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Rewriting is the essence of writing well: it's where the game is won or lost. The idea is hard to accept. We all have 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.

William Zinsser

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William Zinsser
Age: 92 †
Born: 1922
Born: October 7
Died: 2015
Died: May 12
Journalist
Literary Critic
Writer
New York City
New York
William Knowlton Zinsser
Hard
Idea
Close
Writing
Born
Emotional
Believe
Lost
Percent
Rewriting
Ideas
Accepting
Draft
Wells
Wasn
Equity
Firsts
Game
Odds
Well
Games
Essence
First
Perfect
Accept

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To defend what you've written is a sign that you are alive.
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The writers job is like solving a puzzle, and finally arriving at a solution is a tremendous satisfaction.
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Clutter is the official language used by corporations to hide their mistakes.
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Be grateful for every word you can cut.
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Editors are licensed to be curious.
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Hard writing makes easy reading. Easy writing makes hard reading.
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Motivation clears the head faster than a nasal spray.
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Writing is thinking on paper.
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Memoir isn't the summary of a life it's a window into a life, very much like a photograph in its selective composition. It may look like a casual and even random calling up of bygone events. It's not it's a deliberate construction.
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Every time you look at a blank piece of paper, you're doing something new. You have to step onto that blank territory and remind yourself the sky didn't fall in the last time you wrote. Writing is a question of overcoming your fears-and everybody has them.
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Writing is such lonely work that I try to keep myself cheered up. If something strikes me as funny in the act of writing, I throw it in just to amuse myself. If I think it's funny I assume a few other people will find it funny, and that seems to me to be a good day's work.
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Journalism is writing that first appears in any periodic journal.
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Nobody becomes Tom Wolfe overnight, not even Tom Wolfe.
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If you write for yourself, you'll reach all the people you want to write for.
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Most writers sow adjectives almost unconsciously into the soil of their prose to make it more lush and pretty. The sentences become longer and longer as they fill up with stately elms and graceful boughs and frisky kittens and sleepy lagoons.
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Be yourself and your readers will follow you anywhere. Try to commit an act of writing and they will jump overboard to get away.
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Rewriting is the essence of writing well - where the game is won or lost.
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Writing wasn't easy and wasn't fun. It was hard and lonely, and the words seldom just flowed.
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Four basic premises of writing: clarity, brevity, simplicity, and humanity.
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