On Writing Well - William Zinsser 2001

22 The Tyranny of the Final Product
Part IV Attitudes

In the writing course called “People and Places” that I teach at the New School, in Manhattan, students often tell me they have an idea for an article that would be perfect for New York, or for Sports Illustrated, or for some other magazine. That’s the last thing I want to hear. They can already picture their story in print: the headline, the layout, the photographs and, best of all, the byline. Now all they have to do is write it.

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. It’s a very American kind of trouble. We are a culture that worships the winning result: the league championship, the high test score. Coaches are paid to win, teachers are valued for getting students into the best colleges. Less glamorous gains made along the way—learning, wisdom, growth, confidence, dealing with failure—aren’t given the same respect because they can’t be given a grade.

For writers the winning grade is the check. The question that professional authors get asked most often at writing conferences is “How can I sell my writing?” It’s the only question I won’t try to answer, partly because I’m not qualified—I have no idea what editors in today’s market are looking for; I wish I did. But mainly it’s because I have no interest in teaching writers how to sell. I want to teach them how to write. If the process is sound, the product will take care of itself, and sales are likely to follow.

That’s the premise of my course at the New School. Better known by its original name, the New School for Social Research, it was founded in 1919 by liberal-minded scholars and has been one of the city’s most vibrant colleges ever since. I like to teach there because I’ve always felt sympathetic to its historic role: to provide information that helps motivated adults to get on with their lives. I like arriving by subway for my evening class and being part of the rush of men and women entering the building and getting out of classes that have just ended.

I chose “people and places” as the focus of my course because together they are at the heart of expository writing. By concentrating on those two elements I thought I would be able to teach much of what nonfiction writers need to know: how to situate what they write in a particular place, and how to get the people who live in that place to talk about what makes it—or once made it—unique.

But I also wanted to conduct an experiment. As an editor and a teacher I’ve found that the most untaught and underestimated skill in nonfiction writing is how to organize a long article: how to put the jigsaw puzzle together. Writers are endlessly taught how to write a clear declarative sentence. But ask them to try something more extensive—an article or a book—and the sentences leach out all over the floor like marbles. Every editor of a lengthy manuscript knows that grim moment of irreversible chaos. The writer, his eye on the finish line, never gave enough thought to how to run the race.

I wondered if there was any way to wrest writers away from their infatuation with the completed act of writing. Suddenly I had a radical idea: I would teach a writing course in which no writing is required.

At our first session my class consisted—as it has ever since— of two dozen adults, ranging from their twenties to their sixties, mostly women. A few were journalists with small suburban newspapers and television stations and trade magazines. But on the whole they were people with everyday jobs who wanted to learn how to use writing to make sense of their lives: to find out who they were at that moment, who they once were, and what heritage formed them.

I devoted the first period to getting us all introduced and explaining some of the principles of writing about people and places. At the end I said: “Next week I want you to come here prepared to tell us about one place that’s important to you that you’d like to write about. Tell us why you want to write about it and how you want to write about it.” I’ve never been a teacher who likes to read student writing aloud unless it’s unusually good; people are too vulnerable about what they have written. But I guessed that they wouldn’t be self-conscious about what they were merely thinking. Thoughts haven’t been committed to sacred paper; they can always be changed or rearranged or disowned. Still, I didn’t know what to expect.

The first volunteer the following week was a young woman who said she wanted to write about her church, on upper Fifth Avenue, which had recently had a bad fire. Although the church was back in use, its walls were blackened and its wood was charred and it smelled of smoke. The woman found that unsettling, and she wanted to sort out what the fire meant to her as a parishioner and to the church. I asked her what she proposed to write. She said she might interview the minister, or the organist, or the firemen, or maybe the sexton, or the choirmaster.

“You’ve given us five good pieces by Francis X. Clines,” I told her, referring to a New York Times reporter who writes local features warmly and well. “But they’re not good enough for you, or for me, or for this course. I want you to go deeper. I want you to find some connection between yourself and the place you’re writing about.”

The woman asked what sort of piece I had in mind. I said I was reluctant to suggest one because the idea of the course was to think our way collectively to possible solutions. But since she was our first guinea pig I would give it a try. “When you go to church in the next few weeks,” I said, “just sit there and think about the fire. After three or four Sundays the church is going to tell you what that fire means.” Then I said: “God is going to tell that church to tell you what the fire means.”

There was a small gasp in the classroom; Americans get squeamish at any mention of religion. But the students saw that I was serious, and from that moment they took my idea seriously, inviting the rest of us into their fives each week, telling us about some place that touched their interests or their emotions and trying to decide how to write about it. I would spend the first half of each class period teaching the craft and reading passages by nonfiction writers who had solved issues that the students were struggling with. The other half was our lab: a dissecting table of writers’ organizational problems.

By far the biggest problem was compression: how to distill a coherent narrative from a tangled mass of facts and feelings and memories. “I want to write an article about the disappearance of small towns in Iowa,” one woman told us, describing how the fabric of fife in the Midwest had frayed since she was a girl on her grandparents’ farm. It was a good American subject, valuable as social history. But nobody can write an article about the disappearance of small towns in Iowa; it would be all generalization and no humanity. The writer would have to write about one small town in Iowa and thereby tell her larger story, and even within that one town she would have to reduce her story still further: to one store, or one family, or one farmer. We talked about different approaches, and the writer gradually thought her story down to human scale.

Focus was another problem. Of all the possible stories that you might distill out of this place, which one is your story? One woman wanted to write about the house in Michigan where she grew up. Her mother had died, the house had been sold, and she was about to go home to help her father and her ten brothers and sisters dispose of the contents. Writing about the visit, she thought, would help her to understand her childhood in that large Catholic family, and she planned to start by interviewing all her brothers and sisters. I asked her if the story she wanted to write was her brothers’ and sisters’ story. No, she said, it was her story. In that case, I said, interviewing her brothers and sisters would be almost a complete waste of her time and energy. Only then did she begin to glimpse the proper shape of her story and prepare her mind for confronting the house and its possessions.

Another common problem had to do with voice and tense. A woman wanted to write about the public school she attended as a child in the Bronx, which she remembered vividly. She had recently visited the school, and now she didn’t know what voice to use for her story. Should she write from the point of view of the girl who had been a pupil in the school, or as the woman she was today, bringing the wisdom of age to the credulities of childhood? That question has troubled everyone who ever tried to write a memoir: whose truth is the “right” truth? The question doesn’t have one right answer, but it has to be settled in advance. Readers won’t put up with vacillating between two perspectives and tones.

I was struck by how often my students’ gropings led to a sudden revelation of the proper path, obvious to everyone in the room. A man would say that he wanted to try a piece about the town where he lived and would venture a possible approach: "I could write about X” X, however, was uninteresting, even to him, lacking any distinctiveness, and so were Y and Z, and so were P and Q and R, the writer continuing to dredge up fragments of his life, when, almost accidentally, he stumbled into M, a long-forgotten memory, seemingly unimportant but unassailably true, compressing into one incident everything that had made him want to write about the town in the first place. “There’s your story,” several people in the class would say, and it was. The student had been given time to find it.

That release from immediacy was what I wanted to get into the metabolism of my students. I told them that if they actually wrote their piece I would be glad to read it, even if they sent it to me after the course was over, but that that wasn’t my primary interest. I was primarily interested in the process, not the product. At first that made them uneasy. This was America—they not only wanted validation; it was their national right. Quite a few came to me privately, almost furtively, as if letting me in on some shabby secret, and said, “You know, this is the only writing course I’ve ever taken that isn’t market-driven.” But after a while they found it liberating to be freed from a deadline, the monster of all their school and college and postgraduate years (“the paper is due on Friday”), insatiably demanding to be fed. They relaxed and enjoyed considering different ways of getting where they wanted to go. Some of those ways would work and some wouldn’t. The right to fail was as liberating as the right to succeed.

Occasionally I’ve described this course to elementary and high school teachers at a workshop. I didn’t particularly expect them to find it pertinent to their age group—adolescents with fewer memories and attachments than adults have. But they always pressed me for more details. When I asked why they were so interested they said, “You’ve given us a new timetable.” By which they meant that the traditional assigning of short-term papers may be a tradition that teachers have followed too unquestioningly for too long. They began to muse about writing assignments that would give their pupils more room and would be judged by different expectations.

I always remind my New School students that there are many good reasons for writing that have nothing to do with getting published. Writing for yourself is a powerful search mechanism: there’s no better way to find out who you are and what you know and what you think. Writing for your children and your grandchildren—the family history or the personal or local memoir—is also satisfying.

My father, a businessman with no literary pretensions, wrote both a family history and a history of the family business, which he gave to each of his four children, his sons-in-law, his daughter-in-law and his 15 grandchildren. Pride of ancestry was not what got him going; the Zinssers, he said, “came over from Germany on the pickle boat.” But the process of re-examining his German-American roots and his tum-of-the-century New York boyhood not only kept him engaged when he was an old man with few talents for self-amusement. His two histories also have considerable charm as social history. In my own older years I find myself dipping into them surprisingly often.

The methodology of my course—thinking of a particular place—is only a pedagogical device. My real purpose was to give writers a new mentality, one they could apply to whatever writing projects they might try thereafter, allowing as much time as they need for the journey. For one of my students, a lawyer in his late 30s, the journey took three years. One day in 1996 he called me to say that he had finally wrestled into submission the subject whose organizational problems he had presented to our class is 1993. Would I look at it?

What arrived was a 350-page manuscript. I’ll admit that one part of me didn’t want to receive a 350-page manuscript. But a larger part of me was delighted that the process I had set in motion had worked its way to a conclusion. I was also curious to see how the lawyer had solved his problems, because I remembered them well.

The place he wanted to write about, he told us, was the town in suburban Connecticut where he grew up, and his theme was soccer. Playing on the school team as a boy, he had formed close friendships with five other boys who loved the sport as much as he did, and he wanted to write about that bonding experience and his gratitude to soccer for providing it. That was a good writer’s subject: a memoir.

So strong was the bond, the lawyer went on to say, that the six men were still bonded as midlife professionals in the northeast—they continued to see each other regularly—and he also wanted to write about that experience and about his gratitude for such lasting friendships. That was also a good subject: a personal essay.

But there was more. He also wanted to write about the state of soccer today. The texture of the sport he remembered had been eroded by social change, he explained. Among other losses, players no longer change in the locker room; they get into their uniform at home and drive to the field and then drive home again. The lawyers idea was to volunteer as a soccer coach at his old school and to write about the contrast between the present and the past. That was still another good subject: investigative reporting.

I enjoyed hearing the lawyer’s story. I was being taken into a world I knew nothing about, and his affection for that world was appealing. But I also knew that he was about to drive himself crazy, and I told him so. He couldn’t fit all those stories under one small roof; he would have to choose one story. As it turned out, he did fit all those stories under one roof, but the house had to be greatly enlarged and the job took three years of his spare time.

After I had read his manuscript, which was called The Autumn of Our Lives, he asked me if it was good enough to submit to a publisher. Not yet, I told him; it was still one rewrite away. Maybe he just didn’t want to make that kind of effort. He gave it some thought and said that, having traveled this far, he would probably give it one more shot. I have a feeling I’ll see the book in print some day.

“But even if it never gets published,” he said, “I’m glad I did it. I can’t begin to describe how rewarding it has been to write about what soccer has meant in my life.”

Two final words occur to me. One is quest, the other is intention.

The quest is one of the oldest themes in storytelling, an act of faith we never get tired of hearing about. Looking back, I notice that many students in my class, assigned to think about a place that was important to them, used the assignment to go on a quest for something deeper than the place itself: a meaning, an idea, some sliver of the past. The result was that the class always had an unusually warm dynamic for a group of strangers. (Some classes even held reunions.) Every quest that a student embarked on found an echo in some search or yearning of our own. 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; the choice is ours. Destruction has long been a journalistic mode, rewarding the snoop and the hatchet man (or woman) and the invader of privacy. 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.