William zinsser

William zinsser

May 13,  · William Zinsser, a writer, editor and teacher whose book “On Writing Well” sold more than million copies by employing his own literary craftsmanship to urge clarity, simplicity, brevity and William Zinsser is a lifelong journalist and nonfiction writer—he began his career on the New York Herald Tribune in —and is also a teacher, best known for his book On Writing Well, a companion held in affection by three generations of writers, reporters, editors, teachers, and students May 20, William Zinsser, former faculty member in English and master of Branford College, who taught nonfiction writing at Yale in the s and whose influence continues in today’s Yale courses, died peacefully last week at age 92

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Or my grandmother. Or my grandfather. As every parent knows, our children are not as fascinated by our fascinating lives as we are. Only when they have children of their own—and feel the first twinges of their own advancing age—do they suddenly want to know more about their family heritage and all its accretions of anecdote and lore.

That record can take many shapes. It can be a formal memoir—a careful act of william zinsser construction. Or it can be an informal william zinsser history, written to tell your children and your grandchildren about the family they were born into, william zinsser.

It can be the oral history that you extract by tape recorder from a parent or a grandparent too old or too sick to do any writing. Or it can be anything else you want it to be: some hybrid mixture of history and reminiscence. Too often memories die with their owner, and too often time surprises us by running out.

My father, william zinsser, a businessman with no literary pretensions, wrote two family histories in his old age, william zinsser. It was the perfect task for a man with few gifts for self-amusement. Sitting in his favorite green leather armchair in an apartment high above Park Avenue in New York, he wrote a history of his side of the family—the Zinssers and the Scharmanns—going back to 19th century Germany.

He wrote with a pencil on a yellow legal pad, never pausing—then or ever again—to rewrite. He had no patience with any enterprise that obliged him to reexamine or slow down. On the golf course, walking toward his ball, he would assess the situation, william zinsser, pick a club out of the bag, and swing at the ball as he approached it, hardly breaking stride. When my father finished writing his histories he had them typed, mimeographed, william zinsser, and bound in a plastic cover.

I like the fact that they all got their own copy; it recognized each of them as an equal partner in the family saga. How many of those grandchildren spent any time with the histories I have no idea. There are many good reasons for writing that have nothing to do with being published. Writing is a powerful search mechanism, and one of its satisfactions is that it allows you to come to terms with your life narrative, william zinsser.

I also hear his honesty. Be yourself and your readers will follow you anywhere. Try to commit an act of writing and your readers will jump overboard to get away. Your product is you. The crucial transaction in memoir and personal history is the transaction between you and your remembered experiences and emotions. Their mother was the daughter of a self-made German immigrant, H. Scharmann, who went to California as a teenager in a covered wagon with the forty-niners and lost both his mother and his sister on the journey.

Frida Scharmann inherited his fierce pride and ambition, and when she married William Zinsser, a promising young man in her circle of German-American friends, she saw him as the answer to her cultural aspirations, william zinsser. They would spend their evenings going to concerts and to the opera and holding musical salons.

But the promising husband evidently turned out to have no such yearnings, william zinsser. Home william zinsser for falling asleep in his chair after dinner.

How bitterly his lassitude william zinsser have dawned on the young Frida Zinsser I can imagine from knowing her as an older woman, endlessly pushing herself to Carnegie Hall, playing Beethoven and Brahms on the piano, traveling to Europe and learning foreign languages, prodding my father and my sisters and me to cultural self-improvement.

Her drive to fulfill the broken dreams of william zinsser marriage never faltered. But she had the German penchant for telling people off, william zinsser, and she died alone at 81, having scolded away all her friends.

I wrote about her once, many years ago, in a memoir for a book called Five William zinsser. Describing the grandmother I knew as a boy, I praised her strength but also noted that she was a difficult presence in our lives. After the book came out, my mother defended the mother-in-law who had made her own life far from easy.

But she was like that to me. I mention this because one of the questions often asked by memoir writers is: should I write from the point of view of the child I once william zinsser, or of the adult I am now?

But if you prefer the other route—to write about your younger years from the wiser perspective of your older years—that memoir will have its own integrity. One good example is Poets in Their Youthin which Eileen Simpson recalls her life with her first husband, John Berryman, and his famously self-destructive fellow poets, william zinsser, including Robert Lowell and Delmore Schwartz, whose demons she was too young as a bride to understand.

When she revisited that period as an older woman in her memoir she had become a writer and a practicing psychotherapist, william zinsser, and she used that clinical knowledge to create an invaluable portrait of a major school of American poetry at the high tide of its william zinsser. But these are two different kinds of writing, william zinsser.

Choose one. Now, knowing the facts, I can understand the disappointments that made her the woman she became, and if I were to take another shot at the family saga today I would bring to it a lifetime of trying to fathom its Germanic storms and stresses, william zinsser. In his two histories his father gets scant mention and no forgiveness; all sympathy goes to the aggrieved young divorcée and her lifelong grit.

Whenever I asked my father about him, he changed the subject and had no stories to tell. When you write your family history, be a recording angel and record william zinsser your descendants might want to know. This brings me to another question that memoir writers often ask: What about the privacy of the people I write about? Should I leave out things that might offend or hurt my relatives?

What will my sister think? Your first job is to get your story down as you remember it—now. Say what you want to say, freely and honestly, and finish the job. Then take up the privacy issue. But if you have in mind a broader audience— a mailing to friends or a possible book—you may want to show your relatives the pages in which they are mentioned. It also gives them their moment to ask you to take certain william zinsser out—which you may or may not agree to do, william zinsser.

If your sister has a problem with your memoir, william zinsser, she can write her own memoir, and it will be just as valid as yours; nobody has a monopoly on the shared past. But I believe that at some level most families want to have a record left of their effort to be a family, however flawed that effort was, and they will give you their blessing and will thank you for taking on the job—if you do it honestly and not for the wrong reasons, william zinsser.

What are the wrong reasons? Let me take you back to the memoir-crazed s, william zinsser. Until that decade, memoir writers drew a veil over their most shameful experiences and thoughts; certain civilities were still agreed on by society. Then talk shows came into their own and shame went out the window.

Suddenly no remembered episode was too squalid, no family too dysfunctional, to be trotted out for the titillation of the masses on cable TV and in magazines and books. The result was an avalanche of memoirs that were little more than therapy, their authors using the form to wallow in self-revelation and self-pity and to bash everyone who had ever done them wrong.

Writing was out and whining was in. Although the childhoods they describe were painful, the writers are as hard on their younger selves as they are on their elders. We are not william zinsser, they want us to know. We come from a tribe of fallible people and we have survived william zinsser resentment to get on with our lives.

For them, writing william zinsser memoir became an act of healing, william zinsser. It can also be an act of healing for you. If you make an honest transaction with your own humanity and with the humanity of the people who crossed your life, no matter how much pain they caused you or you caused them, readers will connect with your journey.

Now comes the hard part: how to organize the damn thing. Most people embarking on a memoir are paralyzed by the size of the task. What to put in? What to leave out? Where to start? Where to stop? How to shape the story? The past looms over them william zinsser a thousand fragments, defying them to impose on it some kind of order.

Because of that anxiety, many memoirs linger for years half written, or never get written at all, william zinsser. You must make a series of reducing decisions.

For example: in a family history, one big decision would be to write about only one branch of the family. Families are complex organisms, especially if you trace them back several generations. Return to the other one later and make it a separate project. Remember that you are the protagonist in your own memoir, the tour guide.

You must find a narrative trajectory for the story you want to tell and never relinquish control. Like siblings. One of my students in a memoir class was william zinsser woman who wanted to write about william zinsser house in Michigan where she grew up.

Her mother had died, the house had been sold, and she and her father and her 10 sisters and brothers were about to meet at the house to dispose of its contents. Writing about that task, she thought, would help her to understand her childhood in that large Catholic family.

I agreed—it was a perfect framework for a memoir—and I asked her how she was going to proceed. She said she was going to start by interviewing her father and all her brothers and sisters to find out how they remembered the house. I asked her if the story she wanted to write was their story. No, she said, william zinsser, it was her story. In that case, I said, interviewing all those siblings would be an almost complete waste of her time and energy. Only then did she begin to glimpse the proper shape of her story and to prepare her mind for confronting the house and its memories.

You only need to interview family members who have a unique insight into a family situation, or an anecdote that william zinsser a puzzle you were unable to solve. He had escaped from his village in Poland at the age of 14—one of the few Jews to get away—and had made his way to Italy, william zinsser, to New Orleans and, william zinsser, to New York.

Audio of Ms. Meder Reading William Zinsser's \

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William Zinsser - Wikipedia

William Zinsser is a lifelong journalist and nonfiction writer—he began his career on the New York Herald Tribune in —and is also a teacher, best known for his book On Writing Well, a companion held in affection by three generations of writers, reporters, editors, teachers, and students William Zinsser was a lifelong journalist and nonfiction writer—he began his career on the New York Herald Tribunein —and was also a teacher, best known for his book On Writing Well, a companion held in affection by three generations of writers, reporters, editors, teachers and students May 12,  · William Zinsser, a longtime Scholar contributor and dear friend of the magazine, was an extraordinary writer and teacher, whose popular blog on our website, “Zinsser on Friday,” won a National Magazine Award in O ne of the saddest sentences I know is