On Writing Well

A Surgeon and a Writer Walk Into a Schoolroom

A schoolteacher in Connecticut once put William Zinsser onstage beside a surgeon named Dr. Brock. The day was billed as a celebration of the arts, and the two men had been invited to talk about what it was like to be a writer. Zinsser had spent his career as a journalist and was teaching nonfiction at Yale. Dr. Brock had taken up writing late, almost as a hobby, and had managed to sell a few stories to magazines. They sat down on either side of a moderator and proceeded to disagree about everything.

Is writing fun? Dr. Brock said it was tremendous fun, that the words just flowed. Zinsser said writing was hard and lonely, that the words seldom did. Is rewriting important? Dr. Brock said no, just let it all hang out. Zinsser said rewriting was the essence of the whole business. What do you do on a bad day? Dr. Brock went fishing. Zinsser sat down at the desk anyway, because that was the job. Symbolism? Dr. Brock loved it. Zinsser avoided it whenever he could.

The students went home more confused than they had arrived. But both men had told the truth about themselves, and that was Zinsser's point. There is no single right way to write. There is, however, one right thing every writer is selling, and it is not the subject. It is the writer. "Ultimately the product that any writer has to sell," Zinsser says, "is not the subject being written about, but who he or she is." That insight is the seed of *On Writing Well*, the book he first drafted in 1975 from an outbuilding in Connecticut equipped with a dangling lightbulb, an Underwood typewriter, a wire wastebasket, and a stack of yellow paper. He revised it six times across thirty years, watched it sell more than a million copies, and never softened his answer to the question that began it all.