Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in On Writing Well, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
The Human Element
Simplicity vs. Clutter
Process and Organization
The Gift of Writing
Summary
Analysis
Places are the second most important subject in nonfiction, after people. But most writing about them is terrible. Travelers tend to be overly enthusiastic about their travels, and they often imagine that their experience is unique and original, when it isn’t. Travel writers often give readers excessive, unnecessary detail. They also frequently use a tired style full of gaudy adjectives (like “dappled”), clichés (like “old meets new”), and altogether meaningless words (like “charm”). Zinsser offers two rules for effective travel writing: “choose your words with unusual care” and “be intensely selective” about which material to include.
Since people and places are the building blocks of all good nonfiction, the lessons in this chapter really apply to setting the scene in any kind of writing. Similarly, Zinsser’s basic lessons for travel writers are really based on his fundamental advice for everyone else: think small, avoid “journalese,” and empathize with the reader’s perspective when revising. Travel writers try to pass their enthusiasm on to the reader, but they tend to overlook the composition of their work as a whole.
Themes
Zinsser gives several examples of effective travel writing. In a passage about driving out to a San Bernardino crime scene, Joan Didion carefully chooses details that evoke Southern California’s tacky landscape and superficial culture. John McPhee describes the intolerable wind in cramped Juneau, Alaska in order to explain why some officials want to move the state capital elsewhere; he contrasts Juneau with Anchorage, which he compares to any ordinary American city. His descriptions are successful because he identifies the key idea associated with each place.
Didion and McPhee’s work shows that effective travel writing communicates a single, compelling idea about a place. By citing them, Zinsser indirectly returns to one of the key points from his chapter on unity: successful writing leaves the reader with a single “provocative thought.” While amateur travel writers try to say everything they know about a place, the best travel writers carefully make a single, narrow, memorable argument about a place.
Themes
Similarly, Jonathan Raban compares the Mississippi River that runs through Minnesota’s perfect square farms to nature sending the land’s pious Lutherans a message about sin and rebellion. Zinsser adds three more examples of writers who successfully identify three places’ distinctive traits: Jack Agueros describes diverse East Harlem, Prudence Mackintosh describes the Southern traditions in her small Texas town, and Tom Wolfe describes the perfectly flat seasonal lake beds that made the Mojave Desert the perfect place for a military base. Zinsser encourages his readers to practice writing about places this way. They don’t have to go far away—they should simply go somewhere and figure out what’s unique about it.
Usually, good travel writing isn’t really about traveling: it’s about places. Like Didion and McPhee, these four writers condense their experience of a place down to a specific, digestible idea. Most importantly, this central idea always connects the place to the people who live there. This shows that people and places are always connected. This is clearest in Agueros and Mackintosh’s writing, which is really about the people who make a place what it is. Meanwhile, Raban and Wolfe use landscapes as metaphors for people and their lives.
Themes
Often, the human element is what makes places interesting. For instance, V.S. Pritchett describes Istanbul’s mix of bustle and glory by analyzing the way Turkish men sit. Many notable travel articles focus on what the writer learns about themselves while traveling, and describing people’s activity is an excellent way to make a place seem alive. Zinsser excerpts James Baldwin’s description of preaching in a Harlem church in The Fire Next Time, which focuses on the congregants’ motion and excitement.
Zinsser reaffirms that the human element is usually the most compelling part of any story. People bring a place to life—their stories are also a place’s story. The writer’s own story can also be interesting, but only if it’s about personal transformation (and not just the excitement of visiting a new place). Of course, this is part of why Zinsser thinks writing is such an enriching and exciting career: it means exposing oneself to interesting places and stories for a living.
Themes
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Zinsser says that it’s still possible to find fresh thoughts about much-visited places. To prove this, he wrote a book about 15 of the U.S.’s most popular and important tourist destinations. At each site, he asked people why they thought so many people visited it, in a quest to understand each place’s story. He excerpts the remarkable stories he heard from custodians at Mount Rushmore, Kitty Hawk, and Yellowstone National Park. There’s a beautiful story behind every place, Zinsser concludes, but it’s better to let people who are connected to that place tell it, rather than trying to take it over.
Zinsser sticks to his tried-and-true method for finding the human element behind any story: asking the people who know the story best. As in his other work, he cuts out anything that distracts from his single main idea about every place. As a writer, his role is simply to help the reader understand the compelling story he’s found—and not to get in the way or turn himself into the story.
Themes
