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

Two of the most emotional moments of my life came as a result

As a nonfiction writer you must get on the plane. If a subject interests you, go after it, even if it’s in the next county or the next state or the next country. It’s not going to come looking for you. Decide what you want to do. Then decide to do it. Then do it.

The only thing they should notice is that you have made a sensible plan for your journey. Every step should seem inevitable.

One lubricant in criticism is humor. It allows the critic to come at a work obliquely and to write a piece that is itself an entertainment. But the column should be an organic piece of writing, not just a few rabbit punches of wit.

Critics should be among the first to notify us when the truths we hold to be self-evident cease to be true.

humanity. I explained about using active verbs and avoiding “concept nouns.” I told them not to use the special vocabulary of education as a crutch; almost any subject can be made accessible in good English.

as a writer I’ve learned that scientific and technical material can be made accessible to the layman. It’s just a matter of putting one sentence after another. The “after,” however, is crucial. Nowhere else must you work so hard to write sentences that form a linear sequence. This is no place for fanciful leaps or implied truths. Fact and deduction

Humor, to them, is urgent work. It’s an attempt to say important things in a special way that regular writers aren’t getting said in a regular way—or if they are, it’s so regular that nobody is reading it.

I could make the same kind of list for every art. A film critic who reviews a new Robert Altman picture without having seen Altman’s earlier films isn’t much help to the serious moviegoer. A music critic should know not only his Bach and Palestrina, his Mozart and Beethoven, but his Schoenberg and Ives and Philip Glass—the theoreticians and maveric