On Writing Well - William Zinsser 2001

24 Write as Well as You Can
Part IV Attitudes

I’m occasionally asked if I can recall the moment when I knew I wanted to be a writer. No such blinding flash occurred; I only knew that I thought I would like to work for a newspaper. But I can point to a set of attitudes that I inherited early in life and that have guided me ever since. They came from both sides of my family, by different routes.

My mother loved good writing, and she found it as often in newspapers as she did in books. She regularly clipped columns and articles out of the paper that delighted her with their graceful use of language, or their wit, or their original vision of life. Because of her I knew at an early age that good writing can appear anywhere, even in the lowly newspaper, and that what matters is the writing itself, not the medium where its published. Therefore I’ve always tried to write as well as I could by my own standards; I’ve never changed my style to fit the size or the presumed education of the audience I was writing for. My mother was also a woman of humor and optimism. These 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.

Originally I wasn’t meant to be a writer. My father was a businessman. His grandfather had come from Germany in the great immigration of 1848 with a formula for making shellac. He built a small house and factory in a rocky field far uptown in Manhattan—at what is now 59th Street and Tenth Avenue—and started a business called William Zinsser & Company. I still have a photograph of that pastoral scene; the land slopes down toward the Hudson River, and the only living creature is a goat. The firm stayed at that location until 1973, when it moved to New Jersey.

For a business to remain in the same family on the same Manhattan block for more than a century is rare, and as a boy I couldn’t escape the naggings of continuity, for I was the fourth William Zinsser and the only son; my father’s fate was to have three daughters first. In those Dark Ages the idea that daughters could run a business as well as sons, or better, was still two decades off. My father was a man who loved his business. When he talked about it I never felt that he regarded it as a venture for making money; it was an art, to be practiced with imagination and only the best materials. He had a passion for quality and had no patience with the second-rate; he never went into a store looking for a bargain. He charged more for his product because he made it with the best ingredients, and his company prospered. It was a ready-made future for me, and my father looked forward to the day when I would join him.

But inevitably a different day arrived, and not long after I came home from the war I went to work for the New York Herald Tribune and had to tell my father I wasn’t going to carry on the family business. He accepted the news with his usual generosity and wished me well in my chosen field. No boy could receive a finer gift. I was liberated from having to fulfill somebody else s expectations, which were not the right ones for me. I was free to succeed or fail on my own terms.

Only later did I realize that I took along on my journey another gift from my father: a bone-deep belief that quality is its own reward. I, too, have never gone into a store looking for a bargain. Although my mother was the literary one in our family—magpie collector of books, lover of the English language, writer of dazzling letters—it was from the world of business that I absorbed my craftsmans ethic, and over the years, when I found myself endlessly rewriting what I had endlessly rewritten, determined to write better than everybody who was competing for the same space, the inner voice I was hearing was the voice of my father talking about shellac.

Besides wanting to write as well as possible, I wanted to write as entertainingly as possible. When I tell aspiring writers that they should think of themselves as part entertainer, they don’t like to hear it—the word smacks of carnivals and jugglers and clowns. But to succeed you must make your piece jump out of a newspaper or a magazine by being more diverting than everyone else’s piece. You must find some way to elevate your act of writing into an entertainment. Usually this means giving 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. These seeming amusements in fact become your “style.” When we say we like a writer’s style, what we mean is that we like his personality as he expresses it on paper. Given a choice between two traveling companions—and a writer is someone who asks us to travel with him—we usually choose the one who we think will make an effort to brighten the trip.

Unlike medicine or the other sciences, writing has no new discoveries to spring on us. We’re in no danger of reading in our morning newspaper that a breakthrough has been made in how to write a clear English sentence—that information has been around since the King James Bible. We know that verbs have more vigor than nouns, that active verbs are better than passive verbs, that short words and sentences are easier to read than long ones, that concrete details are easier to process than vague abstractions.

Obviously the rules have often been bent. Victorian writers had a taste for the ornate and didn’t consider brevity a virtue, and many modem writers, like Tom Wolfe, have broken out of the cage, turning a headlong exuberance of language into a source of positive energy. Such skillful acrobats, however, are rare; most nonfiction writers will do well to cling to the ropes of simplicity and clarity. We may be given new technologies like the word processor to ease the burdens of composition, but on the whole we know what we need to know. We’re all working with the same words and the same principles.

Where, then, is the edge? Ninety percent of the answer lies in the hard work of mastering the tools discussed in this book. Add a few points for such natural gifts as a good musical ear, a sense of rhythm and a feeling for words. But the final advantage is the same one that applies in every other competitive venture. If you would like to write better than everybody else, you have to want to write better than everybody else. You must take an obsessive pride in the smallest details of your craft. And you must be willing to defend what you’ve written against the various middlemen—editors, agents and publishers—whose sights may be different from yours, whose standards not as high. Too many writers are browbeaten into settling for less than their best.

I’ve always felt that my “style”—the careful projection onto paper of who I think I am—is my main marketable asset, the only possession that might set me apart from other writers. Therefore I’ve never wanted anyone to tinker with it, and after I submit an article I protect it fiercely. Several magazine editors have told me that I’m the only writer they know who cares what happens to his piece after he gets paid for it. Most writers won’t argue with an editor because they don’t want to upset him; they’re so grateful to be published that they agree to having their style—in other words, their personality—violated in public.

Yet to defend what you’ve written is a sign that you are alive. I’m a known crank on this issue—I fight over every semicolon. But editors put up with me because they can see that I’m serious. In fact, my crankiness has brought me more work than it has driven away. Editors with an unusual assignment often thought of me because they knew I would do it with unusual care. They also knew they would get the article on time and that it would be accurate. Remember that the craft of nonfiction writing involves more than writing. It also means being reliable. Editors will properly drop a writer they can’t count on.

Which brings us to editors. Are they friends or enemies— gods who save us from our sins or bums who trample on our poetic souls? Like the rest of creation, they come in all varieties. I think with gratitude of a half-dozen editors who sharpened my 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 me talk a problem through with them when I couldn’t decide between several routes, or cutting various forms of excess. Twice I threw out an entire chapter of a book because editors told me it was unnecessary. But above all I remember those good editors for their generosity. They had an enthusiasm for whatever project we were trying to bring off together as writer and editor. Their confidence that I could make it work kept me going.

What a good editor brings to a piece of writing is an objective eye that the writer has long since lost, and there is no end of ways in which an editor can improve a manuscript: pruning, shaping, clarifying, tidying a hundred inconsistencies of tense and pronoun and location and tone, noticing all the sentences that could be read in two different ways, dividing awkward long sentences into short ones, putting the writer back on the main road if he has strayed down a side path, building bridges where the writer has lost the reader by not paying attention to his transitions, questioning matters of judgment and taste. An editors hand must also be invisible. Whatever he adds in his own words shouldn’t sound like his own words; they should sound like the writers words.

For all these acts of salvation, editors can’t be thanked fervently enough. Unfortunately, they can also do considerable harm. In general the damage takes two forms: altering style and altering content. Let’s look at style first.

A good editor likes nothing better than a piece of copy he hardly has to touch. A bad editor has a compulsion to tinker, proving with busywork that he hasn’t forgotten the minutiae of grammar and usage. He is a literal fellow, catching cracks in the road but not enjoying the scenery. Very often it simply doesn’t occur to him that a writer is writing by ear, trying to achieve a particular sound or cadence, or playing with words just for the pleasures of wordplay. One of the bleakest moments for writers is the one when they realize that their editor has missed the point of what they are trying to do.

I remember many such dismal revelations. A minor one that comes to mind involved an article I wrote about a program called Visiting Artists, which brought artists and musicians to a group of economically depressed Midwestern cities. Describing them, I wrote: “They don’t look like cities that get visited by many visiting artists.” When the galleys came back the sentence said: “They don’t look like cities that are on the itinerary of many visiting artists.” A small point? Not to me. I had used repetition because it’s a device I like—it takes readers by surprise and refreshes them in midsentence. But the editor remembered the rule about substituting synonyms for words that are repeated, and he corrected my error. When I called to protest, he was amazed. We argued for a long time, neither of us yielding. Finally he said, “You really feel strongly about this, don’t you?” 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.

Ideally the relationship between a writer and an editor should be one of negotiation and trust. 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 he 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 process, in short, is one in which the writer and the editor proceed through the manuscript together, finding for every problem the solution that best serves the finished article.

It’s a process that can be done just as well over the phone as in person. 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”—these dreary phrases cloak a multitude of inefficiencies and sins. One unpleasant change in the publishing profession has been the erosion of courtesies that were once routine. 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 its O.K., returning it immediately if its 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.

The prevailing notion is that such “courtesies” are merely frills and can therefore be dismissed. On the contrary, they are organic to the craft. They are the code of honor that anchors the whole enterprise, and editors who forget them are toying with nothing less than the writer’s fundamental rights.

This arrogance is at its most injurious when an editor goes beyond changes of style or structure and enters the sacred realm of 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 writers opinions. But editors will do what writers allow them to do, especially if time is short. Writers conspire in their own humiliation, allowing their piece to be rewritten by an editor to serve his own purposes. With every surrender they remind editors that they can be treated like hired help.

But finally the purposes that writers serve must be their own. What you write is yours and nobody else’s. Take your talent as far as you can and guard it with your life. Only you know how far that is; no editor knows. Writing well means believing in your writing and believing in yourself, taking risks, daring to be different, pushing yourself to excel. You will write only as well as you make yourself write.

My favorite definition of a careful writer comes from Joe DiMaggio, though he didn’t know that was what he was defining. DiMaggio was the greatest player I ever saw, and nobody looked more relaxed. He covered vast distances in the outfield, moving in graceful strides, always arriving ahead of the ball, making the hardest catch look routine, and even when he was at bat, hitting the ball with tremendous power, he didn’t appear to be exerting himself. I marveled at how effortless he looked because what he did could only be achieved by great daily effort. A reporter once asked him how he managed to play so well so consistently, and he said: “I always thought that there was at least one person in the stands who had never seen me play, and I didn’t want to let him down.”