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
Many people regret not learning more from their parents and grandparents. But through writing, people can create a record of their family lives for the sake of future generations. Zinsser explains that this can take the form of a formal memoir, an informal family history, or even oral storytelling. All are ways to preserve people’s memories before they die.
Family memoir shows how writing is a powerful tool for connecting families across generations. It can preserve the voices of the deceased for their descendants, whether or not they exist yet and whether or not they recognize the value of the gift they’re receiving.
Themes
Zinsser remembers his father scribbling out his memoirs on a legal pad, then printing them and distributing them to his family. Even though he never revised or cared about his writing style, this is a valid approach to family history—in fact, it allowed his distinctive voice to stand out even more.
Family history is the only genre in which most of the ordinary rules of good writing—revision, clarity, limited scope, and so on—don’t fully apply. In family history, personality is much more important than clarity. Good family history is anything that accurately depicts the writer and their relationships.
Themes
Zinsser uses his father’s experience to address some important questions about writing family memoirs. Memoirists sometimes wonder if they should write in their present-day voice or the voice they would have used in the past. Zinsser says that both these approaches can work, as long as the writer commits to one of them. He argues that memoirists should also record as much information as possible, including details that seem irrelevant but might be important to their descendants.
Throughout his book, Zinsser recommends adding a personal touch to make stories more relatable, so it’s no surprise that he uses his own father’s memoirs as a model. Meanwhile, while many of Zinsser’s basic rules for nonfiction don’t apply to memoirs, many also do. Unity is essential, and writers should always over-research (or amass more information than they could possibly end up using).
Themes
Next, many family memoirists worry about hurting other people’s feelings. Zinsser suggests writing everything down first and sorting through it later. It’s usually courteous to show people any sections written about them before publication, but ultimately, the memoirist gets to make the final decision about what to include. In the 1990s, many memoirists started using their books as an excuse to wallow in self-pity and whine about other people—Zinsser cautions against doing this, since these books weren’t interesting and caused plenty of problems for their writers. Plenty of successful memoirists write about their difficult childhoods and resentment, but they focus on healing and growth, not settling scores and portraying themselves as victims. In fact, the very act of writing a memoir can be a way for people to heal.
Like all writers, memoirists have an ethical responsibility towards the people their work will affect. But they also have the sole right to decide what and whether to publish. Still, writers should avoid starting feuds in their memoirs, which may outlive them. Beyond causing ill will, people hurt their own reputations when they immortalize their petty resentments in their memoirs. In contrast, he shows that writing memoirs can actually help people solve these problems, if they’re willing to do enough serious self-reflection during the process. After all, memoirs aren’t just records of people’s lives: they’re also records of how people thought about their lives in retrospect. A memoirist’s attitude towards their past conflicts, problems, and traumas speaks volumes about how they developed over the course of their life.
Themes
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The hardest and most stressful part about writing a memoir is organizing it. Zinsser recommends first cutting down the scope—there’s no need to mention everyone in the family or cover an entire lifetime. For instance, one of Zinsser’s students was planning on interviewing all of her siblings for her memoir, but Zinsser advised her to skip the interviews and focus on telling her story. Another student gave herself the impossible task of visiting her father’s native village in Poland and reconstructing his experience during the Holocaust. Instead, Zinsser advised her to write about her own quest to understand her heritage, and the book ended up being far more powerful.
Family historians have a legitimate reason to include as much detail as they possibly can—to leave a record for their descendants. But Zinsser still recommends that they “think small,” in order to give themselves manageable projects. In contrast, memoirists absolutely have to “think small” in order to tell a compelling story. When they include too many voices in a book, writers lose track of their own distinctive voices. Both of Zinsser’s students set themselves impossible research tasks that wouldn’t have yielded a single, robust story. But their quests for knowledge about the past turn out to be just as compelling as the past itself.
Themes
Memoirists should start with specific, vivid memories, because the fact that they remember them means they’re probably significant. For instance, Zinsser wrote a New York Times article about a mechanical baseball game he played with his childhood friends. Then, an executive at the company that made the game contacted Zinsser and invited him to play on one of the last existing machines. While this story is incredibly specific, it’s powerful because it represents a universal truth: “everyone had a favorite toy or game or doll.”
Memoirists best connect with their readers when they present their own lives as unique takes on universal experiences. Narrow details and specific anecdotes are more vivid, memorable, and relatable than blanket statements about the past. Zinsser’s story is compelling because of his emotional attachment to the mechanical baseball game and delight at rediscovering it.
Themes
Similarly, in Writing About Your Life, his memoir and guide to memoir writing, Zinsser decided not to tell the full story of his service in World War II. Instead, he wrote about one significant moment from the war: traveling across North Africa in a boxcar. The most important stories aren’t about what someone did, but about how a situation made them who they are. One great way to start writing a memoir is to sit down for a few minutes every day and write about a different important event from the past. After a few months, a memoirist can lay out all their material and arrange it into an overall story.
Even though the war was clearly a transformative experience in Zinsser’s life, he would probably lose his readers if he tried to explain every single way that it changed him. Instead, it’s more powerful and memorable for him to condense his experience into a single episode. The boxcar trip represents the most important way he changed during the war: it brought him out of his sheltered upbringing, showed him the world, and inspired the lifelong love for adventure that he got to fulfill by writing. Finally, his recommendation to memoirists shows how over-researching and “thinking small” can actually work together to help produce great writing. It's also an illustration of how writers can find their voice authentically, by writing what they care about and finding the common threads within it.
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