Dying is no big deal. Living is the trick.”

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.

If you want your writing to convey enjoyment, write about people you respect.

Push the boundaries of your subject and see where it takes you. Bring some part of your own life to it; it’s not your version of the story until you write it.

If you master the tools of the trade—the fundamentals of interviewing and of orderly construction—and if you bring to the assignment your general intelligence and your humanity, you can write about any subject. That’s your ticket to an interesting life.

“I want to write an article about the disappearance of small towns in Iowa,” one woman told us, describing how the fabric of life in the Midwest had frayed since she was a girl on her grandparents’ farm. It was a good American subject, valuable as social history. But nobody can write a decent article about the disappearance of small towns in Iowa; it would be all generalization and no humanity. The writer would have to write about one small town in Iowa and thereby tell her larger story, and even within that one town she would have to reduce her story still further: to one store, or one family, or one farmer.

I was struck by how often my students’ gropings led to a sudden revelation of the proper path, obvious to everyone in the room. A man would say that he wanted to try a piece about the town where he once lived and would venture a possible approach: “I could write about X.” X, however, was uninteresting, even to him, lacking any distinctiveness, and so were Y and Z, and so were P and Q and R, the writer continuing to dredge up fragments of his life, when, almost accidentally, he stumbled into M, a long-forgotten memory, seemingly unimportant but unassailably true, encapsulating in one incident everything that had made him want to write about the town in the first place.

An exhortation I often use to keep myself going is “Get on the plane.”

But finally the purposes that writers serve must be their own. What you write is yours and nobody else’s. Take your talent as far as you can and guard it with your life. Only you know how far that is; no editor knows. Writing well means believing in your writing and believing in yourself, taking risks, daring to be different, pushing yourself to excel. You will write only as well as you make yourself write.