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 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.”
Which brings us to editors. Are they friends or enemies - god who saves us from our sins or bums who trample on our poetic souls? Like the rest of creation, they come in all varieties. I think with gratitude of a half-dozen editors who sharpened my writing by changing its focus or emphasis, or questioning its tone, or detecting weaknesses of logic or structure, or suggesting a different lead, or letting me talk a problem through with them when I couldn’t decide between several routes, or cutting various forms of excess. Twice I threw out an entire chapter of a book because editors told me it was unnecessary. But above all I remember those good editors for their generosity. They had an enthusiasm for whatever project we were trying to bring off together as writer and editor. Their confidence that I could make it work kept me going.
What a good editor brings to a piece of writing is an objective eye that the writer has long since lost, and there is no end of ways in which an editor can improve a manuscript: pruning, shaping, clarifying, tidying a hundred inconsistencies of tense and pronoun and location and tone, noticing all the sentences that could be read in two different ways, dividing awkward long sentences into short ones, putting the writer back on the main road if he has strayed down a side path, building bridges where the writer has lost the reader by not paying attention to his transitions, questioning matters of judgment and taste. An editor’s hand must also be invisible. Whatever he adds in his own words shouldn’t sound like his own words; they should sound like the writer’s words.
Besides wanting to write as well as possible, I wanted to write as entertaining as possible. To succeed you must make your piece jump out of a newspaper or a magazine by being more diverting than everyone else’s piece. You must find some way to elevate your act of writing into an entertainment. Usually this means giving the reader an enjoyable surprise. Any number of devices will do the job: humor, anecdote, paradox, an unexpected quotation, a powerful act, an outlandish detail, a circuitous approach, an elegant arrangement of words. These seeming amusements in fact become your “style.” When we say we like the style of certain writers, what we mean is that we like their personality as they express it on paper. Given a choice between two traveling companions - and a writer is someone who asks us to travel with him - we usually choose the one who think will make an effort to brighten the trip.
If you would like to write better than everybody else, you have to want to write better than everybody else. You must take an obsessive pride in the smallest details of your craft. And you must be willing to defend what you’ve written against the various middlemen - editors, agents and publishers - whose sights may be different from yours, whose standards not as high. Too many writers are browbeaten into settling for less that their best.
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.
I mention this to give confidence to all nonfiction writers: a point of craft. 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 you humanity, you can write about any subject. That’s your ticket to an interesting life.
Still, it’s hard not to be intimidated by the expertise of the expert. You think, “This man knows so much about his field, I’m too dumb to interview him. He’ll think I’m stupid.” The reason he knows so much about his field is because it’s his field; you’re a generalist trying to make his work accessible to the public. That means prodding him to clarify statements that are so obvious to him that he assumes they are obvious to everyone else. Trust your common sense to figure out what you need to know, and don’t be afraid to ask dumb question.
Living is the trick. Writers who write interestingly tend to be men and women who keep themselves interested. That’s 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.
One of them asked him, “What does it take to be a comic writer?” He said, “It takes audacity and exuberance and gaiety, and the most important one is audacity.” Then he said: “The reader has to feel that the writer is feeling good.” The sentence went off in my head like a Roman candle: it stated the entire case for enjoyment. Then he added: “Even if he isn’t.” That sentence hit me almost as hard, because I knew that Perelman’s life contained more than the usual share of depression and travail. Yet he went to his typewriter every day and made the English language dance. How could he not be feeling good? He cranked it up.
Writers have to jump-start themselves at the moment of performance, no less than actors and dancers and painters and musicians. There are some writers who sweep us along so strongly in the current of their energy that we assume that when they go to work the words just flow. Nobody thinks of the effort they made every morning to turn on the switch.
You also have to turn on the switch. Nobody is going to do it for you.
Control is vital to humor. Don’t try to use comical names like Throttlebottom. Don’t make the same kind of joke two or three times - readers will enjoy themselves more if you make it only once. Trust the sophistication of readers who do know what you’re doing, and don’t try to worry about the rest.
Criticism is a serious intellectual act. It tries to evaluate serious work of art and to place them in the context of what has been done before in that medium or by that artist. This doesn’t mean that critics must limit themselves to work that aim high; they may select some commercial product like Law & Order to make a point about American society and values. But on the whole they don’t want to waste their time on peddlers. They see themselves as scholars, and what interests them is the play of ideas in their field.
She ran the gamut of emotions from A to B.
The ego of the modern athlete has in turn rubbed off on the modern sportswriter. I’m struck by how many sportswriters now think they are the story, their thoughts more interesting than the game they were sent to cover. I miss the days when reporters had the modesty to come right out and say who won. Today that news can be a long time in arriving. Half the sportswriters think they are Guy de Maupassant, masters of the exquisitely delayed lead. The rest think they are Sigmund Freud, privy to the athlete’s psychic needs and wounded sensibilities.
I recited my four articles of faith: clarity, simplicity, brevity and humanity. I explained about using active verbs and avoiding “concept nouns.” I told them not to use the special vocabulary of education as a crutch; almost any subject can be made accessible in good English.
Writing is not a special language owned by the English teacher. Writing is thinking on paper. Anyone who thinks clearly can write clearly, about anything at all. Science, demystified, is just another nonfiction subject. Writing, demystified, is just another way for scientists to transmit what they know.
A tenet of journalism is that “the reader knows nothing.”
Nobody turns so quickly into a bore as a traveler home from his travels. He enjoyed his trip so much that he wants to tell us all about it - and “all” is what we don’t want to hear. We only want to hear some. What made his trip different from everybody else’s? What can he tell us that we don’t already know? We don’t want him to describe every ride at Disneyland, or tell us that the Grand Canyon is awesome, or that Venice has canals. If one of the rides at Disneyland got stuck, if somebody fell into the awesome Grand Canyon, that would be worth hearing about.
It’s natural for all of us when we have gone to a certain place to feel that we are the first people who ever went there or thought such sensitive thoughts about it. Fair enough: it’s what keeps us going and validates our experience. Who can visit Egypt and not be moved by the size and antiquity of the pyramids? But that ground is already covered by multitude of people. As a writer you must keep a tight reign on your subjective self - the traveler touched by new sights and sounds and smells - and keep an objective eye on the reader. The article that records everything you did on your trip will fascinate you because it was your trip. Will it fascinate the reader? It won’t. The detail must be significant.
Travels is also a style of soft words that under hard examination mean nothing, or that mean different things to different people: “attractive,” “charming,” “romantic.” To write that “the city has its own attractiveness” is no help. And who will define “charm,” except the owner of a charm school? Or “romantic”? These are subjective concepts in the eye of the beholder. One man’s romantic sunrise is another man’s hangover.
Many beginning interviewers are inhibited by the fear that they are imposing on other people and have no right to invade their privacy. This fear is almost wholly unfounded. The so-called man in the street is delighted that somebody wants to interview him. Most men and women lead lives, if not of quiet desperation, at least of desperate quietness, and they jump at a chance to talk about their work to an outsider who seems eager to listen.
Get people talking. Learn to ask questions that elicit answers about what is most interesting or vivid in their lives. Nothing so animates writing as someone telling what he thinks or what he does - in his own words.
His own words will always be better than your words, even if you are the most elegant stylish in the land. They carry the inflection of his speaking voice and the idiosyncrasies of how he puts a sentence together. They contain the regionalisms of his conversation and the lingo of his trade. They convey their enthusiasms. This is a person talking to the reader directly, not through the filter of a writer. As soon as a writer steps in, everyone else’s experience becomes secondhand.
Readers can do their own marveling. They will also enjoy being allowed to think for themselves. The readers plays a major role in the act of writing and must be given room to play it. Don’t annoy your readers by over-explaining - by telling them something they already know or can figure out. Try not to use words like “surprisingly,” “predictably” and “of course,” which put a value on a fact before the reader encounters the fact. Trust your material.
The longer I work at the craft of writing, the more I realize that there’s nothing more interesting than the truth. What people do - and what people say - continues to take me by surprise with its wonderfulness, or its quirkiness, or its drama, or its humor, or its pain. Who could invent all the astonishing things that really happen? I increasingly find myself saying to writers and students, “Trust your material.” It seems to be hard advice to follow.
Rewriting is the essence of writing well: it’s where the game is won or lost. That idea is hard to accept. We all have an emotional equity in our first draft; we can’t believe that it wasn’t born perfect. But the odds are close to 100 percent that it wasn’t. Most writers don’t initially say what they want to say, or say it as well as they could. The newly hatched sentence almost always has something wrong with it. It’s not clear. It’s not logical. It’s verbose. It’s klunky. It’s pretentious. It’s boring. It’s full of clutter. It’s full of cliches. It lacks rhythm. It can be read in several different ways. It doesn’t lead out of the previous sentence. It doesn’t… The point is that clear writing is the result of a lot of tinkering.
Many people assume that professional writers don’t need to rewrite; the words just fall into place. On the contrary, careful writers can’t stop fiddling. I’ve never thought of rewriting as an unfair burden; I’m grateful for every chance to keep improving my work. Writing is a good watch - it should run smoothly and have no extra parts. Students don’t share my love for rewriting. They think of it as a punishment: extra homework or extra infield practice. Please - if you’re such a student - think of it as a gift. You won’t write well until you understand that writing is an evolving process, not a finished product. Nobody expects you to get it right the first time, or even the second time.
What do I mean by “rewriting”? I don’t mean writing one draft and then writing a different second version, and then a third. Most rewriting consists of reshaping and tightening and refining the raw material you wrote on your first try. Much of it consists of making sure you’ve given the reader a narrative flow he can follow with no trouble from beginning to end. Keep putting yourself in the reader’s place. Is there something he should have been told early in the sentence that you put near the end? Does he now when he starts sentence B that you’ve made a shift - of subject, tense, tone, emphasis - from sentence A?
Credibility is just as fragile for a writer as for a President. Don’t inflate an incident to make it more outlandish than it actually was. If the reader catches you in just one bogus statement that you are trying to pass off as true, everything you write thereafter will be suspect. It’s too great a risk, and not work taking.
Your subconscious mind does more writing than you think. Often you’ll spend a whole day trying to fight your way out of some verbal thicket in which you seem to be tangled beyond salvation. Frequently a solution will occur to you the next morning when you plunge back in. While you slept, your writer’s mind didn’t. A writer is always working. Stay alert to the currents around you. Much of what you see and hear will come back, having percolated for days or months or even years through your subconscious mind, just when your conscious mind, laboring to write, needs it.
Surprisingly often a difficult problem in a sentence can be solved by simply getting rid of it. Unfortunately, this solution is usually the last one that occurs to writers in a jam. First they will put the troublesome phrase through all kinds of exertions - moving nit to some other part of the sentence, trying to rephrase it, adding new words to clarify the thought or to oil whatever that stuck. These efforts only make the situation worse, and the writer is left to conclude that there is no solution to the problem - not a comforting thought. When you find yourself at such impasse, look at the troublesome element and ask, “Do I need it at all?” Probably you don’t. It was trying to do an unnecessary job all along - that’s why it was giving you so much grief. Remove it and watch the afflicted sentence spring to life and breathe normally. It’s the quickest cure and often the best.
Keep your paragraphs short. Writing is visual - it catches the eye before it has a chance to catch the brain. Short paragraphs put air around what you write and make it look inviting, whereas a long chunk of type can discourage a reader from even starting to read.
Never say anything in writing that you wouldn’t comfortably say in conversation. If you’re not a person who says “indeed” or “moreover,” or who calls someone an individual (“he’s a fine individual”), please don’t write it.
Style is tied tot he psyche, and writing has deep psychological roots. The reason we express ourselves as we do, or fail to express ourselves because of “writer’s block,” are partly buried in the subconscious mind. There are as many kinds of writer’s blocks as there are kinds of writers, and I have no intention of trying to untangle them. This is a short book, and my name isn’t Sigmund Freud.
Leaders who bob and weave like aging boxers don’t inspire confidence - or deserve it. The same thing is true of writers. Sell yourself, and your subject will exert its own appeal. Believe in your own identity and your own opinions. Writing is an act of ego, and you might as well admit it. Use its energy to keep yourself going.
You think your article must be of a certain length or it won’t seem important. You think how august it will look in print. You think of all the people who will read it. You think that it must have the solid weight of authority. You think that its style must dazzle. No wonder you tighten; you are so busy thinking of your awesome responsibility to the finished article that you can’t even start. Yet you vow to be worthy of the task, and, casting about for grand phrases that wouldn’t occur to you if you weren’t trying to hard too make an impression, you plunge in.
Writers are obviously at the most natural when they write in the first person. Writing is an intimate transaction between two people, conducted on paper, and it will go well to the extent that it retains its humanity. Therefore I urge people to write in the first person: to use “I” and “me” and “we” and “us.”
Nevertheless, getting writers to use “I” is seldom easy. They think they must earn the right to reveal their emotions or their thoughts. Or that it’s egotistical. Or that it’s undignified - a fear that afflicts the academic world. Hence the professional use of “one” (“One finds oneself not wholly in accord with Dr. Maltby’s view of the human condition”), or of the impersonal “it is” (“It is to be hoped that Professor Felt’s monograph will find the wider audience it most assuredly deserves”). I don’t want to meet “one” - he’s a boring guy. I want a professor with a passion for his subject to tell me why it fascinates him.
Few people realize how badly they write. Nobody has shown them how much excess or murkiness has crept into their style and how it obstructs what they are trying to say. If you give me an eight-page article and I tell you to cut it to four pages, you’ll howl and say it can’t be done. Then you’ll go home and do it, and it will be much better. After that comes the hard part: cutting it to three.
The point is that you have to strip your writing down before you can build it back up. You must know what the essential tools are and what job they were designed to do. Extending the metaphor of carpentry, it’s first necessary to be able to saw wood neatly and to drive nails. Later you can bevel the edges or add elegant finials, if that’s your taste. But you can never forget that you are practicing a craft that’s based on certain principles. If the nails are weak, your house will collapse. If your verbs are weak and your syntax is rickety, your sentences will fall apart.
But you will be impatient to find a “style” - to embellish the plain words so that readers will recognize you as someone special. You will reach for gaudy similes and tinseled adjectives, as if “style” were something you could buy at the style store and drape onto your words in bright decorator colors. There is no style store, style is organic to the person doing the writing, as much a part of him as his hair, or, if he is bald, his lack of it.
This is the problem of writers who set out deliberately to garnish their prose. You lose whatever it is that makes you unique. The reader will notice if you are putting on airs. Readers want the person who is talking to them to sound genuine. Therefore a fundamental rule is: be yourself.
No rule, however, is harder to follow. It requires writers to do two things that by the metabolism are impossible. They must relax, and the must have confidence.
Telling a writer to relax is like telling a man to relax while being examined for a hernia, and as for confidence, see how stiffly he sits, glaring at the screen that awaits his words. See how often he gets up to look for something to eat or drink. A writer will do anything to avoid the act of writing. I can testify from my newspaper days that the number of trips to the water cooler per reporter-hour far exceeds the body’s need for fluids.
What can be done to put the writer out of these miseries? Unfortunately, no cure has been found. I can only offer the consoling thought that you are not alone. Some days will go better than others. Some will go so badly that you’ll despair of ever writing again. We have all had many of those days and will have many more.
Verbal camouflage reached new heights during General Alexander Haig’s tenure as President Reagan’s secretary of state. Before Haig nobody had thought of saying “at this juncture of maturization” to mean “now.” He told the American people that terrorism could be fought with “meaningful sanctionary teeth” and that intermediate nuclear missiles were “at the vortex of cruciality.” As for any worries that the public might habor, his message was “leave it to Al,” though what he actually said was: “We must push this to a lower decibel of public fixation. I don’t think there’s much of a learning curve to be achieved in this area of content.”
Just as insidious are all the word clusters with which we explain how we propose to go about our explaining. “I might add,” “It should be pointed out,” “It is interesting to note.” If you might add, add it. If it should be pointed out, point it out. If it is interesting to note, make it interesting; we are not all stupefied by what follows when someone says, “This will interest you”? Don’t inflate what needs no inflating: “with the possible exception of” (except), “due to the fact that” (because), “he totally lacked the ability to” (he couldn’t), “until such time as” (until), “for the purpose of” (for).
You can develop the same eye. Look for the clutter in your writing and prune it ruthlessly. Be grateful for everything you can throw away. Reexamine each sentence you put on paper. Is every word doing new work? Can any thought be expressed with more economy? Is anything pompous or pretentious or faddish? Are you hanging on to something useless because you think it’s beautiful?
Simplify, simplify.
How can the rest of us achieve such enviable freedom from clutter? The answer is to clear our heads of clutter. Clear thinking becomes clear writing; one can’t exist without the other. it’s impossible for a muddy thinker to write good English. He may get away with it for a paragraph or two, but soon the reader will be lost, and there’s no sin so grave, for the reader will not easily be lured back.
Who is this elusive creature, the reader? The reader is someone with an attention span of about 30 seconds - a person assailed by many forces competing for attention. At one time those forces were relatively few: newspaper, magazines, radio, spouse, children, pets. Today they also include a galaxy of electronic devices for receiving entertainment and information as well as a fitness program, a pool, a lawn and that most potent of competitors, sleep. The man or woman snoozing in a chair with a magazine or a book is a person who was being given too much unnecessary trouble by the writer.
It won’t do it to say that the reader is too dumb or too lazy to keep pace with the train of thoughts. If the reader is lost, it’s usually because the writer hasn’t been careful enough. That carelessness can take any number of forms. Perhaps a sentence is so excessively cluttered that the reader, hacking through the verbiage, simply doesn’t know what it means. Perhaps a sentence has been so shoddily constructed that the reader could read it in several ways. Perhaps the writer has switched pronouns in midsentence, or has switched tenses, so the reader loses track of thow is talking or when the action took place. Perhaps Sentence B is not a logical sequel to Sentence A; the writer, in whose head the connection is clear, hasn’t bothered to provide the missing link. Perhaps the writer has used a word incorrectly by not taking the trouble to look it up.
Faced with such obstacles, readers are at first tenacious. They blame themselves - they obviously missed something, and they go back over the mystifying sentence, or over the whole paragraph, piercing it out like an ancient rune, making guesses and moving on. But they won’t do it for long. The writer is making them work too hard, and they will look for one who is better at the craft.
Writers must therefore constantly ask: what am I trying to say? Surprisingly often they don’t know. Then they must look at what they have written and ask: have I said it? Is it clear to someone encountering the subject for the first time? If it’s not, some fuzz has worked its way into the machinery. The clear writer is someone clearheaded enough to see this stuff what it is: fuzz.
Writing is hard work. A clear sentence is no accident. Very few sentences come out right the first time, or even the third time. Remember this in moments of despair.