The Best Writing Tip I've Ever Read

It was just a note William Zinsser scrawled in the margin of a student's essay but it poked my greatest fear as a writer

William Zinsser was an enigma. A writer shaped by military service. An generous man with little patience for nonsense or self indulgence. A Yale teacher who disliked academia so much he said academic writing is the enemy of all good writing.

When he finished college he went to war. Twenty one year old kid serving in the Army Air Forces flying a B-24 Bomber in North Africa and Italy. Later, he’d say the military was the best thing that happened to him. Taught him discipline, he said.

For the rest of his life, he’d tell writers if you’re a writer, write. Respect the process. Discipline. Pick a time you’re going to write and do it. Don’t always know what’s going to show up, but something will. You won’t know until you start.

After the war, he walked into the office of the New York Herald Tribune, gave them a writing sample and landed his dream job as a theatre reporter. He had no intention of teaching. No plans to write about writing. He just wanted to write. And he did.

Wrote for The New York Times, Life Magazine, The Saturday Evening Post, Harper's Magazine, New York Herald Tribune, Esquire, The Wall Street Journal, and more.

In 1973, Yale called. Said they wanted to run a writing class, but not by some academic. They wanted someone with real world writing experience.

He called it Non-Fiction Workshop.

Said it had to be a small class. 12-15 students max. So he could work one on one. Read every assignment, give personal feedback. 170 students signed up.

Didn’t have a PhD or any teaching credentials but his writing class became known for the legendary waiting list to get in. Students applied their first year of Yale, sometimes didn’t get in until their last year, if at all.

Which is how it came to be a book. After three years, Yale admin asked if he could write the course into a book. He said he’d try.

Even after he lost his sight to glaucoma, he was still helping writers. They’d come to his Manhattan apartment, read him their writing, he’d give them advice. Tell them how to clean it up. Make it stronger. All he ever cared about was the craft.

On Writing Well has sold over 1.5 million copies and is still the most popular book on writing ten years after his death at age ninety two. Went to bed one night, never woke up. But he lives on through that book, still today.

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First thing he’d probably tell you is to read Charlotte’s Web.

He loved that book. Said it was so simply and clearly written it made E.B. White his North Star. It’s all he ever wanted to do. Write that clean and simple and moving.

He had a photo framed and hanging in his office. It was a photo of E.B. White sitting on a plain wooden bench at a plain wooden table. Typing. He said that’s what it’s about. Don’t need frills. Just a keyboard and clear simple words.

He said few people realize how badly they write. No one ever tells writers how bad they are, but they should. No one shows people how much excess has crept into their writing and how it obstructs what they’re trying to say. He said writers write like they talk and that’s good. But they ramble just like when they talk and that’s bad.

Next thing he’d tell you is writing is learned by imitation.

When people asked how he learned to write, he said by reading men and women who did the kind of writing he wanted to do. You start by imitating writers you admire, but eventually you shed that skin, become the writer you’re supposed to be.

His book is filled with great advice about clarity, simplicity, and mercilessly cutting excess words to get to the bones of the story. He’d tell you if you don’t interest the reader in the first sentence, you lose.

For me, one of his best tips came from a story one of his students told.

Mark Singer took his class the first year. Got out of that class and became a writer for The New Yorker in 1974. In a tribute to Zinsser piece, he remembered a note Zinsser wrote in the margin of one of his first writing assignments. It said:

“You’ll notice that I stopped marking this halfway through. What you’ve written is interesting only to you.”

Make no mistake, he didn’t think writers should write for anyone else.

He said you don’t write to sell, you don’t write what an agent or publisher wants you to write, you don’t write for the market, you write for the process of finding a true story. But you need to respect the reader.

Respecting the reader is not the same as writing for the reader. He said writing should have a point. Should leave the reader with something they didn’t have before they started reading.

You don’t do that by navel gazing or trying to be writerly.

People fall in love with their words, spin some fancy nonsense. That doesn’t work.

You respect the reader by digging deep, by finding tiny incidents that live vivid in your memory. Because every tiny thing that won’t leave you alone holds a larger truth that readers will recognize in their own lives. Think small and you’ll find big.

And when you fail to do that? It’s not interesting to anyone but you. Just like he told that writer. I think there’s something really powerful in that.

Especially now.

Every day 7.5 million posts and articles are published on the internet. Everywhere you can write, people do. Medium, Substack, Vocal, Wordpress, and every other platform there is. A non-stop stream of words.

A fair lot of them are people pontificating and navel-gazing. Trying to write flowery words to impress and when you’re writing in that environment it’s hard to get seen and real easy to wonder—who the hell cares what I think?

Who cares what I think?

You know?

That thought lives in my belly every time I start to write.

Eats me alive some days. Especially when the views are hard to come by. Easy to ask myself — 7.5 million posts going up today and again tomorrow.

Who cares what *I* think?

Then I remind myself what he said. That writing is about connecting.

And I think maybe I can dig a little deeper. Share the scary thought. Tell you that every time I start to write, I think of what he said to a writer. This isn’t interesting to anyone but you. And I worry that maybe that’s me. Writing shit that’s not interesting.

Because maybe someone else feels the same way.

Maybe you resonate with that. And maybe you can dig a little deeper, too.

After that, it’s just stripping out the garbage. Stripping every sentence down to the cleanest you can make it. That’s what good writing is. Clean and simple.

After he died, his wife Caroline said he wasn’t one for navel-gazing. He didn’t spend any time dwelling on things that happened to him or analyzing. He just looked at his whole life and thought, “What can I turn this into, in terms of words and writing?”

Just looking for those little things that won’t leave him alone.

Funny thing is when I go into my stats on both Medium and Substack, sort my writing by views, I find exactly what he said. The times I tapped into a memory that wouldn’t leave me alone—those are always the ones people connected to most.

Love to know what you think. Are those your best pieces, too?

P.S. I leave you with this:

“Write about small, self-contained incidents that are still vivid in your memory. If you remember them, it's because they contain a larger truth that your readers will recognize in their own lives. Think small and you'll wind up finding the big”
― William Zinsser