William Zinsser Quotes about Writing - Page 2

Many writers are paralyzed by the thought that they are competing with everybody else who is trying to write and presumably doing it better.... Forget the competition and go at your own pace. Your only contest is with yourself.

The best way to learn to write is to study the work of the men and women who are doing the kind of writing you want to do.

My four articles of faith: clarity, simplicity, brevity and humanity.

A clear sentence is no accident.

Be yourself and your readers will follow you anywhere. Try to commit an act of writing and they will jump overboard to get away.

Nobody told all the new e-mail writers that the essence of writing is rewriting. Just because they are writing with ease and enjoyment doesn't mean they are writing well.

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.

Few people realize how badly they write. Nobody has shown them how much excess or murkiness has crept into their style.

Be grateful for every word you can cut.

A writer will do anything to avoid the act of writing.

Never say anything in writing that you wouldn't comfortably say in conversation. Be yourself when you write. 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.

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.

My commodity as a writer, whatever I'm writing about, is me. And your commodity is you. Don't alter your voice to fit the subject. Develop one voice that readers will recognize when they hear it on the page, a voice that's enjoyable not only in its musical line but in its avoidance of sounds that would cheapen its tone: breeziness and condescension and clichés.

I almost always urge people to write in the first person. ... Writing is an act of ego and you might as well admit it.

Writing is thinking on paper. Anyone who thinks clearly should be able to write clearly-about any subject at all.

Good writers are visible just behind their words.

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.

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.

There are all kinds of writers and all kinds of methods, and any method that helps you to say what you want to say is the right method for you.

Writing is a craft not an art.

Don’t try to visualize the great mass audience. There is no such audience—every reader is a different person.

Don't try to guess what sort of thing editors want to publish or what you think the country is in a mood to read. Editors and readers don't know what they want to read until they read it. Besides, they're always looking for something new.

Make a habit of reading what is being written today and what has been written before. Writing is learned by imitation.

Not everybody has a talent for painting, or for the piano, or for dance. But we can write our way into the artist's head and into his problems and solutions. Or we can go there with another writer.

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 so high.