William Zinsser, writing professor and author of the million-copy classic On Writing Well, would probably tell you this sentence is too long.

He’d also tell you the hardest decision any writer makes is how to begin a piece. “Your lead must capture the reader immediately,” he wrote, “and compel him to keep reading.”

How am I doing?

Another piece of Zinsser wisdom: fall in love with the process, not the end result. He once taught a writing class in which he did not require students to hand in any writing because “this fixation on the finished article causes writers a lot of trouble.”

He wanted them to throw off “the tyranny of the final product” and experience the subtler gains of “learning, wisdom, growth, confidence, [and] dealing with rejection.” It’s not all about the grade or, for professional writers, the check.

Speaking of the final product, Zinsser thought most writers go on for too long. “If you have presented all the facts and made the point you want to make,” he urged, “look for the nearest exit.”

He backed that up in an annotated tour of his Condé Nast Traveler article about a trip to Timbuktu (yes, it’s an actual place). His whole reason for this junket was to witness the great Bedouin salt caravans completing their thousand-mile trek across the Sahara, culminating in a triumphant entrance into the city. Instead, having witnessed the caravans en route, the piece ends with Zinsser waking up from a dream about Lawrence of Arabia in a tent on a desert dune. “The realization that I could just stop was a terrific feeling,” he wrote, “not only because my labors were over—the jigsaw puzzle solved—but because the ending felt right.”

Typewriter photo by Pereanu Sebastian on Unsplash

On Writing Well is a pleasure to read in part because of the humor throughout. For example, this comedic burst comes in his chapter on writing about places:

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,” “scudding”—are common currency. Half the sights seen in a day’s sightseeing are quaint, especially windmills and covered bridges; they are certified for quaintness. Towns situated in hills (or foothills) are nestled—I hardly ever read about an unnestled town in the hills—and the countryside is dotted with byways, preferably half forgotten. In Europe you awake to the clip-clop of horse-drawn wagons along a history-haunted river; you seem to hear the scratch of a quill pen. This is a world where old meets new—old never meets old. It’s a world where inanimate objects spring to life: storefronts smile, buildings boast, ruins beckon and the very chimneytops sing their immemorial song of welcome.

You can tell Zinsser’s having a good time, which underscores a tip he offers on the writer’s mindset. “Writing is such lonely work that I try to keep myself cheered up,” he writes, adding humorist S. J. Perelman’s advice: “The reader has to feel that the writer is feeling good. Even if he isn’t.”

Pillars and Pointers

When I think about the book as a whole, I see two themes as the twin pillars of Zinsser’s instruction. The first is the idea that, ultimately, the writer is the product. In other words, we must find our own way into a piece.

Musing on travel writing, for example, he writes, “It’s not enough just to take your readers on a trip; you must take them on your trip.” In his chapter on family history and memoir, he recounts, “Many of the chapters in my memoir are about small episodes that were not objectively ‘important’ but that were important to me. Because they were important to me they also struck an emotional chord with readers, touching a universal truth that was important to them.”

“When we say we like the style of certain writers,” he writes, “what we mean is that we like their personality as they express it on paper.” That’s certainly how I felt as I read Zinsser. I couldn’t help imagining (fantasizing?) what it would be like to sit in one of his writing classes (he died in 2015).

The other pillar is related—to find the human element in whatever subject you’re covering. Take sports. Don’t bore us with statistics. Help us relate to our heroes. Give us some hint of what it feels like to catch a 40-yard pass or drive a Formula One race car.

And if those are the pillars, Zinsser also offers plenty of specific, practical tips. Here are just a few:

• “Most adverbs are unnecessary.”
• On using dashes, he wrote they “will get you out of many tight corners.”
• “Your style will be warmer and truer to your personality if you use contractions.”
• “If you’re not a person who says ‘indeed’ or ‘moreover,’ or who calls someone an individual (‘he’s a fine individual’), please don’t write it.”
• “Relax and say what you want to say.”
• “Don’t 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.”

“I Did My Best, Dr. Zinsser”

The book is a masterwork, to be sure, and most nonfiction writers (plus quite a few fiction writers) would benefit enormously from it.

In his final chapter, titled “Write as Well as You Can,” Zinsser tells writers 90 percent of writing well comes from “mastering the tools discussed in this book.” The rest comes from wanting it bad enough, he says, just like in sports or any other major endeavor.

Zinsser inspired me, even in this review, to give it all I had—to go as far as I can with my talent. If I were handing this piece into him in one of his writing classes at Yale, I’d tell him, “I did my best, Dr. Zinsser,” and I hope he would enjoy reading it.

On Writing Well is a fun read, and it’s a helpful read too (in part because it’s fun). What I value most of all is the lift in confidence it gave me. Zinsser reinforced some of my instincts and clarified things I’d intuited but couldn’t articulate. This mix of affirmation and illumination has me approaching the keyboard with a bit more boldness, and that’s a priceless gift to any writer.

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