On Writing Well, 30th Anniversary Edition: An Informal Guide to Writing Nonfiction

I recited my four articles of faith: clarity, simplicity, brevity and humanity

For the principle of scientific and technical writing applies to all nonfiction writing. It’s the principle of leading readers who know nothing, step by step, to a grasp of subjects they didn’t think they had an aptitude for or were afraid they were too dumb to understand

Those of us who are trying to write well about the world we live in, or to teach students to write well about the world they live in, are caught in a time warp, where literature by definition still consists of forms that were certified as “literary” in the 19th century: novels and short stories and poems.

ow can you overcome such fearful odds and write well about a place? My advice can be reduced to two principles—one of style, the other of substance.
First, choose your words with unusual care. If a phrase comes to you easily, look at it with deep suspicion; it’s probably one of the countless clichés that have woven their way so tightly into the fabric of travel writing that you have to make a special effort not to use them

Nobody turns so quickly into a bore as a traveler home from his travels. He enjoyed his trip so much that he wants to tell us all about it—and “all” is what we don’t want to hear. We only want to hear some. What made his trip different from everybody else’s? What can he tell us that we don’t already know? We don’t want him to describe every ride at Disneyland, or tell us that the Grand Canyon is awesome, or that Venice has canals. If one of the rides at Disneyland got stuck, if somebody fell into the awesome Grand Canyon, that would be worth hearing about.

People and places are the twin pillars on which most nonfiction is built.

As for how to organize the interview, the lead should obviously tell the reader why the person is worth reading about.

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

The longer I work at the craft of writing, the more I realize that there’s nothing more interesting than the truth. What people do—and what people say—continues to take me by surprise with its wonderfulness, or its quirkiness, or its drama, or its humor, or its pain.

Add all the books combining history and biography that have distinguished American letters in recent years: David McCullough’s Truman and The Path Between the Seas; Robert A. Caro’s The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York; Taylor Branch’s Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954–63; Richard Kluger’s The Paper: The Life and Death of the New York Herald Tribune; Richard Rhodes’s The Making of the Atomic Bomb; Thomas L. Friedman’s From Beirut to Jerusalem; J. Anthony Lukas’s Common Ground: A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of American Families; Edmund Morris’s Theodore Rex; Nicholas Lemann’s The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How It Changed America; Adam Hochschild’s King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa; Ronald Steel’s Walter Lippmann and the American Century; Marion Elizabeth Rodgers’s Mencken: The American Iconoclast; David Remnick’s Lenin’s Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire; Andrew Delbanco’s Melville; Mark Stevens’s and Annalyn Swan’s de Kooning: An American Master. My roster of the new literature of nonfiction, in short, would include all the writers who come bearing information and who present it with vigor, clarity and humanity.