Visions and Revisions
by William Zinsser
(Continued from the previous week)
I broadened the Sports chapter to note some of the darker forces that had begun to corrupt that once-sanitized world. I also expanded the Humor chapter, which had previously dealt only with the uses of topical humor to make a serious point. Since then I had taught a humor-writing course at Yale that situated American humor in its longer historical context. Now I provided that history, adding passages by such pioneers as George Ade, Don Marquis, Ring Lardner, Donald Ogden Stewart, Robert Benchley, James Thurber, and S. J. Perelman.
So the book went back out into the world stronger and more helpfuland still less than 200 pages long.
By 1985, when it was time for a third edition, I had long been back in New York City, busy with writing projects that taught me many new lessons. One was a long piece for The New Yorker about a trip I took to Shanghai with the musicians Willie Ruff and Dwike Mitchell in 1981, when they introduced live jazz to China. In my article I dutifully explained everything I was absolutely sure a reader would need to know about Ruff and Mitchell and how I felt about their music. But the editor of The New Yorker, William Shawn, eliminated most of those sections, assuring me that the points I was so determined to make were implicit. I was nervous, but Shawn was rightreaders had no trouble getting the point.
That lesson would strengthen everything I wrote thereafter. I learned to delete every word or phrase or sentence that told readers something they had already been enabled to know or were bright enough to deduce. I also tried to stop using phrases like of course and adverbs like surprisingly, predictably, understandably, and ironically, which place a value on a sentence before the reader has a chance to read it. Readers, I learned, are not as dumb as the writer thinks; they must be given room to play their role in the act of writingto discover for themselves whats surprising or predictable or understandable or ironic. They dont want that pleasure usurped. That struck me as an important lesson, and I put it into a new section called Trust Your Material.
I also wrote a highly personal final chapter about the values that shaped my own writing, starting with the ethical values of my parents. Called Write as Well as You Can, it stated my credo that writers must set higher standards for their work than anyone else doesand must defend what they write against every editor or publisher or agent who tries to distort or dilute it.
But the biggest revolution was in the technology of how writers did their writing. Overnight, they had been given a machine called a word processor that wrenched them away from the bone-deep process of putting words on paper, and they were fearful about making the leap. Nobody was more fearful than I. But I forced myself to go out and buy one of the new contraptions, an early ibm behemoth, and to puzzle out its arcane commands (initialize diskette), discovering that it miraculously eased the drudgery of writing and rewriting and retyping. That also called for a new chapter.
Those three new chapters ran at the end of the third edition, adding substance to the book without pulling apart its fabric.
By 1990, however, America had changed considerably. On Writing Well was a child of the 1970s. I knew that its principles were still valid. But what about its references and its tone? Would it strike a new generation of readers as an old mans book? I took a closer look and saw that my 14-year-old product was slowly slipping out of touch. Without a major overhaul it would wither and die.
Most obviously, much of the nonfiction I now admired was written by women. Yet my excerpted passages were still mostly by menthe graybeards who had been models for my generation of journalists, now gray-bearded ourselves. The language was also lopsidedly male; he and him were still the prevailing pronouns, though women readers had chided me for referring to the reader as he, pointing out that they did much of the nations reading and resented having to picture themselves as men.
I began by hacking at the pronouns. I found more than 100 places where I could eliminate he, him, his, himself, and man, either by switching to the plural or by altering some other component of the sentence. Then I took another look at all those male writers. Some of them no longer served my purposes and were gently eased overboard. I wrote a new chapter, on memoir, the glamorous new belle of the nonfiction form, and that provided a natural habitat for such newly fledged memoirists as Eudora Welty (One Writers Beginnings), Patricia Hampl (A Romantic Education), and Vivian Gornick (Fierce Attachments).
Other strong women tumbled into chapters that almost seemed to be waiting for them: the nature writer Diane Ackerman, the science writer Dava Sobel, the Texas regional writer Prudence Mackintosh, the movie critic Molly Haskell, the literary critic Cynthia Ozick. All of them came bearing new sensitivities that gave the book an emotional tenor it had lacked. Many of them also brought new information. Janice Kaplan, one of my Yale students, had carved a journalistic beat out of the immense gains made by women in physical stamina and athletic performance, and I expanded my sports chapter to include two passages from her magazine pieces.
Another woman writer, Kennedy Fraser, reviewing a book about the abused girlhood of Virginia Woolf, a tireless writer of journals, diaries, and letters, revealed that what Woolf wrote in those intimate forms had been crucially helpful to her and other women contending with similar demons of loneliness and pain. Frasers voice of vulnerability, stunningly honest, had never been heard in the male-oriented world of On Writing Well. The Humor chapter was also stuck in the dark ages, and I added passages by writers like Woody Allen, Nora Ephron, and Garrison Keillor, who were tilting at modern quandaries and neuroses.
Finally, I wrote a new chapter called A Writers Decisions. I had discovered that the crippling problem for many writers is not how to write, but how to organize what they have written. Yet that skill is almost never mentioned or taught in writing classes. My chapter, strictly pedagogical, using myself as a laboratory specimen, analyzes sequentially the big and small decisions that went into a long magazine article about a trip that Caroline and I made to Timbuktu to look for a camel caravan in the Sahara. Teachers have told me that the chapter is unusually helpful because it puts readers into the mind of the writer during the process of construction.
When that fourth edition was published, in 1990, On Writing Well had sold a half-million copies. Bigger spurts were still to come. But they wouldnt have been achieved without the regular tune-ups that saved the book from the fatal sin of not keeping up with the times.
Demographically, as always, America refused to hold still. By 1994 a tidal wave of immigration had reshaped the national character. Around me, the neighborhoods of New York were suddenly a tapestry of exotic faces, clothes, languages, shops, signs, foods, sounds, smells, and ceremonial customs. On Writing Well could no longer overlook those lively new Americans, and in the fifth edition I added a half-dozen passages by writers from other cultural traditions.
One passage, from The Woman Warrior, by Maxine Hong Kingston, the daughter of Chinese immigrants in Stockton, California, describes the acute shyness and embarrassment of being a child starting school in a strange land. Another, from Halfway to Dick and Jane: A Puerto Rican Pilgrimage, by Jack Ageros, recalls the authors boyhood in an urban neighborhood where several ethnic principalities existed within a single block, all fiercely defended.
Not all my writers from other cultures were born in other countries. Some grew up in the United States but felt no less like outsiders in white America. One was James Baldwin, whose The Fire Next Time, an electrifying account of his years as a boy preacher in Harlem, I still remembered 30 years later. Another native-born outsider, Lewis P. Johnson, a great-grandson of the last recognized chief of the Potawatomi Ottawas, describes a bittersweet quest for his lost identity in an essay called For My Indian Daughter.
Those immigrant and minority writers filled still another hole in On Writing Well. With my safely chosen samples of writing from my own culture, I had undoubtedly suggested that the only writers worth emulating were white people leading mainstream lives. Now I wanted to tell Americans of every ethnic origin that their own narratives were no less valid and that they could use forms like memoir to contend with the pain of adjusting to a new homeland.
The Science and Technology chapter was also showing its age. The writing was still fresh, but the science wasnt. Partial rescue came with an article in Scientific American, written with warmth and linear clarity, on The Future of the Transistor, by Robert W. Keyes. But my big break came when I saw in The New York Times that the winner of the National Magazine Award for 1993 in the coveted category of reporting, defeating such traditional champs as The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Newsweek, and Vanity Fair, was a magazine called I.E.E.E. Spectrum. I dont think I was the only reader of the Times who hadnt heard of it. It turned out to be the magazine of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, a professional association with 320,000 members. I found its office in the Manhattan telephone directory and walked over and got a copy of the award-winning article, How Iraq Reverse-Engineered the Bomb, by Glenn Zorpette.
The awards committee was rightit was a gem of investigative reporting. Constructed like a detective story, it traced the efforts of the International Atomic Energy Agency to monitor a secret program whereby the Iraqis, in violation of the agencys disclosure rules, came close to building an atomic bomb. Zorpettes article also couldnt have been more current; Iraq and its weapons havent been out of the news since.
After that fifth edition, almost all the new material in On Writing Well (in the sixth edition, in 1998; the 25th anniversary edition, in 2001; and the 30th anniversary edition, in 2006) was self-generated, not written in response to external change. I wasnt the same person who sat typing in a shed in Connecticut in 1974; the book and I had grown older together. Books that teach, if they have a long life, should reflect who the writer has become at later stages of his own long lifewhat new work he has done and how his thinking has evolved.
Among other changes, I had become more interested in the intangiblesbeyond craftthat produce the best writing: matters of character, intention, values, confidence, and enjoyment. I had also done many kinds of writing that I had never tried before. Three were highly reportorial books: Mitchell Ruff, about jazz; Spring Training, about baseball; and American Places, about 15 iconic American sites. In those books I learned to gather hundreds of facts and to let those facts speak for themselves, unvarnished. I learned to generate emotion by getting other people to tell me things they felt strongly about, not by waxing emotional myself. I learned not to wax.
Above all, I returned to the classroom. Since 1993 Ive taught a night class in memoir writing at the New School, in New York, for men and women eager to go in search of who they are, who they once were, and what heritage they were born into. Teaching that class revealed two immobilizing traits I wouldnt otherwise have known about. One was structural, the other psychological.
Most people starting on a memoir, I found, can already picture the jacket of the book: their name in big type, the handsome lettering of the title, and the tinted photograph of a child holding a pail by the seashore. They can also picture exactly what the book will say and how it will be constructed. Their biggest problem is how to find an agent and get it published. The only thing they havent thought about is how to actually write the book. Nobody has told them that they will only discover its shape and its content in the act of writing itand that the finished book wont much resemble the one they had in mind.
To focus my students on the process, rather than on the finished product, I invented a writing course that doesnt require any writing. I only ask the women and men in my class to talk about their hopes and intentions and about the possible ways of getting where they want to go. That forces them to confront all the prior decisions that memoir insists on: matters of voice, tone, tense, attitude, scope, narrative, and the privacy of their family and friends. How do they plan to reduce the vast jumble of memories clamoring to be sorted out and described? A new chapter was written on that subject, called The Tyranny of the Final Product.
Teasing memories out of those bright and accomplished adults, I was also struck by how unconfident they were, how apologetic, how uncertain of the worthiness of the tale they wanted to tell, although the stories they eventually dredged up from the past always moved the rest of us with their powerful emotions. Women, in particular, felt that they needed permission to believe in their remembered truth. To give them that permission I wrote two new chapters: The Sound of Your Voice and Enjoyment, Fear and Confidence.
Later, in 2006, I added a chapter on family history, a cousin of memoir that is now attracting boomers and retired people, drawn by new technology that enables them to self-publish their saga for their children, their grandchildren, their friends, and their local library or historical society. With that chapter I felt that I had said almost everything a nonfiction writer might need to know. It only took 30 years.
On Writing Well sold its millionth copy in 2000. (Sales are now approaching 1.5 million.) It was a figure I could hardly believe or even imagine; Ive never thought of myself as a best-selling author, and Im still surprised to hear that someone knows my name and my books. The numbers that mean the most to me are the hundreds of readers who have written or called just to say how much they like the book and how much it helped them. Surprisingly often they use the phrase You changed my life. I dont take that to mean that they found Buddhist enlightenment or quit smoking. What they mainly mean is that I cleaned out the sludge in their thinking that had paralyzed them from doing writing of any kinda phobia not unlike the fear of cleaning out the closets or the basement. (The hard part of writing isnt the writing; its the thinking.) Now, they tell me, Im at their side whenever they write, exhorting them to cut every word or phrase or sentence or paragraph that isnt doing necessary work. That, finally, is the life-changing message of On Writing Well: simplify your language and thereby find your humanity.
I particularly like to hear from people who came upon the book by surprise, never having thought of themselves as writers, and were taken by its sense of enjoyment. The following letter, from a young woman in Orlando, speaks for all the voyagers whose affection for the book has kept me company on the journey:
I am the night duty manager at a resort campground. I have never aspired to being a writer, but I was persuaded to take over the job of reporter, writer and editor of our weekly newsletter. Because of my moaning and groaning about what to write and how to write it, my boyfriend gave me a copy of On Writing Well. Now Im having a real blast!
