What will my sister think?

"That brings me to another question that memoir writers often ask: What about the privacy of the people I write about? Should I leave out things that might hurt or offend my relatives? What will my sister think?

"Don't worry about that problem in advance."

~~ from On Writing Well by William Zinsser

Nobody is going to do it for you.

"Writers have to jump-start themselves at the moment of performance, no less than actors and dancers and painters and musicians. There are so writers who sweep us along so strongly in the current of their energy—Norman Mailer, Tom Wolfe, Toni Morrison, William F. Buckley, Jr., Hunter Thompson, David Foster Wallace, Dave Eggers—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."

~~ from On Writing Well by William Zinsser

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