“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
Among the writing resources I recommended in a recent post (May 15, 2018) was a book by the late William Zinsser, titled On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction. It’s probably the best known and most popular of the 17 books he wrote. Long recognized as a must read, I couldn’t remember much about it, so I decided it was time for a refresher course.
Am I glad I did! I not only read it from cover to cover, highlighting passages as I went along, but I immediately started over and read it again. It’s a magnificent book, bulging with wisdom for both the wannabe writer and the veteran, as evidenced by the fact that more than a million copies of it have been sold.
Chapter Two: For the last decade or more, I’ve been working on a memoir and it’s been a struggle, so I was delighted to come upon another Zinsser book, this one titled Writing About Your Life: A Journey into the Past. It was exactly what I needed; I not only read it twice, but I continue to consult it regularly.
How helpful was it? Stay tuned and I’ll tell you about it in my next post.