For the past three days it's displayed some terrific quotes that have helped me bulldoze through some serious roadblocks I've encountered recently in my non-work writing. I'll end this post with those three quotes in just a bit.
I picked up William Zinsser's "Writing to Learn" not long ago, ostensibly to help me sharpen the craft of Web writing and blogging, though it wasn't written specifically for any platform. The thesis is quite useful -- namely, using writing to explore new subjects and make sense of knowledge, essentially to further a self-directed, liberal education. He's used this approach to overcome a longtime aversion to hard sciences and is fascinated by how scientists, physicians, psychologists and other non-liberal arts academicians have employed the "writing across the curriculum" approach as a key element of their teaching.
Lifelong learning is what I call it, because at this point in my life I can't envision sitting down for any more "book learnin' " in a formal classroom setting. I'm nearly 50, took my last academic class 26 years ago, and haven't looked back. In fact, a wise history professor who taught that class told the departing seniors, "your education is only beginning." That has become a mantra for most of my professional and creative exploits as an adult, and I think every young college (or high school) graduate would do well to receive that message.
If I ever wanted to do something as unlikely (for me) as to teach, clearly I would have to revise my stance. A former newspaper colleague who's roughly my age recently earned a Master in Fine Arts degree and I admire her patience. Despite the interest in the subject matter, I know I couldn't have gone through with that.
Perhaps it's the institutional culture that I'm averse to more than anything. Some people operate well in them, some absolutely need them while I'm part of the crowd that simply can't bear to exist in them. That I did for nearly 20 years at a big newspaper company still astonishes me. I cannot imagine entering another one.
So I'm continuing my education into being a writer, not just for the Web age but as a means to keep learning about new topics, ideas, events and people. Zinsser's formula isn't that difficult for professional writers to comprehend, but its utter simplicity took me aback a little:
"Keep thinking and writing and rewriting. If you force yourself to think clearly you will write clearly. It's as simple as that. The hard part isn't the writing; the hard part is the writing."
After a quarter century of writing on deadline, and having to think quickly rather than fully, this is refreshing to absorb. I've found myself repeating those ingrained habits while blogging (as I am doing now) and I may never get fully out of the practice of whisking off something in short order. It's mixing that kind of writing with more contemplative, exploratory writing that I am to accomplish as I evolve as a writer and a journalist in this new stage of my career. It's a more personalized form of writing, but I don't want this to be all about me.
Again, Zinsser's message is very, very simple: Take ownership of what you write, gutting out ambiguity, redundancy, misuse of words, vagueness, jargon, pomposity, clutter, unnecessary adjectives, adverbs, prepositions and phrases, etc.:
"Information is your sacred product, and noise is its pollutant. Guard the message with your life."
And I'm sure I've violated all those no-nos already.
One of Zinsser's favorite writers was the humorist S. J. Perelman, whom he met while teaching at Yale in the late 1970s, near the end of Perelman's life. Zinsser sums up the talk Perelman gave to his students, and this is apt for any student of writing, and especially when the inevitable struggles with writing occur:
"What Perelman was finally talking about was craft. Writing is a craft, and a writer is someone who goes to work every day with his tools, like the carpenter, or the television repairman, no matter how he feels, and if one of the things he wants to produce by 6 p.m. is a sense of enjoyment in his writing, he must generate it by an act of will. Nobody else is going to do it for him."
I've read just through Part I of the book; surely there will be more great insight that I will address here in future posts.
Now for those closing quotes that have me amped up, and that I want to keep in mind when there isn't the mad flourish to write, as I feel now. First, from Italo Calvino:
"What Romantic terminology called genius or talent or inspiration is nothing other than finding the right road empirically, following one's nose, taking shortcuts."
And Ernest Hemingway:
"A serious writer is not to be confounded with a solemn writer. A serious writer may be a buzzard or a hawk or even a popinjay, but a solemn writer is always a bloody owl."
And finally, Ezra Pound:
"Good writers are those who keep the language efficient. That is to say, keep it accurate, keep it clear."
Nothing too elaborate about any of those ideas. But damn hard to realize.
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