writing-well.md

Introduction

There's the miracle: All those people who said they hate writing and can't write and don't want to write can write and do want to write. In fact, they can't be turned off. Never have so many Americans written so profusely and with so few inhibitions. Which means that it wasn't a cognitive problem after all. It was a cultural problem, rooted in that old bugaboo of American education: fear.

→ Writing is talking to someone else on paper. Anybody who can think clearly can write clearly, about any subject at all.

• Good writers know that very few sentences come out right the first time, or even the third time or the fifth time. For them the word processor was a rare gift, enabling them to fuss endlessly with their sentences—cutting and revising and reshaping—without the drudgery of retyping.
• Bad writers became even more verbose because writing was suddenly so easy and their sentences looked so pretty on the screen.

Principles

The Transaction

There are all kinds of writers and all kinds of methods, and any method that helps you to say what you want to say is the right method for you.

Two of the most important qualities that this book will go in search of: humanity and warmth.

Good writing keeps the reader reading from one paragraph to the next → Achieve the greatest clarity and strength.

Simplicity

The secret of good writing is to strip every sentence to its cleanest components.

Here are the thousand and one adulterants that weaken the strength of a sentence:

• Word that serves no function.
• Long word that could be a short word.
• Adverb that carries the same meaning that's already in the verb.
• Passive construction that leaves the reader unsure of who is doing what.

Example of bad writing: The president of a university wrote a letter: "You are probably aware that we have been experiencing very considerable potentially explosive expressions of dissatisfaction on issues only partially related." → it simply meant that the students had been hassling them about different things.

The answer are:

• Clear our heads of clutter. Clear thinking becomes clear writing.
• Try to make what has been written tighter, stronger and more precise, eliminating every element that's not doing useful work.
• Writers must constantly ask: what am I trying to say? Thinking clearly is a conscious act that writers must force on themselves.
• Writing is hard work. A clear sentence is no accident. Very few sentences come out right the first time, or even the third time.

Clutter

Fighting clutter is like fighting weeds — the writer is always slightly behind.

Writing improves in direct ratio to the number of things we can keep out of it that shouldn't be there. For example:

• "now" or "today" instead of "at this point in time".
• "up" in "free up" shouldn't be there.
• Take the adjective "personal," as in "a personal friend of mine," "his personal feeling" or "her personal physician." → that personal can be simply identified as "her physician."

Clutter is the laborious phrase that has pushed out the short word that means the same thing, or is the official language used by corporations to hide their mistakes.

"Experiencing" is one of the ultimate clutters. For example, "Are you experiencing any pain?" is far worst than "Does it hurt?".

Clutter is the language of the Pentagon calling an invasion a "reinforced protective reaction strike" and justifying its vast budgets on the need for "counter-force deterrence". Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness.

Beware, then, of the long word that's no better than the short word:

• "assistance" (help)
• "numerous" (many)
• "facilitate" (ease)
• "individual" (man or woman)
• "remainder" (rest)
• "initial" (first)
• "implement" (do)
• "sufficient" (enough)
• "attempt" (try)
• "referred to as" (called)
• "with the possible exception of" (except)
• "due to the fact that" (because)
• "he totally lacked the ability to" (he couldn't)
• "until such time as" (until)
• "for the purpose of" (for).

Common examples of a piece of writing that isn't doing useful work:

• The unnecessary preposition appended to a verb ("order up")
• The adverb that carries the same meaning as the verb ("smile happily")
• The adjective that states a known fact ("tall skyscraper")
• The little qualifiers that weaken any sentence they inhabit ("a bit," "sort of")
• The meaningless phrases ("in a sense,")
• An entire sentence that essentially repeats what the previous sentence said or says something readers don't need to know or can figure out for themselves

→ Look for the clutter in your writing and prune it ruthlessly. Be grateful for everything you can throw away. Reexamine each sentence you put on paper. Simplify, simplify.

Style

Simplicity carried to an extreme might seem to point to a style little more sophisticated than "Dick likes Jane" and "See Spot run".

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

Style is organic to the person doing the writing, as much a part of him as his hair, or, if he is bald, his lack of it → Trying to add style is like adding a toupee. At first glance the formerly bald man looks young and even handsome. But at second glance, he doesn't look quite right.

It's amazing how often an editor can throw away the first three or four paragraphs of an article, or even the first few pages, and start with the paragraph where the writer begins to sound like himself or herself.

The is-a-person-writing check is a sentence that says something like "I'll never forget the day when I..." → Writers are at their most natural when they write in the first person.

There are vast regions of writing where "I" isn't allowed:

• Newspapers don't want "I" in their news stories.
• Many magazines don't want it in their articles.
• Businesses and institutions don't want it in the reports.
• Colleges don't want "I" in their term papers or dissertations.
• English teachers discourage any first-person pronoun except the literary "we".

Sensible reasons for avoiding "I":

• Newspaper articles should consist of news, reported objectively.
• Teachers who don't want to give students an easy escape into opinion before they have grappled with the discipline of assessing a work on its merits and on external sources. For example: "I think Hamlet was stupid".

Takeaways:

• Must know what the essential tools are and what job they were designed to do.
• Never forget that you are practicing a craft that's based on certain principles.
• If what you build is sturdy and serviceable, take satisfaction in its plain strength.
• A fundamental rule is: be yourself → It requires writers to do two things that by their metabolism are impossible: relax and have confidence.
• To relax effectively, don't try so hard to make an impression, just plunge in.
• Write in the first person when possible: to use "I" and "me" and "we" and "us."
• If it is not 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.
• 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.

The Audience

"Who am I writing for?" - it s a fundamental question, and it has a fundamental answer: You are writing for yourself.

Donts:

• Try to visualize the great mass audience → every reader is a different person.
• Try to guess what sort of thing editors want to publish or what you think the country is in a mood to read → they don't know what they want to read until they read it. Besides, they're always looking for something new.
• Worry about whether the reader will "get it" if you indulge a sudden impulse for humor → If it amuses you in the act of writing, put it in.

You are writing primarily to please yourself, and if you go about it with enjoyment you will also entertain the readers who are worth writing for.

There are 2 different issues:

• Craft, is a question of mastering a precise skill → reader is an impatient bird, perched on the thin edge of distraction or sleep.
• Attitude is a question of how you use that skill to express your personality → write for yourself and not be gnawed by worry over whether the reader is tagging along.

How can you think carefully about not losing readers and still be carefree about their opinion?

• Craft:

  • Work hard to master the tools.
  • Simplify, prune and strive for order.
  • Think of this as a mechanical act, and soon your sentences will become cleaner.

• Attitude:

  • Think of this as a creative act: the expressing of who you are.
  • Relax and say what you want to say.
  • Only need to be true to yourself when you write.
  • Never say anything in writing that you wouldn't comfortably say in conversation. → If you're not a person who says "indeed" or "moreover," or who calls someone an individual ("he's a fine individual"), don't write it.

Mencken was never timid or evasive; tie didn't kowtow to the reader or curry anyone's favor. It takes courage to be such a writer, but it is out of such courage that revered and influential journalists are born.

Any writer who uses "ain't" and "tendentious" in the same sentence, who quotes without using quotation marks, knows what he's doing. This seemingly artless style, so full of art, is ideal for Herndon's purpose. It avoids the pretentiousness that infects so much writing by people who are doing worthy work, and it allows for a rich vein of humor and common sense.

Words

Journalese - a quilt of instant words patched together out of other parts of speech:

• Adjectives are used as nouns ("greats", "notables").
• Nouns are used as verbs ("to host"), or they are chopped off to form verbs ("enthuse", "emote"), or they are padded to form verbs ("beef up", "put teeth into").

→ Its the death of freshness in anybody's style - the common currency of newspapers and of magazines, a mixture of cheap words, made-up words and clichés that have become so pervasive that a writer can hardly help using them.

Example of such journalese phrases that only reach the nearest cliché:

• "Shouldered his way"
• "only to be met"
• "crashing into his face"
• "waging a lonely war"
• "corruption that is rife"
• "sending shock"
• "New York's finest" → We know just what to expect. No surprise awaits us in the form of an unusual word, an oblique look.

Takeaway

• Develop a respect for words and a curiosity about their shades of meaning that is almost obsessive.
• Take the time to root around and find the ones you want.
• Make a habit of reading what is being written today and what has been written by earlier masters.
• Learn by reading the men and women who were doing the kind of writing that you wanted to do and trying to figure out how they did it.
• Get in the habit of using dictionaries.
• Learn about words' etymology and notice what curious branches they original root have put forth.
• Master the small gradations between words that seem to be synonyms. For instances:
  • "cajole", "wheedle", "blandish" and "coax".
  • Look up "villain", since only a lexicographer could conjure back of iniquity, obliquity, depravity, knavery, profligacy, frailty, flagrancy, infamy, immorality, corruption, wickedness, wrongdoing, backsliding and sin.
  • Nouns: ruffians and riffraff, miscreants and malefactors, reprobates and rapscallions, hooligans and hoodlums, scamps and scapegraces, scoundrels and scalawags, Jezebels and jades.
  • Adjectives: foul and fiendish, devilish and diabolical.
• Use dictionary with gratitude → you want to know how synonyms differ first, then go to the dictionary.
• Pay attentions to how words sound when choosing and stringing them together → readers hear what they are reading far more than you realize. For example, E. B. White suggests phrases that has survived for a century:
  • "Times like these try men's souls."
  • "How trying it is to live in these times!"
  • "These are trying times for men's souls."
  • "Soulwise, these are trying times."
• 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.
• See if you can gain wordings variety so they don't all sound as if they came out of the same mold by:
  • reversing the order of a sentence.
  • substituting a word that has freshness or oddity.
  • altering the length of your sentences.

Usage

Good words:

• "Hassle" is both a verb and a noun, meaning to give somebody a hard time, or the act of being given a hard time.
• "Freak" means an enthusiast, and there's no missing the aura of obsession that goes with calling someone a jazz freak, or a chess freak, or a sun freak.

Cheap words:

• "notables"
• "greats"
• "upcoming"

Why is one word good and another word cheap? → No concrete answer because:

• sage has no fixed boundaries.
• Language is a fabric that changes from one week to another.
• Word freaks fight over what is allowable, often reaching their decision on a subjective basis such as taste.

The American Heritage Dictionary - it assembled a "Usage Panel" to help them appraise the new words and dubious constructions that had come knocking at the door.

The laws of usage are relative, bending with the taste of the lawmaker → In the end, it comes down to what is "correct" usage. For example:

• "dropout" - the perfect word.
• "cyberspace," "meltdown," "skyjacker," "wetlands," "software," "fax," "macho," "yuppie," "gentrify" - correct usage every day of science and technology, fad and fashion and social change.
• "trip," "rap," "crash," "trash," "funky," "split," "rip-off," "vibes," "downer," "bummer" - lashing back at the self-important verbiage.
• "can" and "may," "fewer" and "less," "eldest" and "oldest," etc. - most of the classic distinctions in grammar.

Incorrect usage will lose you the readers you would most like to win. Know the difference between:

• a "reference" and an "allusion"
• "connive" and "conspire"
• "compare with" and "compare to"
• If you must use "comprise", use it right. It means "include" - dinner comprises meat, potatoes, salad and dessert.

One helpful approach is to try to separate usage from jargon. For example:

• "prioritize" is jargon - a pompous new verb that sounds more important than "rank" — and that "bottom line" is usage, a metaphor borrowed from the world of bookkeeping that conveys an image we can picture. As every businessman knows, the bottom line is the one that matters. If someone says, "The bottom line is that we just can't work together," we know what he means. I don't much like the phrase, but the bottom line is that it's here to stay.

New usages also arrive with new political events. For example:

• Vietnam gave us "escalate".
• Watergate gave us a whole lexicon of words connoting obstruction and deceit: "stonewall," "deep-six," "launder," "enemies list" and other "gate"-suffix scandals ("Irangate"). → It's vivid, and we need it.

A similar guideline for separating good from technical English. For example, the difference between, "printout" and "input":

• A printout is a specific object that a computer emits. Before the advent of computers it wasn't needed; now it is. But it has stayed where it belongs.
• Not so with "input," which was coined to describe the information that's fed to a computer. Our input is sought on every subject, from diets to philosophical discourse ("I'd like your input on whether God really exists"). → Good usage consists of using good words if they already exist to express myself clearly and simply to someone else.

Methods

Unity

The only way to learn to write is to force yourself to produce a certain number of words on a regular basis. For example, if you went to work for a newspaper that required you to write two or three articles every day, you would be a better writer after six months. → Your style might still be full of clutter and clichés, but you would be exercising your powers of putting the English language on paper, gaining confidence and identifying the most common problems.

All writing is ultimately a question of solving a problem, for example:

• a problem of where to obtain the facts or how to organize the material.
• a problem of approach or attitude, tone or style.

→ Unity is the anchor of good writing. It helps keep the reader from straggling off in all directions and satisfies the readers' subconscious need for order and reassures them that all is well at the helm.

• Unity of pronoun: Are you going to write in the first person, as a participant, or in the third person, as an observer? Or even in the second person?
• Unity of tense: Most people write mainly in the past tense, but some people write agreeably in the present. What is not agreeable is to switch back and forth → you must choose the tense in which you are principally going to address the reader, no matter how many glances you may take backward or forward along the way.
• Unity of mood: You might want to talk to the reader in the casual voice, or approach the reader with a certain formality to describe a serious event or to present a set of important facts. But again don't mix them.

Ask yourself some basic questions before you start. For example:

• "In what capacity am I going to address the reader?" (Reporter? Provider of information? Average man or woman?)
• "What pronoun and tense am I going to use?"
• "What style?" (Impersonal reportorial? Personal but formal? Personal and casual?)
• "What attitude am I going to take toward the mate- rial?" (Involved? Detached? Judgmental? Ironic? Amused?)
• "How much do I want to cover?"
• "What one point do I want to make?"

The last two questions are especially important. What you think is definitive today will turn infinitive by tonight, and writers who doggedly pursue every last fact will find themselves pursuing the rainbow and never settling down to write → Every writing project must be reduced before you start to write. Some tips could be:

• Think small.
• Decide what corner of your subject you're going to bite off, and be content to cover it well and stop.
• Often you'll find that along the way you've managed to say almost everything you wanted to say about the entire subject.
• Decide what single point you want to leave in the reader's mind.

An unwieldy writing task is a drain on your enthusiasm. Enthusiasm is the force that keeps you going and keeps the reader in your grip.

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.

The single point will affect your decision about tone and attitude. Some points are best made by earnestness, some by dry understatement, some by humor.

It is normal that the material begins to lead you in an unexpected direction, where you are more comfortable writing in a different tone. Some tips could be:

• Don't fight such a current if it feels right.
• Trust your material if it's taking you into terrain you didn't intend to enter but where the vibrations are good.
• Adjust your style accordingly and proceed to whatever destination you reach.
• Don't ever become the prisoner of a preconceived plan.
• If this issue happens, then it's just a matter of making repairs. You can go back to the beginning and rewrite it so that your mood and your style are consistent from start to finish.

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, and it goes on the same for the subsequent sentences. Of such a progression of sentences, a writer constructs that fateful unit, the "lead"

No pat answer for a standard lead's length:

• Some leads hook the reader with just a few well-baited sentences.
• Others amble on for several pages, exerting a slow but steady pull.
• May depend on the audience you're writing for. For example, readers of a literary review expect its writers to start somewhat discursively.

The Lead

Takeaway

• The lead may not be the best of all possible leads, but if it does the job it's supposed to do, be thankful and proceed.
• Capture the reader immediately and force him to keep reading by cajole him with freshness, or novelty, or paradox, or humor, or surprise, or with an unusual idea, or an interesting fact, or a question. Anything will do, as long as it nudges his curiosity and tugs at his sleeve.
• The lead must do some real work. It must provide hard details that tell the reader why the piece was written and why he ought to read it. But don't dwell on the reason. Coax the reader a little more; keep him inquisitive.
• Continue to build and amplify the paragraph that preceded it. Give more thought to adding solid detail and less to entertaining the reader.
• Take special care with the last sentence of each paragraph, try to give that sentence an extra twist of humor or surprise, like the periodic "snapper" in the routine of a stand-up comic.
• Another approach is to just tell a story. It's such a simple solution, so obvious and unsophisticated. However, it is the oldest and most compelling method of holding someone's attention.
• Always look for ways to convey your information in narrative form.
• Approach their subject in a manner that most naturally suits what they are writing about and who they are.

For some writing example of a good lead sentence:

• "I've often wondered what goes into a hot dog. Now I know and I wish I didn't".

A slower lead, luring the reader more with curiosity than with humor:

• By any reasonable standard, nobody would want to look twice—or even once—at the piece of slippery elm bark from Clear Lake, Wisc., birthplace of pitcher Burleigh Grimes, that is on display at the National Baseball Museum and Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y. As the label explains, it is the kind of bark Grimes chewed during games "to increase saliva for throwing the spitball. When wet, the ball sailed to the plate in deceptive fashion." → Learning points from this lead:
• Salvation often lies not in the writer's style but in some odd fact he or she was able to discover.
• You should always collect more material than you will use but you don't go on gathering facts forever. At some point you must stop researching and start writing.
• Look for your material everywhere, not just by reading the obvious sources and interviewing the obvious people:
  • Look at signs and at billboards and at all the junk written along the American roadside.
  • Read the labels on our packages and the instructions on our toys, the claims on our medicines and the graffiti on our walls.
  • Read the fillers, so rich in self-esteem, that come spilling out of your monthly statement from the electric company and the telephone company and the bank.
  • Read menus and catalogues and second- class mail.
  • Nose about in obscure crannies of the newspaper, like the Sunday real estate section → you can tell the temper of a society by what patio accessories it wants.

Here's the opening sentence of seven memorable nonfiction books:

• "In the beginning God created heaven and earth". —THE BIBLE
• "In the summer of the Roman year 699, now described as the year 55 before the birth of Christ, the Proconsul of Gaul, Gaius Julius Caesar, turned his gaze upon Britain". —WINSTON S. CHURCHILL, A HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH-SPEAKING PEOPLES
• "Put this puzzle together and you will find milk, cheese and eggs, meat, fish, beans and cereals, greens, fruits and root vegetables—foods that contain our essential daily needs". —IRMA S. ROMBAUER, JOY OF COOKING
• "To the Manus native the world is a great platter, curving upwards on all sides, from his flat lagoon village where the pile-houses stand like long-legged birds, placid and unstirred by the changing tides". —MARGARET MEAD, GROWING UP IN NEW GUINEA
• "The problem lay buried, unspoken, for many years in the minds of American women". —BETTY FRIEDAN, THE FEMININE MYSTIQUE
• "Within five minutes, or ten minutes, no more than that, three of the others had called her on the telephone to ask her if she had heard that something had happened out there". -TOM WOLFE, THE RIGHT STUFF
• "You know more than you think you do". —BENJAMIN SPOCK, BABY AND CHILD CARE

Bad leads per category e.g. future archaeologist:

• "If a creature from Mars landed on our planet he would be amazed to see hordes of scantily clad earthlings lying on the sand barbecuing their skins".
• "One day not long ago a small button-nosed boy was walking with his dog, Terry, in a field outside Paramus, N.J., when he saw something that looked strangely like a balloon rising out of the ground".

The Ending

• Give as much thought to choosing your last sentence as you did to your first.
• An article that doesn't stop where it should stop becomes a drag and therefore a failure.
• At any age—even professional writers are adrift more often than they would like to admit. But if you're going to write good nonfiction you must wriggle out of the Ending's dread grip.
• Failure to know where the ending sentence should occur can wreck an article that until its final stage has been tightly constructed.
• The positive reason for ending well is that a good last sentence, or last paragraph, is a joy in itself. It gives the reader a lift, and it lingers when the article is over.
• The perfect ending should take your readers slightly by surprise and yet seem exactly right. For example, we are in the middle of a scene (we think), when suddenly one of the actors says something funny, or outrageous, or epigrammatic, and the lights go out. We are startled to find the scene over, and then delighted by the aptness of how it ended.
• When you're ready to stop, stop. If you have presented all the facts and made the point you want to make, look for the nearest exit.
• Often it takes just a few sentences to wrap things up. Ideally they should encapsulate the idea of the piece and conclude with a sentence that jolts us with its fitness or unexpectedness:
  • "We suffer most, not when the White House is a peaceful dormitory, but when it [has] a tin-pot Paul bawling from the roof. Counting out Harding as a cipher only, Dr. Coolidge was preceded by one World Saver and followed by two more. What enlightened American, having to choose between any of them and another Coolidge, would hesitate for an instant? There were no thrills while he reigned, but neither were there any headaches. He had no ideas, and he was not a nuisance".
• Bring the story full circle to strike at the end an echo of a note that was sounded at the beginning.
• What usually works best is a quotation → Go back through your notes to find some remark that has a sense of finality, or that's funny, or that adds an unexpected closing detail.
• Surprise is the most refreshing element in nonfiction writing → 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.

Bits & Pieces

VERBS.

• Use active verbs unless there is no comfortable way to get around using a passive verb → The difference between an active verb style and a passive verb style: "Joe saw him" is strong. "He was seen by Joe" is weak → The first is short and precise; it leaves no doubt about who did what. The second is necessarily longer and it has an insipid quality.
• Active verbs push hard; passive verbs tug fitfully.
• Avoid the kind of verbs that need an appended preposition.
• Be precise. Use precise verbs.

ADVERBS.

• Most adverbs are unnecessary.
• Don't choose a verb that has a specific meaning and then add an adverb that carries the same meaning. For example:
  • "the radio blared loudly" → "blare" connotes loudness already.
  • "effortlessly easy"
  • "slightly spartan"
  • "totally flabbergasted"
• Retire "decidedly" and all its slippery cousins.

ADJECTIVES.

• Most adjectives are also unnecessary.
• Don't choose a adjective that the concept is already in the noun. For example, adjectives denoting the color of an object whose color is well known:
  • "yellow daffodils"
  • "brownish dirt"
• Use adjectives that would do a job that the noun alone wouldn't be doing. For example, if you're in a part of the country where the dirt is red, feel free to mention the "red dirt".
• Make your adjectives do work that needs to be done. For example:
  • "a house was drab"
  • "a girl was beautiful"

LITTLE QUALIFIERS.

• Prune out the small words that qualify how you feel and how you think and what you saw such as "a bit", "a little", "sort of", "kind of", "rather", "quite", "very", "too", "pretty much", "in a sense", etc. → they dilute your style and your persuasiveness.
• Don't be kind of bold. Be bold.

Good writing is lean and confident. For example:

• Do:
  • Be confused. Be tired. Be depressed. Be annoyed.
  • Happy. Expensive. Awesome. Spectacular. Methodical.
• Don't:
  • A bit confused. Sort of tired. A little depressed. Somewhat annoyed.
  • Too happy. Pretty expensive. Very awesome. Very spectacular. Very methodical.

PUNCTUATION.

The Period

• There's not much to be said about the period except that most writers don't reach it soon enough.
• There is no minimum length for a sentence that's acceptable.
• If you want to write long sentences, be a genius or at least make sure that the sentence is under control from beginning to end, in syntax and punctuation.

The Exclamation Point

• Don't use it unless you must to achieve a certain effect.
• Construct your sentence so that the order of the words will put the emphasis where you want it.
• Resist using an exclamation point to notify the reader that you are making a joke or being ironic.

The Semicolon

• In the 19th-century, it is associated with the carefully balanced sentences, the judicious weighing of "on the one hand" and "on the other hand".
• Should be used sparingly by modern writers of nonfiction.
• Use it with discretion as it is no longer popular and rely instead on the period and the dash.

The Dash

• The dash is used in two ways:
  • One is to amplify or justify in the second part of the sentence a thought you stated in the first part, for example: "We decided to keep going — it was only 100 miles more and we could get there in time for dinner."
  • The other use involves two dashes, which set apart a parenthetical thought within a longer sentence, for example: "She told me to get in the car — she had been after me all summer to have a haircut — and we drove silently into town."

The Colon

• It has begun to look even more antique than the semicolon, and many of its functions have been taken over by the dash.
• Bring your sentence to a brief halt before you plunge into like an itemized list, for example: "The brochure said the ship would stop at the following ports: Oran, Algiers, Naples, Brindisi, Piraeus, Istanbul and Beirut."

MOOD CHANGERS.

• Alert the reader as soon as possible to any change in mood from the previous sentence → At least a dozen words will do this job for you: "but", "yet", "however", "nevertheless", "still", "instead", "thus", "therefore", "meanwhile", "now", "later", "today", "subsequently".
• "But" is the strongest word at the start. "However" is a weaker word and needs careful placement → Don't start a sentence with "however", it hangs there like a wet dishrag. And don't end with "however" as by that time, it has lost its howeverness.
• "Yet" does almost the same job as "but", though its meaning is closer to "nevertheless" → They can replace a whole long phrase that summarizes what the reader has just been told, for example: "Yet he decided to go" vs "Despite the fact that all these dangers had been pointed out to him, he decided to go."
• "Meanwhile", "now", "today" and "later" can save confusion for careless writers often change their time frame without remembering to tip the reader off. For example:
  • "Now I know better."
  • "Later I found out why."
• Always ask yourself where you left your readers in the previous sentence and make sure they are oriented.

CONTRACTIONS.

• Contractions like: "I'll" and "won't" and "can't" will help make your style warmer and truer to your personality. For example: "I'll be glad to see them if they don't get mad" vs "I will be glad to see them if they do not get mad." → Read that aloud and hear how stilted it sounds.
• No concrete rule on contraction usage, just trust your ear and your instincts.
• Just avoid one form — "I'd", "he'd", "we'd", etc. — because "I'd" can mean both "I had" and "I would".
• Don't invent contractions like "could've" as they cheapen your style → Stick with the ones you can find in the dictionary.

THAT AND WHICH.

That

• Always use "that" unless it makes your meaning ambiguous.
• In most situations, "that" is what you would naturally say and therefore what you should write.

Which

• If your sentence needs a comma to achieve its precise meaning, it probably needs "which."
• "Which" serves a particular identifying function.

A great example:

• (A) "Take the shoes that are in the closet" → This means: take the shoes that are in the closet, not the ones under the bed.
• (B) "Take the shoes, which are in the closet" → Only one pair of shoes is under discussion; the "which" usage tells you where they are. → Note that the comma is necessary in B, but not in A.

CONCEPT NOUNS.

These sentences with concept nouns - "reaction," "cynicism," "response," "hostility." have no people in them and no working verbs — only "is" or "isn't". For example:

• The common reaction is incredulous laughter.
• Bemused cynicism isn't the only response to the old system.
• The current campus hostility is a symptom of the change.

→ Turn these cold sentences around by getting people doing things:

• Most people just laugh with disbelief.
• Some people respond to the old system by turning cynical; others say
• It's easy to notice the change—you can see how angry all the students are.

CREEPING NOUNISM.

This is a new American disease that strings two or three nouns together where one noun or, better yet, one verb will do:

• "We have money problem areas".
• "We have precipitation activity or a thunderstorm probability situation". Or, as many as four or five concept nouns will attach themselves to each other:
• "Communication facilitation skills development intervention".

OVERSTATEMENT.

• Don't overstate like this:
  • "The living room looked as if an atomic bomb had gone off there"
  • "I felt as if ten 747 jets were flying through my brain"
• Let the humor sneak up instead.

CREDIBILITY.

• Don't inflate an incident to make it more outlandish than it actually was → If the reader catches you in just one bogus statement that you are trying to pass off as true, everything you write thereafter will be suspect.

DICTATION.

Dictated sentences tend to be pompous, sloppy and redundant → Executives who are so busy should at least find time to edit what they have dictated, making sure that what they write is a true reflection of who they are.

WRITING IS NOT A CONTEST.

Many writers are paralyzed by the thought that they are competing with everybody else who is trying to write and presumably doing it better:

• Can often happen in a writing class.
• Hobbles freelance writers, who see the work of other writers appearing in magazines while their own keeps returning in the mail. → Forget the competition and go at your own pace. Your only contest is with yourself.

THE SUBCONSCIOUS MIND.

Often you'll spend a whole day trying to fight your way out of some verbal thicket in which you seem to be tangled beyond salvation. Frequently a solution will occur to you the next morning when you plunge back in. → Stay alert to the currents around you because much of what you see and hear will come back, having percolated for days or months or even years, just when your conscious mind, laboring to write, needs it.

THE QUICKEST FIX.

• Often a difficult problem in a sentence can be solved by simply getting rid of it.
• When you find yourself at such an impasse, look at the troublesome element and ask, "Do I need it at all?"

PARAGRAPHS.

• Keep your paragraphs short → Short paragraphs put air around what you write and make it look inviting, whereas a long chunk of type can discourage a reader from even starting to read.
• But don't go berserk. A succession of tiny paragraphs is as annoying as a paragraph that's too long.
• Good nonfiction writers think in paragraph units, not in sentence units. Each paragraph has its own integrity of content and structure.

SEXISM.

• Don't use constructions that suggest that only men can be settlers or farmers or cops or firefighters.
• A thornier problem is raised by the feminists' annoyance with words that contain "man," such as "chairman" and "spokesman." Their point is that women can chair a committee as well as a man and are equally good at spoking → One solution is to find another term: "chair" for "chairman," "company representative" for "spokesman." Can also convert the noun into a verb: "Speaking for the company, Ms. Jones said ..."
• Where a certain occupation has both a masculine and a feminine form, look for a generic substitute. For example: Actors and actresses can become performers.
• There is still the bothersome pronoun - "He" and "him" and "his" are words that rankle → The solutions can be:
  • Turn them into the plural: "All employees should decide what they think is best for them and their dependents." (good only in small doses)
  • Use "or": "Every employee should decide what he or she thinks is best for him or her." (should be used sparingly)
  • Eliminate "he" and its connotations of male ownership by using other pronouns or by altering some other component of the sentence:
    • "We" is a handy replacement for "he" "Our" and "the" can often replace "his": "First we notice what's happening to our kids and we blame it on the neighborhood".
    • One other pronoun is "you": "You'll often find ..."
• Always look for ways to make yourself available to the people you're trying to reach.

REWRITING.

• Rewriting is the essence of writing well as most writers don't initially say what they want to say, or say it as well as they could.
• Clear writing is the result of a lot of tinkering.
• Writing is an evolving process, not a finished product.
• Most rewriting consists of reshaping and tightening and refining the raw material you wrote to make sure you've given the reader a narrative flow he can follow with no trouble from beginning to end.

Some common things to check for when rewriting that the writer might fail to keep the reader notified of:

• changes in time.
• place and mood.
• vary and animate the style.

A good example of the rewriting process:

1. Identifying issues and improvements:

There used to be a time when neighbors took care of one another, he remembered. [Put "he remembered" first to establish reflective tone.] It no longer seemed to happen that way, however. [The contrast supplied by "however" must come first. Start with "But." Also establish America locale.] He wondered if it was because everyone in the modern world was so busy. [All these sentences are the same length and have the same soporific rhythm; turn this one into a question?] It occurred to him that people today have so many things to do that they don't have time for old-fashioned friendship. [Sentence essentially repeats previous sentence; kill it or warm it up with specific detail.] Things didn't work that way in America in previous eras. [Reader is still in the present; reverse the sentence to tell him he's now in the past. "America" no longer needed if inserted earlier.] And he knew that the situation was very different in other countries, as he recalled from the years when he lived in villages in Spain and Italy. [Reader is still in America. Use a negative transition word to get him to Europe. Sentence is also too flabby. Break it into two sentences?] It almost seemed to him that as people got richer and built their houses farther apart they isolated themselves from the essentials of life. [Irony deferred too long. Plant irony early. Sharpen the paradox about richness.] And there was another thought that troubled him. [This is the real point of the paragraph; signal the reader that it's important. Avoid weak "there was" construction.] His friends had deserted him when he needed them most during his recent illness. [Reshape to end with "most"; the last word is the one that stays in the reader's ear and gives the sentence its punch. Hold sickness for next sentence; it's a separate thought.] It was almost as if they found him guilty of doing something shameful. [Introduce sickness here as the reason for the shame. Omit "guilty"; it's implicit.] He recalled reading somewhere about societies in primitive parts of the world in which sick people were shunned, though he had never heard of any such ritual in America. [Sentence starts slowly and stays sluggish and dull. Break it into shorter units. Snap off the ironic point.]

2. Perform the update:

He remembered that neighbors used to take care of one another. But that no longer seemed to happen in America. Was it because everyone was
so busy? Were people really so preoccupied with their television sets and their cars and their fitness programs that they had no time for friendship? In previous eras that was never true. Nor was it how families lived in other parts of the world. Even in the poorest villages of Spain and Italy, he recalled, people would drop in with a loaf of bread. An ironic idea struck him: as people got richer they cut themselves off from the richness of life. But what really troubled him was an even more shocking fact. The time when his friends deserted him was the time when he needed them most. By getting sick he almost seemed to have done something shameful. He knew that other societies had a custom of "shunning" people who were very ill. But that ritual only existed in primitive cultures. Or did it?

→ The rewriting is mainly about: altering the sequence, tightening the flow, sharpening the point. You can read your article aloud from beginning to end, always remembering where you left the reader in the previous sentence.

Tips

• Learn to enjoy this tidying process.
• Replace a humdrum word with one that has more precision or color.
• Strengthen the transition between one sentence and another.
• Rephrase a drab sentence to give it a more pleasing rhythm or a more graceful musical line.

WRITING ON A COMPUTER.

• The computer is a technology's gift to rewriting and reorganizing that it puts your words right in front of your eyes for your instant consideration and reconsideration.
• With a computer compared to a typewriter, these are crucial gains for a writer: time, output, energy, enjoyment and control.

TRUST YOUR MATERIAL.

• There's nothing more interesting than the truth.
• Don't annoy your readers by over-explaining—by telling them something they already know or can figure out. The reader plays a major role in the act of writing and must be given room to play it.
• Try not to use words like "surprisingly," "predictably" and "of course," which put a value on a fact before the reader encounters the fact.

Many reporters had fallen into the habit of trying to make the news more palatable by writing in a feature style. Their leads consisted of a series of snippets that went something like this:

• Whoosh!
• It was incredible.
• And now there was also little Scooter to worry about.
• Come to think of it, the dog was acting kind of suspicious. → The assumption is that fact and color are two separate ingredients. But they're not, color is organic to the fact. Your job is to present the colorful fact.

GO WITH YOUR INTERESTS.

• There's no subject you don't have permission to write about.
• Follow your affections you will write well and will engage your readers regardless of the area of life.
• Write about your hobbies: cooking, gardening, photography, knitting, antiques, jogging, sailing, scuba diving, tropical birds, tropical fish.
• Write about your work: teaching, nursing, running a business, running a store.
• Write about a field you enjoyed in college and always meant to get back to: history, biography, art, archaeology.

Forms

Nonfiction as Literature

Practitioners of nonfiction who are trying to write well about the world we live in, or to teach students to write well about the world they live in, are caught in a time warp, where literature by definition still consists of forms that were certified as "literary" in the 19th century: novels and short stories and poems. But the great preponderance of what writers now write and sell, what book and magazine publishers publish and what readers demand is nonfiction.

The roster of the new literature of nonfiction, in short, would include all the writers who come bearing information and who present it with vigor, clarity and humanity:

• King Leopold Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa - Adam Hochschild.
• Walter Lippmann and the American Century - Ronald Steel.
• Mencken: The American Iconoclast - Marion Elizabeth Rodgers.
• Lenin Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire - David Remnick.
• Melville - Andrew Delbanco.
• De Kooning: An American Master - Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan.

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

Ultimately every writer must follow the path that feels most comfortable. For most people learning to write, that path is nonfiction. It enables them to write about what they know or can observe or can find out. → Motivation is at the heart of writing.

Writing About People: The Interview

• Get people talking.
• Learn to ask questions that will elicit answers about what is most interesting or vivid in their lives and conduct an interview.
• Take heart and you'll find the solution if you look for the human element.

How should you start?

• First, decide what person you want to interview. If you are a college student, don't interview your roommate → 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.
• Decide which publication you are hypothetically writing for.
• Choose as your subject someone whose job is so important, or so interesting, or so unusual that the average reader would want to read about that person → someone who touches some corner of the reader's life.
• Get better at interviewing skills → Much of the skill is mechanical. The rest is instinct — knowing how to make the other person relax, when to push, when to listen, when to stop. This can all be learned with experience. Some tips for improving interview skills:
  • "Be prepared" is apt a motto for the nonfiction writer.
  • Keep your notebook out of sight until you need it → Both of you need time to get to know each other. Take a while just to chat, gauging what sort of person you're dealing with, getting him or her to trust you.
  • Go into an interview with doing whatever homework you can.
  • Make a list of likely questions — it will save you the vast embarrassment of going dry in mid-interview - or you can only go by intuition. If they stray hopelessly off the subject, drag them back. If you like the new direction, follow along and forget the questions you intended to ask.
  • You might be talking to people who have never been interviewed before, and they will warm to the process awkwardly, self-consciously, perhaps not giving you anything you can use → just come back another day, you will both even begin to enjoy it — proof that you aren't forcing your victims to do something they really don't want to do.
  • Speaking of tools, is it all right (you ask) to use a tape recorder? → strictly, this is a process of asking questions and then pruning and splicing and editing the transcribed answers, and it takes a tremendous amount of time and labor.
  • Be a writer. It is preferred to write things down. Taking notes, however, has one big problem: the person you're interviewing often starts talking faster than you can write → tell him to stop. Just say, "Hold it a minute, please," and write until you catch up as nobody wants to be misquoted.
  • With practice you will write faster and develop some form of shorthand. You'll find yourself devising abbreviations for often-used words and also omitting the small connective syntax.
  • As soon as the interview is over, fill in all the missing words you can remember. Complete the uncompleted sentences. Most of them will still be lingering just within the bounds of recall.
• When you get home, type out your notes — probably an almost illegible scrawl — so that you can read and review them easily.
• Single out the sentences that are most important or colorful.
• What about your obligation to the person you interviewed? To what extent can you cut or juggle his words? → keep in mind two standards - brevity and fair play:
  • Fair play: Present the interviewee position accurately → Don't change any words or let the cutting of a sentence distort the proper context of what remains.
  • Brevity: The reader deserves the tightest package → If you find on page 5 of your notes a comment that perfectly amplifies a point on page 2 — a point made earlier in the interview — you will do everyone a favor if you link the two thoughts, letting the second sentence follow and illustrate the first. This may violate the truth of how the interview actually progressed, but you will be true to the intent of what was said.
  • If the speaker's conversation is ragged - his sentences trail off, his thoughts are disorderly, his language is so tangled that it would embarrass him — the writer has no choice but to clean up the English and provide the missing links.
  • Don't become the prisoner of the speaker's quotes and don't let anything go out into the world that you don't understand → you can call and tell him you want to check a few of the things he said. Get him to rephrase his points until you understand them.
• What is his claim to our time and attention? → try to achieve a balance between what the subject is saying in his words and what you are writing in your words.
• When you use a quotation, start the sentence with it. Don't lead up to it with a vapid phrase saying what the man said.
  • BAD: Mr. Smith said that he liked to "go downtown once a week and have lunch with some of my old friends."
  • GOOD: "I usually like to go downtown once a week," Mr. Smith said, "and have lunch with some of my old friends."
• Be careful where you break the quotation. Do it as soon as you naturally can, so that the reader knows who is talking, but not where the break will destroy the rhythm or the meaning.
• Don't strain to find synonyms for "He said". Don't make your man assert, aver and expostulate just to avoid repeating "he said".
• If you crave variety, choose synonyms that catch the shifting nature of the conversation:
  • "He pointed out"
  • "He explained"
  • "He replied"
  • "He added" → These all carry a particular meaning and should be used wisely.

It's just not possible to write a competent interview without some juggling and eliding of quotes, just don't fabricate quotes or to surmise what someone might have said. 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 a valuable gift.

Writing About Places: The Travel Article

You'll need only a paragraph or two to sketch the setting of an event. But more often you'll need to evoke the mood of a whole neighborhood or town to give texture to the story you're telling.

As a writer you must keep a tight rein on your subjective self and keep an objective eye on the reader → The mere agglomeration of detail is no free pass to the reader's interest. The detail must be significant.

Nowhere else in nonfiction do writers use such syrupy words and groaning platitudes. Adjectives you would squirm to use in conversation — "wondrous", "dappled", "roseate", "fabled", and "scudding" — are common currency.

There are 2 principles of advice:

• Style:
  • First, choose your words with unusual care. If a phrase comes to you easily, look at it with deep suspicion.
  • Resist straining for the luminous lyrical phrase to describe the wondrous waterfall.
• Substance:
  • Be intensely selective and 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 and make sure they do useful work.

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

The Mississippi River's most succinct example from Jonathan Raban: (and plenty more examples refer from the book)

Flying to Minneapolis from the West, you see it as a theological problem.

The great flat farms of Minnesota are laid out in a ruled grid, as empty of surprises as a sheet of graph paper. Every gravelled path, every ditch has been projected along the latitude and longitude lines of the township-and- range-survey system. The farms are square, the fields are square, the houses are square; if you could pluck their roofs off from over people's heads, you'd see families sitting at square tables in the dead center of square rooms. Nature has been stripped, shaven, drilled, punished and repressed in this right-angled, right-thinking Lutheran country. It makes you ache for the sight of a rebellious curve or the irregular, dappled colour of a field where a careless farmer has allowed corn and soybeans to cohabit.

But there are no careless farmers on this flight path. The landscape is open to your inspection—as to God's—as an enormous advertisement for the awful rectitude of the people. There are no funny goings-on down here, it says; we are plain upright folk, fit candidates for heaven.

Then the river enters the picture — a broad serpentine shadow that sprawls unconformably across the checkerboard. Deviously winding, riddled with black sloughs and green cigar-shaped islands, the Mississippi looks as if it had been put here to teach the god-fearing Midwest a lesson about stubborn and unregenerate nature. Like John Calvin's bad temper, it presents itself as the wild beast in the heart of the heartland.

When people who live on the river attribute a gender to the Mississippi, they do so without whimsy, and nearly always they give it their own sex. "You better respect the river, or he'll do you in," growls the lockmaster. "She's mean—she's had a lot of people from round here," says the waitress at the lunch counter. When Eliot wrote that the river is within us (as the sea is all about us), he was nailing something true in an everyday way about the Mississippi. People do see its muddy turmoil as a bodying-forth of their own turbulent inner selves. When they boast to strangers about their river's wantonness, its appetite for trouble and destruction, its floods and drownings, there's a note in their voices that says, I have it in me to do that ... I know how it feels.

A travel piece doesn't mean you have to go to a distanced place from where you live. Go to your local mall, or bowling alley, or day-care center. But whatever place you write about, go there often enough to isolate the qualities that make it distinctive.

When you write about a place, try to draw the best out of it. But if the process should work in reverse, let it draw the best out of you.

What brings a place alive is human activity: people doing the things that give a locale its character.

When investigating about a place, don't ask tourists: "What do you feel?"; but interview local men and women—park rangers, curators, librarians, merchants: "Why do you think two million people a year come to Mount Rushmore? Or three million to the Alamo? Or one million to Concord bridge? Or a quarter million to Hannibal? What kind of quest are all these people on?"

Here are example things that custodians at the sites told:

• MOUNT RUSHMORE: "In the afternoon when the sunlight throws the shadows into that socket," one of the rangers, Fred Banks, said, "you feel that the eyes of those four men are looking right at you, no matter where you move. They're peering right into your mind, wondering what you're thinking, making you feel guilty: ‘Are you doing your part?'"

Don't wax emotional or patriotic and beware of waxing, especially if you're writing about places that are sacred or meaningful. For example:

• One fact at Pearl Harbor is that the battleship Arizona, sunk by the Japanese on December 7, 1941, continues to leak as much as a gallon of oil every day. When later interviewed superintendent Donald Magee he recalled that upon taking the job he reversed a bureaucratic fiat prohibiting children under 45 inches tall from visiting the Arizona Memorial. Their behavior had been decreed as could "negatively impact the experience" for other tourists.
• "I don't think children are too young to appreciate what that ship represents," Magee told me. "They'll remember it if they see the leaking oil—if they see that the ship is still bleeding."

Writing About Yourself: The Memoir

If you're a writing teacher, make your students believe in the validity of their lives.

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

On the question of who you're writing for, don't be eager to please. If you consciously write for a teacher or for an editor, you'll end up not writing for anybody. If you write for yourself, you'll reach the people you want to write for.

Permission, however, is a two-edged instrument, and nobody should use it without posting a surgeon general's warning: EXCESSIVE WRITING ABOUT YOURSELF CAN BE HAZARDOUS TO THE HEALTH OF THE WRITER AND THE READER.

Rules and tips:

• Ego is healthy. Egotism, however, is a drag.
• Make sure every component in your memoir is doing useful work.
• Write about yourself, by all means, with confidence and with pleasure.

Memoir's power is the narrowness of its focus. Unlike autobiography, which spans an entire life, memoir assumes the life and ignores most of it → The memoir writer takes us back to some corner of his or her past that was unusually intense — childhood, for instance — or that was framed by war or some other social upheaval. It is a window into a life, and is a deliberate construction.

To write a good memoir you must:

• become the editor of your own life.

• impose on an untidy sprawl of half-remembered events a narrative shape and an organizing idea.

• invent the truth in an artistic way.

• 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.

• 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 most interesting character in a memoir, we hope, will turn out to be the person who wrote it.

Science and Technology

Science, demystified, is just another nonfiction subject. Writing, demystified, is just another way for scientists to transmit what they know.

Scientific and technical material needs to be written in sentences that form a linear sequence. This is no place for fanciful leaps or implied truths. Fact and deduction are the ruling family.

Science writing is simply about describing how something works e.g. how a sewing machine does what it does, or how a pump operates, or why an apple falls down, or how the eye tells the brain what it sees. Any process will do, and "science" can be defined loosely to include technology, medicine and nature.

Describing how a process works is valuable because:

• It forces you to make sure you know how it works.
• It forces you to take the reader through the same sequence of ideas and deductions that made the process clear to you.
• It's the principle of leading readers who know nothing, step by step, to a grasp of subjects they didn't think they had an aptitude for or were afraid they were too dumb to understand.

Tips:

• Imagine science writing as an upside-down pyramid:
  • Start at the bottom with the one fact a reader must know before he can learn any more.
  • The second sentence broadens what was stated first, making the pyramid wider.
  • The third sentence broadens the second, so that you can gradually move beyond fact into significance and speculation — how a new discovery alters what was known, what new avenues of research it might open, where the research might be applied.
• Take much of the mystery out of science writing by helping the reader to identify with the scientific work being done → looking for the human element, which can be yourself. Use your own experience to connect the reader to some mechanism that also touches his life.
• Another way to help your readers understand unfamiliar facts is to relate them to sights they are familiar with. Reduce the abstract principle to an image they can visualize.
• Always start with too much material. Then give your reader just enough.
• Make science more accessible by write like a person and not like a scientist.
• The materials tend to spatter all over the inside of the vacuum chamber, which must be cleaned after every few dozen hours of operation.

If a scientific subject of that complexity can be made that clear and robust, in good English, with only a few technical words, which are quickly explained (kryton) or can be quickly looked up (fissile), any subject can be made clear and robust.

Business Writing: Writing in Your Job

People work for an institution don't have to write like one. Institutions can be warmed up. Administrators can be turned into human beings. Information can be imparted clearly and without pomposity. You only have to remember that readers identify with people, not with abstractions like "profitability," or with Latinate nouns like "utilization" and "implementation".

How to close the gap between your true self and your professional self:

• Focus on the four articles of faith: clarity, simplicity, brevity and humanity.
• Use active verbs and avoid "concept nouns".
• Do not to use the special vocabulary of the professional fields as a crutch; almost any subject can be made accessible in good English.

For example that when we need to improve this phrase "Evaluative procedures for the objectives were also established based on acceptable criteria":

• "At the end of the year we will evaluate our progress"
• "We will see how well we have succeeded"

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 → what you write is often the only chance you'll get to present yourself to someone whose business or money or good will you need.

How to make the writing more humane and warm up any institution:

• Find the people behind the fine achievements being described → "Go to the engineer who conceived the new system", "or to the designer who designed it, or to the technician who assembled it, and get them to tell you in their own words how the idea came to them, or how they put it together, or how it will be used by real people in the real world".
• Locate the missing "I." Remember: "I" is the most interesting element in any story.

Why engineers don't want to be made intelligible and they just speak in an arcane language studded with acronyms ("Sub-system support is available only with VSAG or TNA"):

• If they speak too simply he would look like a jerk to his peers.
• This is easier said than done in hierarchical corporations, where approval of written reports is required at a succession of higher levels → Do things the company way and don't risk your job trying to make the company human.
• High executives were equally victimized by wanting to sound important. → 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, and your example might even persuade your manager to write his own stuff.

Sports

What best sportswriters do:

• Avoid the exhausted synonyms.
• Strive for freshness elsewhere in their sentences.
• Keep a honest, graceful and carry strong convictions in the writing style.
• Avoid rearing on so many clichés that are assumed to be the required tools of the trade.
• Avoid repeating the word that's easiest for the reader to visualize — batter, runner, golfer, boxer — if a synonym can be found.
• Don't get carried away with numbers. Every sports addict lives with a head full of statistics, cross-filed for ready access, etc. but some statistics are more important than others → Mention only the important ones e.g. a pitcher wins his 20th game, if a golfer shoots a 61, if a runner runs the mile in 3:48, etc.
• Remember that athletes are men and women who become part of our lives during the season, acting out our dreams or filling some other need for us, and we want that bond to be honored. Hold the hype and give us heroes who are believable.
• Take a hard look at some vexing stories such as drug abuse and steroids, crowd violence, women's rights, minorities in management, television contracts, etc. as the financial seduction of school and college athletes → It's the story of our values and our priorities in the education of our children.
• Remember that the sport's 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.
• Focus on letting the readers know what it feels like to actually perform a sport: to be a marathon runner or a soccer goalie, a skier or a golfer or a gymnast.
• The values to look for when you write about sport: people and places, time and transition.

Writing About the Arts: Critics and Columnists

Some of the writing about art such as acting, dancing, painting, writing poetry, playing an instrument, etc. is journalistic — the interview with the new symphony orchestra conductor, the tour of the new museum with its architect or its curator.

Write about the arts from the inside — to appraise a new work, to evaluate a performance, to recognize what's good and what's bad - is also a critic.

A distinction should therefore be made between a "critic" and a "reviewer":

• Reviewers write for a newspaper or a popular magazine, and what they cover is primarily an industry—the output of, for instance, the television industry, the motion-picture industry and, increasingly, the publishing industry in its flood of cookbooks, health books, how-to books, "as told to" books, "gift books" and other such items of merchandise. As a reviewer your job is more to report than to make an aesthetic judgment.
• Critics should like — or, better still, love — the medium they are reviewing. If you think movies are dumb, don't write about them. The reader deserves a movie buff who will bring along a reservoir of knowledge, passion and prejudice. It's not necessary for the critic to like every film; criticism is only one person's opinion. But he should go to every movie wanting to like it. If he is more often disappointed than pleased, it's because the film has failed to live up to its best possibilities.
• Criticism is a serious intellectual act. It tries to evaluate serious works of art and to place them in the context of what has been done before in that medium or by that artist.

Tips:

• 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 → One sentence will often do the trick, for example "This is a picture about a whimsical Irish priest who enlists the help of three orphan boys dressed as leprechauns to haunt a village where a mean widow has hidden a crock of gold."
• Use specific detail. This avoids dealing in generalities, which, being generalities, mean nothing. For example of a generic critic sentence: "The play is always fascinating".
• In book reviewing, allow the author's words to do their own documentation.
• Avoid the ecstatic adjectives that occupy such disproportionate space in every critic's quiver — words like "enthralling" and "luminous" → Good criticism needs a lean and vivid style to express what you observed and what you think.
• Generate a provocative idea and throw it onto the page, where your readers can savor it.
• Criticism at its best should be with stylish, allusive, disturbing. It disturbs us — as criticism often should — because it jogs a set of beliefs and forces us to reexamine them. What holds our attention is the metaphor of the keyhole, so exact and yet so mysterious.
• Make an immediate effort to orient your readers to the special world they are about to enter. Even if they are broadly educated men and women they need to be told or reminded of certain facts. You can't just throw them in the water and expect them to swim easily. The water needs to be warmed up.
• Express your opinion firmly. Don't cancel its strength with last-minute evasions and escapes.

Humor

Humor is the secret weapon of the nonfiction writer because so few writers realize that humor is often their best tool — and sometimes their only tool — for making an important point → If you're trying to write humor, almost everything you do is serious. Humor is urgent work. It's an attempt to say important things in a special way that regular writers aren't getting said in a regular way.

The writer must find some comic device — satire, parody, irony, lampoon, nonsense — that he can use to disguise his serious point. For examples:

1. First scenario: Dear Haircurl (the funny magazine): I am 15 and am considered pretty in my group. I wear baby pink rollers, jumbo size. I have been going steady with a certain boy for 21⁄2 years and he has never seen me without my rollers. The other night I took them off and we had a terrible fight. "Your head looks small," he told me. He called me a dwarf and said I had misled him. How can I win him back? - HEARTSICK Speonk, N.Y. Dear Heartsick: You have only yourself to blame for doing something so stupid. The latest "Haircurl" survey shows that 94% of American girls now wear rollers in their hair 21.6 hours a day and 359 days a year. You tried to be different and you lost your fella. Take our advice and get some super-jumbo rollers (they come in your favorite baby pink shade, too) and your head will look bigger than ever and twice as lovely. Don't ever take them off again.

2. Second scenario: Dear Haircurl: My boyfriend likes to run his fingers through my hair. The trouble is he keeps getting them pinched in my rollers. The other night a terribly embarrassing episode happened. We were at the movies and somehow my boyfriend got two of his fingers caught (it was right where the medium roller meets the clipcurl) and couldn't get them out. I felt very conspicuous leaving the theater with his hand still in my hair, and going home on the bus several people gave us "funny looks." Fortunately I was able to reach my stylist at home and he came right over with his tools and got poor Jerry loose. Jerry was very mad and said he's not going to date me again until I get some rollers that don't have this particular habit. I think he is being unfair, but he "means business." Can you help me? - FRANTIC Buffalo Dear Frantic Buffalo: We're sorry to have to tell you that no rollers have yet been developed that do not occasionally catch the fingers of boys who tousle. The roller industry, however, is working very hard on the problem, as this complaint frequently comes up. Meanwhile why not ask Jerry to wear mittens? That way you'll be happy and he'll be safe.

→ The method will work for subjects that are important, or for almost any subject, if you can find the right comic frame.

Tips:

• 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.
• Operate on a deeper current than most people suspect.
• Be willing to go against the grain, to say what the populace and the President may not want to hear.
• Master the craft of writing good "straight" English.
• Don't search for the outlandish and scorn what seems too ordinary → finding what's funny in what you know to be true.
• Don't strain for laughs; humor is built on surprise, and you can surprise the reader only so often.
• Dramatic dialogue is another form that can serve the humorist.
• Influential humorist also used an unorthodox medium — doggerel — for his message.
• Demolish whatever trite idea had been there before.
• No law that says humor has to make a point. Pure nonsense is a joy forever.
• Enjoyment, finally, is what all humorists must convey - the idea that they are having a terrific time, and this notion of cranked-up audacity.

Benefits of humor:

• Use for the topical.
• Help us to look at far older problems of the heart, the home, the family, the job and all the other frustrations of just getting from morning to night.

Humor is not a separate organism that can survive on its own frail metabolism. It's a special angle of vision granted to certain writers who already write good English. They aren't writing about life that's essentially ludicrous; they are writing about life that's essentially serious, but their eye falls on areas where serious hopes are mocked by some ironic turn of fate — "the strange incongruity" as Stephen Leacock put it.

An example exercise:

• At first I told Yale students to write in one of the existing humor forms — satire, parody, lampoon, etc. — and not to use "I" or to write from their own experience. I assigned the same topic to the whole class, bringing in some absurdity I had noticed in the newspaper.
• After about four weeks, fatigue set in. The students learned that they were capable of writing humor. But they also learned how tiring it is to sustain a weekly act of comic invention, writing in other voices.
• I adopted the Chic Young principle — stick to what you know — and began to read from writers who use humor as a vein that runs quietly through their work.
• Many of the students wrote about their families. We ran into problems, mainly of exaggeration, and gradually solved them, trying to achieve control, cutting the extra sentence that explains a funny point that is already implicit. A hard decision was to know how much exaggeration was allowable and how much was too much.
• One student wrote a funny piece about what a terrible cook his grandmother was. When I praised it he said she was really a very good cook. I said I was sorry to hear it—somehow the piece now seemed less funny. He asked if that made a difference. I said it didn't make a difference in this piece, since I had enjoyed it without knowing it was untrue, but that I thought he would last longer if he started from the truth rather than from invention.
• In short, our class began by striving first for humor and hoping to wing a few truths along the way. We ended by striving for truth and hoping to add humor along the way. Ultimately we realized that the two are intertwined.

Attitudes

The Sound of Your Voice

Tips:

• Don't alter your voice to fit your subject.
• Develop one voice that readers will recognize when they hear it on the page, a voice that's enjoyable not only in its musical line but in its avoidance of sounds that would cheapen its tone: breeziness and condescension and clichés.
• Never hesitate to imitate another writer. Imitation is part of the creative process for anyone learning an art or a craft → Sometimes you will tap a vein of eloquence or racial memory that gives your writing a depth it could never attain on your own.
• Reach for fresh imagery and avoid phrases that are trite.
• Go for words that are short and strong; words that sedate are words of three, four and five syllables, mostly of Latin origin, many of them ending in "ion" and embodying a vague concept.
• After verbs, plain nouns are your strongest tools; they resonate with emotion.
• Remember the uses of the past when you tell your story.
• Go with what seems inevitable in your own heritage. Embrace it and it may lead you to eloquence.

A kind of writing that sounds so relaxed that you think you hear the author talking to you has a common assumption is that the style is effortless. In fact the opposite is true: the effortless style is achieved by strenuous effort and constant refining.

Finding a voice that your readers will enjoy is largely a matter of taste. Saying that isn't much help — taste is a quality so intangible that it can't even be defined. But we know it when we meet it.

For writers and other creative artists, knowing what not to do is a major component of taste. Taste is an invisible current that runs through writing, and you should be aware of it.

Taste:

• chooses words that have surprise, strength and precision.
• knows that it's better to call people in authority what they are: officials, executives, chairmen, presidents, directors, managers Non-taste:
• slips into the breezy vernacular of the alumni magazine's class notes.
• reaches for the corny synonym, which has the further disadvantage of being imprecise.
• uses "umpteenth", "zillions", and "period".

Taste is a mixture of qualities that are beyond analyzing: an ear that can hear the difference between a sentence that limps and a sentence that lilts, an intuition that knows when a casual or a vernacular phrase dropped into a formal sentence will not only sound right but will seem to be the inevitable choice.

Enjoyment, Fear and Confidence

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

Unfortunately, an equally strong negative current — fear — is at work. Fear of writing gets planted at an early age, usually at school, and it never entirely goes away. 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.

Tips:

• Write about subjects that interest you and that you care about.
• Living is the trick. Writers who write interestingly tend to be men and women who keep themselves interested.
• Write about subjects you think you would enjoy knowing about, your enjoyment will show in what you write. Learning is a tonic.
• Remember that your best credential - sincerity - is yourself when you enter new territory and need a shot of confidence.
• Remember that your assignment may not be as narrow as you think. Often it will turn out to touch some unexpected corner of your experience or your education, enabling you to broaden the story with strengths of your own. Every such reduction of the unfamiliar will reduce your fear.
• Think broadly about your assignment → 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.
• Prod the expert to clarify statements that are so obvious to him that he assumes they are obvious to everyone else. Trust your common sense to figure out what you need to know, and don't be afraid to ask a dumb question. If the expert thinks you're dumb, that's his problem.
• "That's interesting." If you find yourself saying it, pay attention and follow your nose. Trust your curiosity to connect with the curiosity of your readers.
• "Have I seen everything?" Often you'll get your best material after you put your pencil away, in the chitchat of leave-taking. The person being interviewed, off the hook after the hard work of making his or her life presentable to a stranger, thinks of a few important afterthoughts.

I mention this to give confidence to all nonfiction writers: a point of craft. 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.

The Tyranny of the Final Product

This fixation on the finished article causes writers a lot of trouble, deflecting them from all the earlier decisions that have to be made to determine its shape and voice and content.

What nonfiction writers need to know:

• How to situate what they write in a particular place.
• How to get the people who live in that place to talk about what makes it—or once made it—special.
• How to organize a long article: how to put the jigsaw puzzle together.

The quest is one of the oldest themes in storytelling, an act of faith we never get tired of hearing about. The assignment to go on a quest for something deeper than the place itself: a meaning, an idea, some sliver of the past. Moral: any time you can tell a story in the 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. We can write to affirm and to celebrate, or we can write to debunk and to destroy. But nobody can make us write what we don't want to write. We get to keep intention. Nonfiction writers often forget that they are not required to acquiesce in tawdry work, to carry the trash for magazine editors who have an agenda of their own — to sell a commercial product.

→ 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. Then you'll have something to sell.

A Writer s Decisions

This is about little decisions: the hundreds of choices that go into organizing a long article.

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 → Get readers so interested that they will stick around for the whole trip with the lead. For example:

What struck me most powerfully when I got to Timbuktu was that the streets were of sand. I suddenly realized that sand is very different from dirt. Every town starts with dirt streets that eventually get paved as the inhabitants prosper and subdue their environment. But sand represents defeat. A city with streets of sand is a city at the edge.

• The first sentence of that paragraph grows out of the last sentence of the previous paragraph; the reader is given no chance to squirm away. After that the paragraph has one purpose: it acknowledges what the reader already knows—or half knows—about Timbuktu:

That, of course, is why I was there: Timbuktu is the ultimate destination for edge-seekers. Of the half-dozen places that have always lured travelers with the mere sound of their name—Bali and Tahiti, Samarkand and Fez, Mombasa and Macao—none can match Timbuktu for the remoteness it conveys. I was surprised by how many people, hearing of my trip, didn't think Timbuktu was a real place, or, if it was, couldn't think where in the world it might be. They knew it well as a word—the most vivid of all synonyms for the almost-unreachable, a God-given toy for songwriters stuck for an "oo" rhyme and a metaphor for how far a lovestruck boy would go to win the unwinnable girl. But as an actual place—surely Timbuktu was one of those "long-lost" African kingdoms like King Solomon's Mines that turned out not to exist when the Victorian explorers went looking for them.

• The following paragraph gets down to hard work—work that can't be put off any longer. Notice how much information is crammed into these three sentences:

The long-lost Timbuktu, however, got found, though the men who finally found it after terrible ordeals—the Scotsman Gordon Laing in 1826 and the Frenchman René Caillié in 1828—must have felt cruelly mocked for their efforts. The legendary city of 100,000 people described by the 16th-century traveler Leo Africanus—a center of learning with 20,000 students and 180 Koranic schools—was a desolate settlement of mud buildings, its glory and its population long gone, surviving only because of its unique location as the
junction of important camel caravan routes across the Sahara. Much of what got traded in Africa, especially salt from the north and gold from the south, got traded in Timbuktu.

• Now, what do your readers want to know next? Here what they want to know is: why did I go to Timbuktu? What was the purpose of my trip? The following paragraph gets right to it— again, keeping the thread of the previous sentence taut. Besides explaining the genesis of the trip, that paragraph does one other job: it establishes the writer's personality and voice. The phrase "bright enough or dumb enough" calls up a familiar figure in travel literature: the tourist as a possible patsy or buffoon. Another throwaway phrase is the line about beating the crowd. I put it in just to amuse myself:

It was to watch the arrival of one of those caravans that I had come to Timbuktu. I was one of six men and women bright enough or dumb enough— we didn't yet know which—to sign up for a two-week tour we had seen announced in the Sunday New York Times, run by a small travel agency of French origins that specializes in West Africa. (Timbuktu is in Mali, the former French Sudan.) The agency's office is in New York, and I had gone there first thing Monday morning to beat the crowd; I asked the usual questions and got the usual answers—yellow fever shots, cholera shots, malaria pills, don't drink the water—and was given a brochure.

• Here is a typical example of how a writer can get other people to do helpful work for him. 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:

It's your opportunity to participate in a once-in-a-lifetime extravaganza —the annual Azalai Salt Caravan to Timbuktu!" the brochure began. "Picture this: Hundreds of camels carrying huge slabs of precious salt (‘white gold' to the natives of land-locked West Africa) make their triumphant entry into Timbuktu, an ancient and mystical part desert/part city of some 7,000 inhabitants. The colorful nomads who drive the caravans have traveled 1,000 miles across the Sahara to celebrate the end of their trek with outdoor feasts and traditional tribal dances. Spend the night in a desert tent as guest of the tribal chief.

• Here's the last paragraph of the lead:

Well, that's my kind of trip, if not necessarily my kind of prose, and it also turned out to be my wife's kind of trip and four other people's kind of trip. In years we ranged from late middle age to Medicare. Five of us were from mid- Manhattan, one was a widow from Maryland, and all of us had made a lifelong habit of traveling to places on the edge. Names like Venice and Versailles didn't bob up in our accounts of earlier trips, or even Marrakech or Luxor or Chiang Mai. The talk was of Bhutan and Borneo, Tibet and Yemen and the Moluccas. Now—praise Allah!—we had made it to Timbuktu. Our camel caravan was about to come in.

No less important than decisions about structure are decisions about individual words. Banality is the enemy of good writing; the challenge is to not write like everybody else.

• Initially I wrote something serviceable like "we were in our fifties and sixties" → If you look long enough you can usually find a proper name or a metaphor that will bring those dull but necessary facts to life - "from late middle age to Medicare".
• Originally I wrote, "Names like London and Paris didn't turn up in our accounts of earlier trips." Not much fun there → Everybody goes to Venice - "Venice and Versailles".
• Next I needed a fresher verb than "turn up" → Finally I thought of "bob" — a three-letter word, ludicrously simple. Yet it was the perfect word: it paints a picture of an object periodically rising to the surface of the water.
• What slightly offbeat tourist sites would seem commonplace to six travelers who had signed up for Timbuktu? → The three that I finally chose — Luxor, Marrakech and Chiang Mai — were quite exotic in the 1950s. Today they're not; the age of jet travel has made them almost as popular as London and Paris. → Altogether, the sentence took almost an hour. No writing decision is too small to be worth a large expenditure of time. Both you and the reader know it when your finicky labor is rewarded by a sentence coming out right.

More carefully chosen words: "canons," "brazenly," "gaudy," "tendered." They're vivid and precise, but not long or fancy. Best of all, they are words that readers probably weren't expecting and that they therefore welcome. The sentence about the chieftain's tent, referring back to a phrase in the brochure, is another tiny joke.

A crucial decision about a piece of writing is where to end it. Often the story will tell you where it wants to stop. The goal of our trip was to find a salt caravan I assumed that I would have to complete the ancient cycle of trade: to describe how we returned to Timbuktu and saw the salt being unloaded and bought and sold in the market. → The nearer I got to writing that final section, the more I didn't want to write it. It loomed as drudgery, no fun for me or for the reader. The real climax of my story was not finding the salt caravan; it was finding the timeless hospitality of the people who live in the Sahara. Not many moments in my life have matched the one when a family of nomads with almost no possessions offered to share their dinner. Nor could any other moment distill more vividly what I had come to the desert to find and what all those Englishmen had written about—the nobility of living on the edge.

As a postscript, there's one last decision I'd like to mention. It has to do with the nonfiction writer's need to make his or her own luck → 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 county or the next state or the next country. It's not going to come looking for you.

Tips:

• Make a sensible plan for your journey. Every step should seem inevitable.
• Never be afraid to break a long sentence into two short ones, or even three.
• "What do your readers want to know next?" Ask yourself that question after every sentence.
• Make readers identify with you — with your hopes and apprehensions. Giving them some idea of who you are.
• Be on the watch for funny or self-serving quotes and use them with gratitude.
• Ask yourself one very helpful question: "What is the piece really about?" (Not just "What is the piece about?")
• Self-discipline bordering on masochism is required.
• Keep yourself amused and maintain a persona while writing.
• Allow the content to speak for itself — just the facts - and trust your material.
• Look for the door when your story tells you it's over, regardless of what subsequently happened.
• Make sure that the unities were intact: that the writer - guide who started the lead was the same person who was ending it.
• Decide what you want to do. Then decide to do it. Then do it.

Writing Family History and Memoir

As every parent knows, our children are not as fascinated by our fascinating lives as we are. Only when they have children of their own — and feel the first twinges of their own advancing age — do they suddenly want to know more about their family heritage and all its accretions of anecdote and lore.

This is all about: how to leave some kind of record of your life and of the family you were born into.

The record can take many shapes:

• A formal memoir: a careful act of literary construction.
• An informal family history: written to tell your children and your grandchildren about the family they were born into.
• An oral history: extracted by tape recorder from a parent or a grandparent too old or too sick to do any writing.
• Or anything else: some hybrid mixture of history and reminiscence.

The crucial transaction in memoir and personal history is the transaction between you and your remembered experiences and emotions.

It's your story — you're the one who has done all the work. If your sister has a problem with your memoir she can write her own memoir, and it will be just as valid as yours; nobody has a monopoly on the shared past.

Most people embarking on a memoir are paralyzed by the size of the task on how to organize the thing:

• What to put in?
• What to leave out?
• Where to start?
• Where to stop?
• How to shape the story?
• What can be done?

Tips:

• Don't try to be a "writer", be yourself → just wrote the way you talked and what your personality and humor is. (use your voice, not style)
• "Should I write from the point of view of the child I once was, or of the adult I am now?" → The strongest memoirs are those that preserve the unity of a remembered time and place.
• "What about the privacy of the people I write about? Should I leave out things that might offend or hurt my relatives? What will my sister think?" → Don't worry about that problem in advance. Your first job is to get your story down as you remember it—now. Don't look over your shoulder to see what relatives are perched there.
• Say what you want to say, freely and honestly, and finish the job. Then take up the privacy issue. If you wrote your family history only for your family, there's no legal or ethical need to show it to anyone else.
• If you have in mind a broader audience — a mailing to friends or a possible book — you may want to show your relatives the pages in which they are mentioned.
• Don't use your memoir to air old grievances and to settle old scores; get rid of that anger somewhere else.
• Make a series of reducing decisions. For example: in a family history, one big decision would be to write about only one branch of the family. Families are complex organisms, especially if you trace them back several generations. Decide to write about your mother's side of the family or your father's side, but not both. Return to the other one later and make it a separate project.
• Remember that you are the protagonist in your memoir - the tour guide.
• Must find a narrative trajectory for the story you want to tell and never relinquish control → leave out of your memoir many people who don't need to be there like siblings.
• 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.
• Remember about universal ideas (for example the idea of a toy or a game) 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.
• 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.

Suggestion instructions:

• Day #1: Write about some event that's still vivid in your memory. It doesn't have to be long—three pages, five pages—but it should have a beginning and an end.
• Day #2: do the same thing but day 1's episode doesn't have to be related to today's episode. Take whatever memory comes calling; your subconscious mind, having been put to work, will start delivering your past.
• Keep this up for two months, or three months, or six months.
• Then, one day, take all your entries out of their folder and spread them on the floor. Read them through and see what they tell you and what patterns emerge.
• Then all you have to do is put the pieces together.

Write as Well as You Can

Humor and optimism 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.

How to write a clear English sentence:

• verbs have more vigor than nouns.
• active verbs are better than passive verbs.
• short words and sentences are easier to read than long ones.
• concrete details are easier to process than vague abstractions.

Editors can also do considerable harm. In general the damage takes two forms: altering style and altering content.

• Style: I wrote: "They don't look like cities that get visited by many visiting artists" → I had used repetition because it's a device I like — it takes readers by surprise and refreshes them in mid-sentence. But the editor remembered the rule about substituting synonyms for words that are repeated, and he corrected my error. I feel strongly that one such erosion leads to another and that the writer must take a stand. I've even bought articles back from magazines that made changes I wouldn't accept → If you allow your distinctiveness to be edited out, you will lose one of your main virtues. You will also lose your virtue.

  Frequently an editor will make a change to clarify a muddy sentence and will inadvertently lose an important point — a fact or a nuance that the writer included for reasons the editor didn't know about. In such cases the writer should ask to have his point back. The editor, if he agrees, should oblige. But the editor should also insist on his right to fix whatever had been unclear. 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 writer and the editor proceed through the manuscript together, finding for every problem the solution that best serves the finished article.

  Magazine editors, especially, have become cavalier about a whole series of procedures that should be automatic:

  • notifying the writer that the piece has arrived.
  • reading it with reasonable speed
  • telling the writer whether it's O.K.
  • returning it immediately if it's not.
  • working supportively with the writer if the piece needs changes.
  • sending the writer galley proofs.
  • seeing that the writer gets paid promptly. → Writers are vulnerable enough without being put through the repeated indignities of calling to learn the status of their article and to beg for their money.

• Content: I often hear freelance writers say, "When I got the magazine I looked for my article and I didn't even recognize it. They had written a whole new lead and had me saying things that aren't what I believe." That's the cardinal sin—tampering with a writer's opinions. But editors will do what writers allow them to do, especially if time is short.

Tips:

• Always tried to write as well as your could by your own standards.
• Never changed your style to fit the size or the presumed education of the audience you were writing for.
• Write as entertainingly as possible → give the reader an enjoyable surprise. Any number of devices will do the job: humor, anecdote, paradox, an unexpected quotation, a powerful fact, an outlandish detail, a circuitous approach, an elegant arrangement of words.
• If you would like to write better than everybody else, you have to want to write better than everybody else.
• Take an obsessive pride in the smallest details of your craft.
• 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 not as high.
• After you submit an article, you protect it fiercely.
• Remember that the craft of nonfiction writing involves more than writing. It also means being reliable to produce the article on time. Editors will properly drop a writer they can't count on.
• Think with gratitude of editors who sharpened your writing by changing its focus or emphasis, or questioning its tone, or detecting weaknesses of logic or structure, or suggesting a different lead, or letting you talk a problem through with them when you couldn't decide between several routes, or cutting various forms of excess.
• Don't let editors use distance or their own disarray as an excuse for altering your work without your consent:
  • "We were on deadline".
  • "we were already late".
  • "the person who usually deals with you was out sick".
  • "we had a big shake-up here last week".
  • "our new publisher has just come on board".
  • "it got put in the wrong pile".
  • "the editor's on vacation".
• Take your talent as far as you can and guard it with your life. What you write is yours and nobody else's. Only you know how far that is; no editor knows.
• Always think that there is at least one reader who had never seen you write, and you don't want to let him down.