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Writing About Your Life: A Journey into the Past Paperback – March 10, 2005
| William Zinsser (Author) Find all the books, read about the author, and more. See search results for this author |
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Written with elegance, warmth, and humor, this highly original "teaching memoir" by William Zinsser--renowned bestselling author of On Writing Well gives you the tools to organize and recover your past, and the confidence to believe in your life narrative. His method is to take you on a memoir of his own: 13 chapters in which he recalls dramatic, amusing, and often surprising moments in his long and varied life as a writer, editor, teacher, and traveler. Along the way, Zinsser pauses to explain the technical decisions he made as he wrote about his life. They are the same decisions you'll have to make as you write about your own life: matters of selection, condensation, focus, attitude, voice, and tone.
- Print length240 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- Publication dateMarch 10, 2005
- Dimensions5.5 x 0.6 x 8.25 inches
- ISBN-101569243794
- ISBN-13978-1569243794
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Product details
- Publisher : Da Capo Press (March 10, 2005)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 240 pages
- ISBN-10 : 1569243794
- ISBN-13 : 978-1569243794
- Item Weight : 8.3 ounces
- Dimensions : 5.5 x 0.6 x 8.25 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #294,262 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #203 in Rhetoric (Books)
- #471 in Authorship Reference
- #1,037 in Fiction Writing Reference (Books)
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About the author

William Zinsser, a writer, editor, and teacher, is a fourth-generation New Yorker, born in 1922. His 18 books, which range in subject from music to baseball to American travel, include several widely read books about writing.
On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction, first published in 1976, has sold almost 1.5 million copies to three generations of writers, editors, journalists, teachers and students.
Writing to Learn which uses examples of good writing in science, medicine and technology to demonstrate that writing is a powerful component of learning in every subject.
Writing Places, a memoir recalling the enjoyment and gratitude the places where William Zinsser has done his writing and his teaching and the unusual people he encountered on that life journey.
Mr. Zinsser began his career in 1946 at the New York Herald Tribune, where he was a writer, editor, and critic. In 1959 he left to become a freelance writer and has since written regularly for leading magazines. From 1968 to 1972 he was a columnist for Life. During the 1970s he was at Yale, where, besides teaching nonfiction writing and humor writing, he was master of Branford College. In 1979 he returned to New York and was a senior editor at the Book-of-the-Month Club until 1987, when he went back to freelance writing. He teaches at the New School and at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. He is an adviser on writing to schools, colleges, and other organizations. He holds honorary degrees from Wesleyan University, Rollins College, and the University of Southern Indian and is a Literary Lion of the New York Public Library.
William Zinsser's other books include Mitchell & Ruff, a profile of jazz musicians Dwike Mitchell and Willie Ruff; American Places, a pilgrimage to 16 iconic American sites; Spring Training, about the spring training camp of the Pittsburgh Pirates in 1988; and Easy to Remember: The Great American Songwriters and Their Songs; and he is the Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir. A jazz pianist and songwriter, he wrote a musical revue, What's the Point, which was performed off Broadway in 2003.
Mr. Zinsser lives in his home town with his wife, the educator and historian Caroline Zinsser. They have two children, Amy Zinsser, a business executive, and John Zinsser, a painter and teacher.
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In the first of a series of mini-memoirs about his life, Zinsser tells the story of a phone message left on his answering machine from a woman who has a question about a paint primer that Zinsser's father had manufactured years before. In referring to an article he wrote about the message and the phone call that followed, the author shows how the work dealt with a number of themes: fathers and sons, family expectations, and filial duty, among others.
He tells us that he did not start out to write about these themes, but that they naturally evolved from the message and the phone conversation that followed. He then connects this to the two main premises of the book:
1. "Beware of deciding in advance how your memoir or family history will be organized and what it will say."
2. "Write about small self-contained incidents that are still vivid in your memory."
Zinsser uses this technique throughout the book; he shares an incident from his past, and then emphasizes a particular point about memoir writing.
Besides the teaching aspects of the book, another strength is the writing maxims sprinkled throughout. Some examples:
"Go with what interests and amuses you. Trust the process, and the product will take care of itself."
"Too short is always better than too long."
"All writers are embarked on a quest of some kind, and you're entitled to go on yours."
"Look for the human connection as you make your journey. Connect us to the people who connected with you."
"All writing is talking to someone else on paper. Talk like yourself."
In addition to helpful maxims, Writing About Your Life: A Journey into the Past reflects Zinsser's articles of faith (as stated in his signature work, On Writing Well) about what good nonfiction writing exhibits: humanity, clarity, simplicity, and vitality.
With so many books available on this topic why choose Writing About Your Life? Because William Zinsser is a master teacher. Reading Writing About Your Life (and On Writing Well) would be an excellent preparation for anyone thinking about writing a memoir.
If you enjoy reading the interesting personal recollections of a highly respected writer who has led a fascinating life, I recommend this book highly. You'll pick up some writing tips along the way.
But if you want a point by point instructional book about memoir writing, there must be something out there that would be more immediately helpful by giving examples: "This is the wrong way to do it; this is the right way to do it."
Writing well is a skill that must be practiced, and I can't think of a better way to improve your writing than by reading Zinsser's book "On Writing Well." That I would give five stars.
Zinsser notes at the start of Chapter 3, “The problem is that an interesting life doesn’t make an interesting memoir. Only small pieces of a life make an interesting memoir. The rest is just getting through the day....” This book is chockablock with engaging and amusing “pieces of a life.” To be sure, Zinsser offers solid, useful advice on writing, e.g., that “ultimately it’s people--memorable people--who make certain places stick in our minds forever. Look for those people, wherever you go, and tell us how their story intersected with your life” (p. 79). But it’s really the author’s anecdotes about meeting memorable people in fascinating places that captivated this reader. A writer would do well to absorb the advice, and mostly, just imitate the master.
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In this book Zinsser provides the reader with advice on writing a memoir, using his own life and writing as the ‘story’ behind the writing self. In other words he’s doing while teaching. This is a most interesting and stimulating approach to the impossible problem of ‘how to.’ The answer is simply, write on what interests you and it will interest others. Well, yes, maybe and maybe not. I am no lover of baseball or computer games and found the chapters dealing with home runs and boyhood pursuits of fantasy games played enthusiastically by old men less than enthralling. The book also has an evangelical, accentuate-the-positive strain that becomes more and more pronounced as the book moves to its conclusion. The book is what I would term typically American, employing beneath its seductive charm a Christian ethic that ultimately tends to pall. But then I’ve just come from reading that very British writer, George Orwell who illustrates more obliquely his notion of human brotherhood.
Nevertheless I confess to becoming infected by the Zinsser spirit, enjoying his introductions to musicians, writers, dancers, professors and other sages, following his journey through life and literature. It’s really 99% about Zinsser’s life and opinions, and only 1% advice on writing about your life, the title of the book. Having said that I can’t envisage a more useful way of giving practical advice
There are many helpful books on memoir technique that are brief, sparkling and entertaining (The Memoir Project - Marion Roach Smith). There are many books that provide perfect examples of memoir (Angela's Ashes,; On Writing). This book is neither.










