Category: Writing

For decades I have loved, reread, recommended, and extolled William Zinsser’s On Writing Well. He is wise, practical, enjoyable to read, and absolutely on target for new and experienced writers.

While I have been dispensing writing advice for decades (to authors, in lectures, in writing), when I thought about doing a book on writing myself, I was met with two thoughts—neither encouraging. First, how could I possibly say anything better than Zinsser when he says so much so well? Second, what would I possibly put in a book that Zinsser doesn’t already cover? Was anything left to say?

Most other books on writing fell into one of two categories. Either they were memoirs of famous writers with a few writing tips sprinkled here and there, or they were detailed guides to punctuation, grammar, word usage and so forth. While both sorts of books can be helpful, what I appreciated about Zinsser was his middle path of providing principles. His advice was concrete enough to put into practice but general enough to be broadly applicable. That’s the kind of book I also wanted to write—if I could.

I began by making a list of possible topics. Soon I saw they fell roughly into the three categories of craft, art, and spirituality. Half of Zinsser deals with craft but he says almost nothing about the other two. What he writes in that first part about simplicity, clutter, words, and usage is unsurpassed. So I focused on topics he doesn’t cover such as structure, persuasion, narrative in nonfiction, titles, and more. While he also addresses openings, endings, and audience, I took a different but complementary approach.

The last two-thirds of what would become Write Better would clearly be distinct. My five chapters on art consider the nature and practice of creativity, the value of breaking the rules of writing, the significance of tone, the glories of metaphor, and how saying less leaves room for art.

Zinsser had a Protestant upbringing and actually edited a book called Spiritual Quests. But he wrote little on the topic. In his final edition of On Writing Well, he considers the attitudes authors have toward their work—regarding voice, enjoyment, fear, and so forth. I consider some of these topics and many others in my final part on spirituality and writing, but within an explicitly Christian framework.

Something else I could offer that many writing books don’t include is a window into the mysterious world of publishing. Several appendices pull back the veil a bit on this realm of intense interest to writers.

I still recommend Zinsser. My aim is for Write Better to join him in the underpopulated category of principle-based books on writing.

How do you keep readers reading? How do you pull them through a chapter or article or blog without them getting bored or distracted?

Fiction writers aren’t the only ones who can use a mystery to keep readers engaged. Nonfiction writers can also withhold a key piece of information—the whodunnit! It’s what I call the Big Reveal in Write Better. How does it work?

Adam Grant uses the technique effectively in his book Originals. At the beginning of chapter two Grant tells of “an invention [that] took Silicon Valley by storm.” Steve Jobs offered $63 million for 10 percent of the company and the inventor turned it down. But Jobs was so enamored “he offered to advise the inventor for the next six months—for free.”

Legendary investor John Doerr pumped in $80 million, thought it would be the fastest company to reach $1 billion, and “would become more important than the internet.”

“The inventor himself was described as a modern Thomas Edison—he already had a track record of remarkable breakthroughs” which Grant details. The inventor thought he’d soon be selling 10,000 units a week but six years after launch they had only sold 30,000 total.

The product? The Segway, one of the most hyped tech devices in decades with the most disappointing results.

Grant immediately tells us another tale in the same vein. Two entertainers with no TV writing experience struggle to put together a half-hour sitcom pilot. The test audience in Los Angeles gave it bland to bad marks. Somehow, though, the pilot was aired—to yawns. But a passionate exec ordered a few more episodes against the wisdom of others despite the fact that one of the writers said he’d run out of ideas and was ready to quit. Over the next decade, it became the most popular show in America.

“If you’ve ever complained about a close talker, accused a partygoer of double-dipping a chip, uttered the disclaimer ‘Not that there’s anything wrong with that,’ or rejected someone by saying ‘No soup for you,’ you’re using phrases coined” on Seinfeld.

Grant hooks us by putting two mysteries in front of us which we actively try to solve ourselves before the author reveals the answers. But he doesn’t stop there.

The author then asks, How can our predictions about innovations go so wrong—sometimes predicting a hit that becomes a flop, and other times forecasting a bomb that becomes a sensation? He outlines what’s ahead—again without giving away the solution. We’ll discover “best practices in idea selection . . . how to make fewer bad bets . . . meet two venture capitalists who anticipated the failure of the Segway . . . see why it’s so difficult for managers and test audiences to accurately evaluate new ideas,” and more.

If we want to find out about all these interesting results, we’ll have to read on. I did.

photo: Pixabay talliev

Today marks the official release of my new book, Write Better. To give you a taste of what’s in store, here is an excerpt from the preface.

Two of my sons, Phil and Dave, ran cross-country in high school. These grueling three-mile races were not on perfectly flat, machine-fabricated ovals but up hills, over ruts, through woods. In heat and cold, rain and wind I, like other parents, came to urge them and their teammates on.

Sometimes I’d run from one part of the course to another, taking a shortcut, so that several times during a race I could yell encouragement to press on, to not let down, to remember their training. Once when I was dashing from one place to another, a student cheering for another school almost slammed into me. As he flew by in another direction, he said, “Sorry, Coach.” I’ve never felt prouder to be mistakenly identified.

For over forty years I’ve trained, guided, and cheered on hundreds of writers. I’ve made suggestions for what to write about, how to write, and how to revise. I’ve encouraged and praised, cajoled and critiqued. In every case I have been stimulated by a desire to help people express their ideas as clearly and powerfully as possible. That is the motivation behind this book.

I’ve also done a fair bit of my own writing, trying to follow my own advice as much as possible. What I have realized in the process is how hard it is to write. It requires work and determination. It means saying no to other things I want to do or fitting it around things I must do (like my job). I have to overcome discouragement when progress is slow and when I don’t meet my own standards. As a result, I have great admiration for people who write, people like you.

In this book I offer some of the lessons I’ve learned in reading, writing, and editing nonfiction. If I can lighten your load as a writer of books, articles, blogs, newsletters, or manuals, and speed you on your way, I will be content.

Students and those who just want to write better may also find help in these pages. I hope you will feel free to take what is of value here and lay aside the rest till later.

I’ve divided my material into three parts. Part one on craft is about mastering certain skills such as finding strong openings and closings, staying focused on an audience, creating a clear structure, being persuasive, revising well, and developing good titles.

Part two is on art, which is notoriously difficult to define. I use the term a bit reluctantly because we can misapply it to writing pretentiously or can misunderstand it as being so subjective that nothing practical can be said about it. Rather than “high art” in the sense of historical or cultural artifacts, I mostly mean human creations that speak deeply to the full human experience (heart, soul, mind, body as well as our social and historical dimensions). Sentimentality and cliché need not apply. I seek to demystify some aspects of art in writing by considering strategies that can nudge us along the continuum toward fresher, more vital, and perhaps more beautiful expressions of our human condition.

Part three is on the spirituality of writing. Here I do not focus on the spiritual content of what we write so much as on our spirituality as writers. What affect does the act of writing have on my life in God?

While this book is about writing better and not about publishing or how to get published, in the appendixes I try to pull back the curtain of mystery a bit from this often unseen world. How do you find an agent? What is involved in promotion? How does coauthoring work? What about the self-publishing option? And is there any way to make sense of copyright? Also at the back are listed further online resources (found at ivpress.com/write-better), including questions and exercises for students.

I like order, so I would tend to read a book like this straight through. But you can skip around if you wish, going from one chapter to another as your needs or interests lead you.

Photo credit: Pixabay extremis