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Writing wasn't easy and wasn't fun. It was hard and lonely, and the words seldom just flowed.
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
Fun
Wasn
Words
Easy
Hard
Writing
Flowed
Seldom
Lonely
More quotes by William Zinsser
Writing is learned by imitation. If anyone asked me how I learned to write, I'd say I learned by reading the men and women who were doing the kind of writing I wanted to do and trying to figure out how they did it.
William Zinsser
Get people talking. Learn to ask questions that will 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 stylist in the land.
William Zinsser
There's no subject you don't have permission to write about. Students often avoid subjects close to their heart ... because they assume that their teachers will regard those topics as 'stupid.' No area of life is stupid to someone who takes it seriously. If you follow your affections you will write well and will engage your readers.
William Zinsser
Don’t try to visualize the great mass audience. There is no such audience—every reader is a different person.
William Zinsser
Be yourself and your readers will follow you anywhere. Try to commit an act of writing and they will jump overboard to get away.
William Zinsser
The writers job is like solving a puzzle, and finally arriving at a solution is a tremendous satisfaction.
William Zinsser
Readers must be given room to bring their own emotions to a piece so crammed with emotional content the writer must tenaciously resist explaining why the material is so moving.
William Zinsser
Decide what you want to do. Then decide to do it. Then do it.
William Zinsser
Eloquence invites us to bring some part of ourselves to the transaction.
William Zinsser
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.
William Zinsser
There's not much to be said about the period except that most writers don't reach it soon enough.
William Zinsser
All writing is ultimately a question of solving a problem.
William Zinsser
A simple [writing] style is the result of very hard work.
William Zinsser
People and places are the twin pillars on which most nonfiction is built. Every human event happens somewhere, and the reader wants to know what that somewhere was like.
William Zinsser
Clutter is the disease of American writing.
William Zinsser
If you lose the dullards back in the dust, that's where they belong. You don't want them anyway.
William Zinsser
One of underestimated tasks in nonfiction writing is to impose narrative shape on an unwieldy mass of material.
William Zinsser
You learn to write by writing.
William Zinsser
Writing organizes and clarifies our thoughts. Writing is how we think our way into a subject and make it our own. Writing enables us to find out what we know-and what we don't know-about whatever we're trying to learn.
William Zinsser
Never hesitate to imitate another writer. Imitation is part of the creative process for anyone learning an art or a craft. Bach and Picasso didn't spring full-blown as Bach or Picasso they needed models. This is especially true of writing.
William Zinsser
