On Writing Well

Overall Thoughts

A book you will revisit. The chapters walk through the full journey of a writer. Some chapters are better for starting and others for revising or finishing. Zinsser provides in-depth examples for analyzing written text and says what’s good and bad about them. I skimmed through a lot of it, but did find the morals good for writing my own piece. My ratings are as follows: timelessness (5/5), clarity (4.5/5), entertainment (3.5/5), education (4/5). Overall, a ~4/5 read.

“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. And you must be willing to defend what you’ve written against the various middlemen—editors, agents, and publishers—whose sights may be different from yours, whose standards are not as high. Too many writers are browbeaten into settling for less than their best.” — Chapter 25, Write as Well as You Can

Quotes

Part I: Principles

1/ The Transaction

“I then said that rewriting is the essence of writing.”

“Ultimately the product that any writer has to sell is not the subject being written about, but who he or she is.”

2/ Simplicity

“Clear thinking becomes clear writing; one can’t exist without the other.”

3/ Clutter

“Read the sentence without the bracketed material and see if it works.”

4/ Style

“The point is that you have to strip your writing down before you can build it back up.”

“If you aren’t allowed to use ‘I,’ at least think ‘I’ while you write, or write the first draft in the first person and then take the ‘I’s out. It will warm up your impersonal style.”

“The same thing is true of writers. Sell yourself, and your subject will exert its own appeal. Believe in your own identity and your own opinions. Writing is an act of ego, and you might as well admit it. Use its energy to keep yourself going.”

5/ Audience

“Who am I writing for? … You are writing for yourself.”

6/ Words

“The race in writing is not to the swift but to the original.”

“If all your sentences move at the same plodding gait, which even you recognize as deadly but don’t know how to cure, read them aloud.”

“And also remember, somebody out there is listening.”

7/ Usage

“We should apply the test of convenience. Does the word fill a real need? If it does, let’s give it a franchise.”

Part II: Methods

8/ Unity

“You learn to write by writing. It’s a truism, but what makes it a truism is that it’s true. The only way to learn how to write is to force yourself to produce a certain number of words on a regular basis.”

“Every writing project must be reduced before you start to write.”

“Therefore think small.”

“As for what point you want to make, every successful piece of nonfiction should leave the reader with one provocative thought that he or she didn’t have before. Not two thoughts, or five– just one. So decide what single point you want to leave in the reader's mind.”

9/ The Lead and the Ending

“The most important sentence in any article is the first one. If it doesn’t induce the reader to proceed to the second sentence your article is dead.”

“Another approach is to just tell a story.”

“Knowing when to end an article is far more important than most writers realize. You should give as much thought to choosing your last sentence as you did to your first. Well, almost as much.”

“If something surprises you it will also surprise–and delight—the people you are writing for, especially as you conclude your story and send them on their way.”

10/ Bits and Pieces

“Again, the rule is simple: make your adjectives do work that needs to be done. ‘He looked at the gray sky and the black clouds and decided to sail back to the harbor.’”

“The dash is used in two ways. One is to simplify or justify in the second part of the sentence a thought you stated in the first part. The other use involves two dashes, which set apart a parenthetical thought within a longer sentence.”

“Always use ‘that unless it makes your meaning ambiguous. If your sentence needs a comma to achieve its precise meaning, it probably needs ‘which.’”

“Credibility is just as fragile for a writer as for a President. Don’t inflate an incident to make it more outlandish than it actually was.”

“Keep your paragraphs short. Writing is visual–it catches the eye before it has a chance to catch the brain.”

“Rewriting is the essence of writing well: it’s where the game is won or lost. That idea is hard to accept.”

“What you must do is make an arrangement–one that holds together from start to finish and that moves with economy and warmth.”

“Don’t annoy your readers by overexplaining–by telling them something they already know or can figure out. Try not to use words like ‘surprisingly,’ ‘predictably’ and ‘of course,’ which put a value on a fact before the reader encounters the fact. Trust your material.”

Part III: Forms

11/ Nonfiction as Literature

“What I’m saying is that I have no patience with snobbery that says nonfiction is only journalism by another name and that journalism by any name is a dirty word.”

“Journalism is writing that first appears in any periodic journal, whatever its constituency.”

12/ Writing About People: The Interview

“To learn the craft of nonfiction you must push yourself out into the real world — your town or your city or your county — and pretend that you’re writing for a real publication.”

“Never let anything go out into the world that you don’t understand.”

“Don’t make your man assert, aver and expostulate just to avoid repeating ‘he said,’ and please—please!---don’t write ‘he smiled’ or ‘he grinned.’”

“The nonfiction writer’s rare privilege is to have the whole wonderful world of real people to write about. When you get people talking, handle what they say as you would handle as a valuable gift.”

13/ Writing About Places: The Travel Article

“As a writer you must keep a tight rein on your subjective self—the traveler touched by new sights and sounds and smells— and keep an objective eye on the reader.”

“Eliminate every such fact that is a known attribute: don’t tell us that the sea had waves and the sand was white. Find details that are significant.”

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

“But whatever place you write about, go there often enough to isolate the qualities that make it distinctive.”

“The strong emotional content of the book was supplied by what I got other people to say. I didn’t need to wax emotional or patriotic. Beware of waxing. If you’re writing about places that are sacred or meaningful, leave the waxing to someone else.”

14/ Writing About Yourself: The Memoir

“Of all the subjects available to you as a writer, the one you know best is yourself: your past and your present, your thoughts and your emotions. Yet it’s probably the subject you try hardest to avoid.”

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

“EXCESSIVE WRITING ABOUT YOURSELF CAN BE HAZARDOUS TO THE HEALTH OF THE WRITER AND THE READER.”

“Make sure every component in your memoir is doing useful work. Write about yourself by all means, with confidence and with pleasure. But see that all the details–people, places, events, anecdotes, ideas, emotions–are moving your story steadily along.”

“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. Memoir is the art of inventing the truth.”

“Memoir is the perfect form for capturing what it’s like to be a newcomer in America, and every immigrant son and daughter brings a distinctive voice from his or her culture.”

“The crucial ingredient in memoir is, of course, people. Sounds and smells and songs and sleeping porches will take you just so far. Finally you must summon back the men and women and children who notably crossed your life.”

“The best gift you have to offer when you write personal history is the gift of yourself. Give yourself permission to write about yourself, and have a good time doing it.”

15/ Science and Technology

“Writing is thinking on paper.”

“A tenet of journalism is that ‘the reader knows nothing.’”

“Any subject can be made clear and robust by all you writers who think you’re afraid of science and all you scientists who think you’re afraid of writing.”

16/ Business Writing: Writing In Your Job

“The more you know about your system, the better it will work.”

“A computer is like a sophisticated pencil. You don’t care how it works, but if it breaks you want someone there to fix it.”

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

17/ Sports

“If you want to write about sports, remember that the men and women you’re writing about are doing something immensely difficult, and they have their pride. You, too, are doing a job that has its codes of honor. One of them is that you are not the story.”

18/ Writing About the Arts: Critics and Columnists

“It’s necessary, in short, to be a critic—which, at some points in his or her career, almost every writer wants to be.”

“Another rule is: don’t give away too much of the plot. Tell readers just enough to let them decide whether it’s the kind of story they tend to enjoy, but not so much that you’ll kill their enjoyment.”

“Criticism is a serious intellectual act. It tries to evluate serious works of art and to place them in the context of what has been done before in that medium or by that artist.”

“This is criticism at its best: stylish, allusive, disturbing. It disturbs us—as criticism often should—because it jogs a set of beliefs and forces us to reexamine them.”

“What is crucial for you as the writer is to express your opinion firmly. DOn’t cancel its strength with last-minute evasions and escapes.”

19/ Humor

“The answer is that if you’re trying to write humor almost everything you do is serious.”

“Control is vital to humor. Don’t use comical names like Throttlebottom. Don’t make the same kind of joke two or three times—readers will enjoy themselves more if you make it only once. Trust the sophistication of readers who do know what you’re doing, and don’t worry about the rest.”

“Finally, don’t strain for laughs; humor is built on surprise and you can surprise the reader only so often.”

“We ended by striving for truth and hoping to add humor along the way.”

Part IV: Attitudes

20/ The Sound of Your Voice

“My commodity as a writer, whatever I’m writing about, is me. And your commodity is you. Don’t alter your voice to fit your subject.”

“For writers and other creative artists, knowing what not to do is a major component of taste.”

“Does this mean that taste can be learned? Yes and no. Perfect taste, like perfect pitch is a gift from GOd. But a certain amount can be acquired. The trick is to study writers who have it.”

“Go with what seems inevitable in your own heritage. Embrace it and it may lead you to eloquence.”

21/ Enjoyment, Fear, and Confidence

“Living is the trick. Writers who write interestingly tend to be men and women who keep themselves interested.”

“Remember this when you enter new territory and need a shot of confidence. Your best credential is yourself.”

22/ The Tyranny of the Final Product

“Moral: any time you can tell a story int he form of a quest or a pilgrimage you’ll be ahead of the game. Readers bearing their own associations will do some of your work for you. Intention is what we wish to accomplish with our writing. Call it the writer’s soul.”

23/ A Writer’s Decisions

“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.”

“It establishes the writer’s personality and voice. In travel writing you should never forget that you are the guide. It’s not enough just to take your readers on a trip; you must take them on your trip.”

“Readers should always feel that you know more about your subject than you’ve put in writing.”

“A crucial decision about a piece of writing is where to end it. Often the story will tell you where it wants to stop.”

“As a nonfiction writer you must get on the plane. If a subject interests you, go after it, even if it’s in the next country or the next state or the next country. It’s not going to come looking for you. Decide what you want to do. Then decide to do it. Then do it.”

24/ Writing Family History and Memoir

“Remember this when you write your own family history. Don’t try to be a ‘writer.’ Be yourself and your readers will follow you anywhere.”

“The strongest memoirs, I think, are those that preserve the unity of a remembered time and place:”

“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.”

“‘If you write about your own search for your father’s past,’ I said, ‘you’ll also tell the story of his life and his heritage.”

“Look for small self-contained incidents that are still vivid in your memory. If you still remember them it’s because they contained a universal truth that your readers will recognize from their own life.”

“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.”

25/ Write as Well as You Can

“Yet to defend what you’ve written is a sign that you are alive.”

“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.”

“A reporter once asked [Joe DiMaggio] how he managed to play so well so consistently, and he said: ‘I always thought that there was at least one person in the stands who had never seen me play, and I didn’t want to let him down.”