I began to write seriously when I became a traveler. Now I’ve stopped traveling, apparently, to write. The life of a freelance writer — at least from where I sit in a rocking chair with snow falling outside my window — is not terribly glamorous or exciting. But if most of my travels are internal these days, that doesn’t stop them from being adventurous.
So let’s call this a postcard from the writing life.
Do you ever begin reading a book, and start plotting in your head to buy it, before you’ve gotten very many chapters in? That’s the way I felt about William Zinsser’s book Writing to Learn.
And why? Because he writes engagingly and humanly, vocalizing things that I’ve already thought — or at least half-thought — taking them to their very satisfying conclusion.
Take his soliloquy on obscurity in writing:
Obscurity being one of the deadly sins, anyone might suppose that serious people would labor mightily to avoid it in their writing. But to suppose this is to overlook another force of nature that almost equals entropy as a drag on life’s momentum. That force is snobbery. Yes, gentle reader (as the Victorian novelists put it when they had to deal with the darker traits), it pains me to say that there are writers who actually want to be obscure. Their principal habitat is Academia, though they can be spotted without the aid of binoculars wherever intellectuals flock. Not for them the short words and active verbs and concrete details of ordinary speech; they believe that a simple style is the sign of a simple mind. Actually a simple style is the result of harder thinking and harder work than they are willing and able to do. (p. 61)
The premise of the book is that the very act of writing demands and provokes clear thinking, making it an aid to learning on any subject. Even math and science, chemistry, music, geology and art.
There is something beautiful, it must be admitted, in reading people who are experts (and passionate experts) on their subjects, however boring I expected those subjects to be. To find out what goes on in the mind of a composer, or how personable the chemical elements can be, on closer acquaintance.
I’m not terribly thrilled, of course, with the high percentage of material on evolution. But at least he hasn’t dragged in more salacious material — an occupational hazard when you’re searching modern books on writing.
So I might not actually buy Zinsser’s book, but I’m taking something away nonetheless. A reminder of why I love to write: to take something that is (and is beautiful) and make it visible to others. To write cleanly, sparely, and logically — because it is beautiful, and because it is kind to your reader. To learn: to make new discoveries in the very act of writing, and come out richer than when you went in.
Elisabeth Adams 