Writing Places: The Life Journey of a Writer and Teacher

As a boy I had been taken with my three older sisters to Best & Co. and DePinna’s, upscale stores on Fifth Avenue that expediently sold both girls’ and boys’ clothes, and there I was properly outfitted for a proper life. Now, in the 1950s, Best and DePinna’s were still doing business, just a few blocks to the east. But in the geography of my li

And, like many modern people—modern women, especially—I had catapulted out of my context…The successes [of the writers] gave me hope, of course, yet it was the desperate bits I liked best. I was looking for directions, gathering clues.

I also tried to stop using phrases like “of course” and adverbs like “surprisingly,” “predictably,” “understandably” and “ironically,” which place a value on a sentence before the reader has a chance to read it. Readers, I learned, are not as dumb as the writer thinks; they must be given room to play their role in the act of writing—to discover for

That, finally, is the life-changing message of On Writing Well: Simplify your language and thereby find your humanity.

In 1991 the nation of Zimbabwe bought our building and everyone was evicted.

I learned to delete every sentence or phrase or word that told readers something they had already been enabled to know or were bright enough to deduce.

My sentences almost never come out right at first, and I endlessly try to repair them.

I typed the usual something: “Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of the party.” Or maybe it was the one about the quick brown fox jumping over the lazy sleeping dog, which uses all 26 letters of the alphabet. I don’t think I did “Pack my box with five dozen liquor jugs,” that printer’s darling, which uses the 26 letters more succin

Except for the bed—almost certain death for a freelancer—it was a perfect writer’s space, suspended above the hubbub, with a view across fields and privet hedges in every direction.