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
Writers know more about themselves than any other subject, but they also generally avoid writing about themselves. Students think they have to write what their teachers want, and professional writers think they have to write what their editors want. But writing memoirs is liberating. When Zinsser convinced one of his journalist friends to try his hand at memoir, the man dug into his family history and reevaluated his own life. Zinsser argues that more writers ought to write about themselves, for themselves, so long as they don’t go overboard and become too egotistical. Like all writers, memoirists have to be sure that they only include useful details that push the narrative forward.
Zinsser points out that most people dislike writing because they’ve never been able to do it of their own will—they’ve only ever been forced into it. But by writing memoirs, people can develop a new relationship to writing: they can make it relevant to their lives or even learn to love it. They can also learn more about themselves and discover their authentic voices. Therefore, memoir helps writers establish the psychological and emotional connection that Zinsser sees as essential to good writing.
Themes
Zinsser says that he loves reading memoirs. Whereas autobiographies often try to cover too much ground, memoirs are powerful because they give a narrow window into a writer’s life. Good memoirists know how to give shape to their lives, and specific details are a must. For instance, Eudora Welty starts her memoir One Writer’s Beginnings by describing her childhood home’s various clocks and her father’s precise sense of time and weather. In A Walker in the City, Alfred Kazin recounts observing the Sabbath with his family in Brooklyn through his sense of smell. In fact, Kazin is largely responsible for popularizing the personal memoir as a literary genre.
The differences between memoir and autobiography are clarity and structure: memoirs have a unified narrative arc, while autobiographies are scattered and unclear. They’re also precise about the details they choose to include. Of course, for Zinsser, these are the key differences between good and bad writing in general. Like interviews and travel writing, then, memoir ultimately boils down to the key principles that Zinsser covered in the first two parts of his book. Welty and Kazin’s memoirs are effective because they convey the writers’ personalities through coherent ideas about their childhoods.
Themes
Like numerous other American writers, Kazin also used memoir to explore his unique identity as a minority and immigrant. Similarly, Enrique Hank Lopez writes about his relationship with Mexican identity after immigrating to the U.S. in “Back to Bachimba.” In her memoir The Woman Warrior, Chinese American writer Maxine Hong Kingston writes about her intense fear of speaking English in elementary school. Memoir can help the American public understand cultural differences, too. For instance, in “For My Indian Daughter,” Lewis P. Johnson discusses how he confronted and overcame his feeling of estrangement from his Native American ancestors.
Zinsser shows why diverse books matter. Kazin, Lopez, Hong Kingston, and Johnson’s struggles with identity all provide a model for readers and communities to make sense of their own identities. Thus, memoirs can help both individual writers and the American public grapple with questions of identity and belonging. They give minority communities role models and proof that they belong in the nation, while giving the majority community a window into minority groups’ experiences. But they still have to start from individual experience, rather than trying to speak for an entire group.
Themes
Colorful characters are the key to good memoirs. For instance, in Clinging to the Wreckage, John Mortimer remembers how his blind father kept up his legal practice by asking his wife to read him salacious divorce cases out loud on the public train. But of course, memoirists have to be their own most interesting characters. In turn, memoirs can help others understand and accept themselves. For instance, Kenney Fraser writes about reading Virginia Woolf’s memoirs, journals, and letters to help deal with her own struggles as a middle-aged woman. Zinsser concludes that memoir lets authors turn their own lives into a gift for others.
In memoirs, as in any other genre of writing, compelling characters—like Mortimer’s parents and Virginia Woolf—are the key to telling a convincing story. But because they’re so personal, memoirs can depict these characters better than any other form of writing besides fiction. Zinsser even portrays memoir as a kind of public service: it’s a way for authors to identify the key lessons that they’ve learned and pass them on to their readers.
Themes
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