Good Prose Quotes

“When writers stop believing in their own stories, readers tend to sense it.”
― Tracy Kidder, Good Prose: The Art of Nonfiction

“Montaigne blessed the form when he said, “If I knew my own mind, I would not make essays. I would make decisions.”
― Tracy Kidder, Good Prose: The Art of Nonfiction

“The mind that relies on cliché does not really know what it is saying.”
― Tracy Kidder, Good Prose: The Art of Nonfiction

“How to preside over your own internal disorder? Finding the "I" that can represent the pack of you is the first challenge of the memoirist.”
― Tracy Kidder, Good Prose: The Art of Nonfiction

“Encounters with the Archdruid is a paradigm of structural complexity. It’s like a piece of fine cabinetry, fussy and great, and great in part because nothing in the writing calls attention to the structure. The book, from the early 1970s, is in essence an extended profile of David Brower, then the nation’s most prominent and controversial environmentalist. The story is told in three parts, each of them an “encounter” showing Brower in confrontation or debate with people who represent for him the forces of environmental destruction.”
― Tracy Kidder, Good Prose: The Art of Nonfiction

“contain other important qualities. For a story to have a chance to live, it is essential only that there be something important at stake, a problem that confronts the characters or confronts the reader in trying to understand them. The unfolding of the problem and its resolution are the real payoff. A car chase is not required.”
― Tracy Kidder, Good Prose: The Art of Nonfiction

“Beginnings are an exercise in limits.”
― Tracy Kidder, Good Prose: The Art of Nonfiction

“foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.”
― Tracy Kidder, Good Prose: The Art of Nonfiction

“Revelation, someone’s learning something, is what transforms event into story. Without revelation, a story of high excitement leaves us asking, “Is that all?”
― Tracy Kidder, Good Prose: The Art of Nonfiction

“The most important conflict often happens within a character, or within the narrator. The story begins with an inscrutable character and ends with a person the author and reader understand better than before, a series of events that yields, however quietly, a dramatic truth. One might call this kind of story a narrative of revelation.”
― Tracy Kidder, Good Prose: The Art of Nonfiction

“The image that calls attention to itself is often the image you can do without.”
― Tracy Kidder, Good Prose: The Art of Nonfiction

“WRITING GUIDES AND REFERENCES: A SELECTIVE BIBLIOGRAPHY The Artful Edit, by Susan Bell (Norton) The Art of Time in Memoir, by Sven Birkerts (Graywolf Press) The Writing Life, by Annie Dillard (Harper & Row) Writing with Power, by Peter Elbow (Oxford University Press) Writing Creative Nonfiction, edited by Carolyn Forché and Philip Gerard (Story Press) Tough, Sweet and Stuffy, by Walker Gibson (Indiana University Press) The Situation and the Story, by Vivian Gornick (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) Intimate Journalism: The Art and Craft of Reporting Everyday Life, by Walt Harrington (Sage) On Writing, by Stephen King (Scribner) Telling True Stories, edited by Mark Kramer and Wendy Call (Plume) Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life, by Anne Lamott (Pantheon) The Forest for the Trees, by Betsy Lerner (Riverhead) Unless It Moves the Human Heart, by Roger Rosenblatt (Ecco) The Elements of Style, by William Strunk, Jr., and E. B. White (Macmillan) Clear and Simple as the Truth, by Francis-Noel Thomas and Mark Turner (Princeton University Press) Word Court, by Barbara Wallraff (Harcourt) Style, by Joseph M. Williams and Gregory G. Colomb (Longman) On Writing Well, by William Zinsser (Harper & Row) The Chicago Manual of Style, by University of Chicago Press staff (University of Chicago Press) Modern English Usage, by H. W. Fowler, revised edition by Sir Ernest Gowers (Oxford University Press) Modern American Usage, by Wilson Follett (Hill and Wang) Words into Type, by Marjorie E. Skillin and Robert M. Gay (Prentice-Hall) To CHRIS, SAMMY, NICK, AND MADDIE, AND TO TOMMY, JAMIE, THEODORE, AND PENNY”
― Tracy Kidder, Good Prose: The Art of Nonfiction

“obvious drama in which everyone recognizes a story. But usually what’s missing isn’t a story. What’s missing is a broader way of thinking about what makes for a good story.”
― Tracy Kidder, Good Prose: The Art of Nonfiction

“reader does not know (why else presume to write?), but it helps to grant that the reader has knowledge unavailable to you. This isn’t generosity; it is realism. Good writing creates a dialogue between writer and reader, with the imagined reader at moments questioning, criticizing, and sometimes, you hope, assenting. What you “know” isn’t something you can pull from a shelf and deliver.”
― Tracy Kidder, Good Prose: The Art of Nonfiction