On Writing Well is a book about how to write, but it’s also a book about how to become a writer and what writing can do in the world. William Zinsser doesn’t just tell his readers how to put words on a page—he also tells them why it matters when they do so. He loves writing because it allows him to pursue his curiosity and share his discoveries with other people. But good writing also has important real-world effects, beyond just entertaining people: it can bring down governments, launch careers, reconnect families, and much more. Thus, Zinsser views writing as more than an enjoyable job—it’s also an important tool for understanding the world and even a form of public service. He argues that good writing is a valuable gift to the world because it enriches the writer’s life, the reader’s life, and society at large.
For Zinsser, writing is one of the greatest things anyone can do for themselves. As a career choice, he thinks it’s liberating and life-affirming. Successful writers get to follow their interests and passions full-time—and those who do manage to follow their interests, Zinsser points out, tend to be the most successful ones. In Zinsser’s words, “no subject is too specialized or too quirky if you make an honest connection with it when you write about it.” Some writers get to focus their entire careers on niche subjects like gardening, knitting, or scuba diving. Others, like Zinsser, are generalists and get to pursue a wide range of interests about a wide range of subjects. In both cases, writers are free to learn about—and teach their readers—whatever they want. But Zinsser also thinks that writing benefits people even if they don’t do it full-time. In his chapter on memoir and family history, he notes that many people have written memoirs in order to understand their heritage, overcome childhood trauma, or define their own legacy. In all these cases, writing helps people fulfill important personal goals and develop emotionally because it gives them a reason to reflect on their lives.
Next, Zinsser also sees writing as a gift to the reader. Most fundamentally, the best writers take their readers on exciting quests and enrich their day-to-day lives, which is why writing can inspire so many people. Of course, Zinsser is one of them—throughout the book, he cites the numerous writers who have inspired and entertained him, ranging from Red Smith and S.J. Perelman to Joan Didion and E.B. White. In his chapters on form, Zinsser also points out how writing helps readers navigate the world. He takes writers’ obligation to inform their readers just as seriously as their obligation to entertain them. The daily news is an obvious example, but entertainment criticism also helps readers evaluate new works of art, sports writing helps them understand the limits of the human body, and science writing helps them understand the implications of complex new discoveries that they wouldn’t understand otherwise. Finally, memoirs give their readers an even more profound gift: a record of someone’s knowledge, experience, and voice that continues on after their death. For families, this can be invaluable. Zinsser writes about how grateful he is for his father’s memoir, which preserved details of his parents’ and grandparents’ lives forever. Through memoirs, the departed can gift their memories to the living.
Finally, Zinsser argues that writing plays an essential role in a functioning society—which also means that writers have an important responsibility to the public. Zinsser views writers as guardians of the truth who are responsible for identifying and recording what a culture does, thinks, and values. For instance, he repeatedly says that “writers are the custodians of memory,” because they pass on a record of a society’s past. While this responsibility once fell on novelists, after World War II, nonfiction writers took it over. American cultural life started to center on magazines like Life and Harper’s and books like Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood and Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. These nonfiction writers articulated and influenced the national culture, just like writers have done throughout history.
Finally, Zinsser also thinks that writers have an obligation to speak truth to power. He points out that humor can be an especially powerful channel for political and social criticism: by exaggerating “some crazy truth” to the point that people see its craziness, satirical works like the novel Catch-22 make unforgettable political arguments. But writers could never make those same arguments in a column or essay—they probably wouldn’t get published, and even if they did, they wouldn’t get taken seriously as they do when they write humor. (Zinsser used the same strategy to critique more innocuous cultural trends, too, like the popularity of hair curlers in the 1960s.) Thus, writers’ work isn’t just an important part of social and cultural history—it can also change the course of that history.
Zinsser clearly thinks that writing—especially good writing—can do a lot to better the world. But writers also have responsibilities proportional to their power. Most importantly, they have to tell the truth, because otherwise they violate the public’s trust. This sense of trust and honor helps explain Zinsser’s lofty sense of purpose as a writer. At the end of the book, he admits that he frequently argues with editors in order to defend the integrity of his work. Given his view of his profession as a form of public service, this makes sense: honesty and integrity are the writer’s highest values, because the best writers devote themselves to speaking the truth and bettering humanity.
Related Themes from Other Texts
The Gift of Writing ThemeTracker
The Gift of Writing Quotes in On Writing Well
One of the pictures hanging in my office in mid-Manhattan is a photograph of the writer E. B. White. It was taken by Jill Krementz when White was 77 years old, at his home in North Brooklin, Maine. A white-haired man is sitting on a plain wooden bench at a plain wooden table—three boards nailed to four legs—in a small boathouse. The window is open to a view across the water. White is typing on a manual typewriter, and the only other objects are an ashtray and a nail keg. The keg, I don’t have to be told, is his wastebasket.
Clutter is the disease of American writing. We are a society strangling in unnecessary words, circular constructions, pompous frills and meaningless jargon.
[…] “Who am I writing for?”
It’s a fundamental question, and it has a fundamental answer: You are writing for yourself. Don’t try to visualize the great mass audience. There is no such audience—every reader is a different person. Don’t try to guess what sort of thing editors want to publish or what you think the country is in a mood to read. Editors and readers don’t know what they want to read until they read it. Besides, they’re always looking for something new.
You learn to write by writing. It’s a truism, but what makes it a truism is that it’s true. The only way to learn to write is to force yourself to produce a certain number of words on a regular basis.
Rewriting is the essence of writing well: it’s where the game is won or lost.
What’s wrong, I believe, is to fabricate quotes or to surmise what someone might have said. Writing is a public trust. The nonfiction writer’s rare privilege is to have the whole wonderful world of real people to write about. When you get people talking, handle what they say as you would handle a valuable gift.
Any organization that won’t take the trouble to be both clear and personal in its writing will lose friends, customers and money. Let me put it another way for business executives: a shortfall will be experienced in anticipated profitability.
Something in Updike made contact with something in Williams: two solitary craftsmen laboring in the glare of the crowd. Look for this human bond. Remember that athletes are men and women who become part of our lives during the season, acting out our dreams or filling some other need for us, and we want that bond to be honored. Hold the hype and give us heroes who are believable.
Criticism is a serious intellectual act. It tries to evaluate serious works of art and to place them in the context of what has been done before in that medium or by that artist.
Humor is the secret weapon of the nonfiction writer. It’s secret because so few writers realize that humor is often their best tool—and sometimes their only tool—for making an important point.
“The reader has to feel that the writer is feeling good. […] Even if he isn’t.”
Living is the trick. Writers who write interestingly tend to be men and women who keep themselves interested. That’s almost the whole point of becoming a writer. I’ve used writing to give myself an interesting life and a continuing education. If you write about subjects you think you would enjoy knowing about, your enjoyment will show in what you write. Learning is a tonic.
If you master the tools of the trade—the fundamentals of interviewing and of orderly construction—and if you bring to the assignment your general intelligence and your humanity, you can write about any subject. That’s your ticket to an interesting life.
This fixation on the finished article causes writers a lot of trouble, deflecting them from all the earlier decisions that have to be made to determine its shape and voice and content. It’s a very American kind of trouble. We are a culture that worships the winning result: the league championship, the high test score. Coaches are paid to win, teachers are valued for getting students into the best colleges. Less glamorous gains made along the way—learning, wisdom, growth, confidence, dealing with failure—aren’t given the same respect because they can’t be given a grade.
Getting on the plane has taken me to unusual stories all over the world and all over America, and it still does. That isn’t to say I’m not nervous when I leave for the airport; I always am—that’s part of the deal. (A little nervousness gives writing an edge.) But I’m always replenished when I get back home.
As a nonfiction writer you must get on the plane. If a subject interests you, go after it, even if it’s in the next county or the next state or the next country. It’s not going to come looking for you.
Decide what you want to do. Then decide to do it. Then do it.
I’ve always felt that my “style”—the careful projection onto paper of who I think I am—is my main marketable asset, the one 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 I’m the only writer they know who cares what happens to his piece after he gets paid for it.
My favorite definition of a careful writer comes from Joe DiMaggio, though he didn’t know that’s 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.”
