no fabrication

"I have no problem calling 'Mr. Hunter's Grave' nonfiction. Although [Joseph] Mitchell altered the truth about elapsed time, he used a dramatist's prerogative to compress and focus his story, thereby giving the reader a manageable framework. If he had told the story in real time, strung across all the days and months he did spend on Staten Island, he would have achieved the numbing truth of Andy Warhol's eight-hour film of a man having an eight-hour sleep. By careful manipulation he raised the craft of nonfiction to art. But he never manipulated Mr. Hunter's truth; there has been no 'inferring,' no 'fabricating.' He has played fair."

~~ from On Writing Well by William Zinsser

Joan Didion and the new nonfiction

"He didn't know what to make of that, and he began to invoke the names of authors like Ernest Hemingway and Saul Bellow and William Styron, whom we surely regarded as literary giants. We said those writers didn't happen to be our models, and we mentioned people like Lewis Thomas and Joan Didion and Gary Wills. He had never heard of them. One of the women mentioned Tom Wolfe's The Right Stuff, and he hadn't heard of that. We explained that these were writers we admired for their ability to harness the issues and concerns of the day."

~~ from On Writing Well by William Zinsser

alert the reader

"Learn to alert the reader as soon as possible to any change in mood from the previous sentence. At least a dozen words will do this job for you: 'but,' 'yet,' 'however,' 'nevertheless,' 'still,' 'instead,' 'thus,' 'therefore,' 'meanwhile,' 'now,' 'later,' 'today,' 'subsequently' and several more. I can't overstate how much easier it is for readers to process a sentence if you start with 'but' when you're shifting direction. Or, conversely, how much harder it is if they must wait until the end to realize that you have shifted."

~~ from On Writing Well by William Zinsser

a whole sweet potato

"That night the entire Rudd family sat at the round kitchen table, and while we talked of hurt and guilt and war, the chicken soup and matzoh balls appeared, plus a steady stream of Jewish appetizers—pickles, chopped liver, coleslaw. (A few days later a reporter for The New York Post got through to my mother and obtained her recipe for chicken soup, including her secret ingredient—a whole sweet potato.)"

~~ from Underground: My Life with SDS and the Weathermen by Mark Rudd

Behold nineteen Luzinskis

The Bull wore number nineteen.

afraid of violence

"A few days later, back in New York, I got a call from Walter, an acquaintance in the black high-school movement in the city, who said that he had watched me during the demonstration and that I had 'just been running with the girl' and done nothing violent at all. I had seen him and a partner throw a garbage can through a bank window. He said he now knew I was a phony and couldn't be relied on in the coming revolutionary struggle.

"I was devastated . . . because his criticism was true. Since I was a little kid, I'd been (and still am) afraid of violence. I was always ashamed of not standing up to bullies, even when they directly challenged me. In my family, violence was for the goyim or the trombeniks (hoodlums). I knew no one who hit another person. I did not play football. I had never lost my fear of violence."

~~ from Underground: My Life with SDS and the Weathermen by Mark Rudd