Book Review: Writing about Your Life (A Book about Love)

Something I love about writing is that it is a form of self-expression available to almost anyone.

Another beautiful, empowering feature of writing (I have said it before) is that it is a skill which can be developed. One great way to elevate your skill is to write every day. Another is to read often, read widely, and, once in a while, read a good book about craft.

Not all books on craft are created equal, so in this arena I’m happy to hand out tips. Today I want to tell you about a fantastic book on the subject of writing memoir by William Zinsser. It is titled Writing About Your Life.

A brief digression before we get into the book. I did not start an editing business only because I’m great at it and know I can earn a living in the field. When you hire me as your editor, you will discover that the work we embark on is more than mere manuscript-doctoring.

As I journey with you, we will seek to nurture your passion, boost your self-confidence, deepen your intuition, and fine-tune your craft.

Why do I work this way for you? It comes down to love. What drove me to enter this arena was a fierce conviction that your voice matters. If you were not meant to be here, you wouldn’t be here. If your story didn’t matter, you wouldn’t be doing anything and nothing would happen to you. But you are here. You do take action. Events, as it so happens, transpire in your life. This all means that there are amazing stories that only you can tell; unique stories that you deserve to tell; vital stories which the world will be enriched by and which it can only hear from you.

This brings us back to William Zinsser’s Writing About Your Life. If I were to summarize it in one word, that word would be love.

Zinsser does something really clever to introduce his book of writerly instruction. He greets us with an anecdote that has nothing obvious to do with writing. In the tale he receives an answering machine message about removing water stains from one’s ceiling. The caller has mistaken Zinsser for Zinsser’s father, who used to run a shellac company. He was never employed in his father’s business; instead, he is a full-time columnist at the New York Times. Still, he is delighted to receive the call and has a long conversation with the woman, answering her question and engaging her in a meandering chat about life.

The anecdote carries on for pages; long enough that we students of writing might wonder, Am I reading the right book? Zinsser eventually reassures us that, yes, we are in the right place. Then, shortly after he winds up this opening story, he declares that the main ideas of this book on writing memoir are “beware of about” and “think small.” But wait, we might ask, more befuddled than before, this is a contradiction. Hasn’t Zinsser just blatantly stated what his book is about?

Zinsser accomplishes many things with his introduction. He primes our subconscious and our heart to receive more sly lessons masquerading as digressions. He signals that we need to read with alertness and a bit of friendly suspicion. He tantalizes us with the promise that this will not be a dry, by-the-numbers job: we will have fun like he is having fun. And finally, his two-point thesis gives us a framework of pedagogical expectations while also nudging us and winking, as if to say, “Don’t take my lesson plan entirely at face value.”

Then there is the heart of it all, which is the voice with which he engages us. He speaks in a tone of affection, curiosity, receptivity, generosity. This is the spirit which informs the entire book, as Zinsser takes us on a tour of a writing soul which seems to wander all over the place; but in reality,

HE models for us not only what good writing looks like but where it comes from in us and why.

Zinsser shares many lovely, fascinating personal stories which are plenty satisfying in their own right: about being a student, a teacher, a soldier, a reporter, an extra in a Woody Allen film, a baseball fanatic, a journalist, and an amateur jazz pianist.

In many but not all of these tales, he makes like the best sort of teacher by lobbing off small but crucial observations on craft, like “specific detail is the foundation of nonfiction” (p. 18) and make sure your writing has “unity of point of view” (p. 25). Such instructions might seem obvious to some, but for the perceptive reader, his guidelines are always modulated according to an implicit axiom that your guiding lights of memoir need to arise from you. In other words, take these generalities in hand and then learn, through much practice, trial, and error, how to particularize them for your creative circumstances. Zinsser states this most succinctly and perhaps more memorably on page 102: “Trust your obsession to be your best calling card.”

He means, and I agree, that you’re at your best when you capture on the page your specific detail, not simply the number of buttons on the keypad or how many hats there are in the room. What minutiae in a situation sing for you? Maybe it is the number and types of hats…give yourself creative space to find out! Likewise, unity of point of view does not mean simply that there is one main character. What he is saying is something more like, pick which version of you, and in what time, place, frame of mind, and state of spirit, is telling and/or experiencing this particular story.

Much of the guidance Zinsser offers will yield rewards beyond “simply” developing your technique and style.

For instance, the discipline of sticking with a specific part of yourself on a writing journey helps to bring that piece of you into greater clarity and resonance for you.

It would be hard to enumerate all the great nuggets in this book, and anyway I don’t wish to deprive you of the pleasure of discovering its gems for yourself, but here are just a few more pieces of counsel Zinsser shares. I highlight these because I feel they are among the ideas especially helpful to newer writers.

Near the end of Chapter 4, Zinsser encourages us to break stories down into smaller ones, then focus on writing one anecdote at a time. This helps us to make progress while not becoming overwhelmed by the big picture. He also urges us not to lose sight of the people in the places (in Chapter 5, which in another clever reversal is titled “Writing About Places”). People, in many cases, are what “make certain places stick in our minds forever” to begin with (p. 79). In a separate discussion about memory, he adds to this advice to hunt for and place alongside the people at the heart of your story, “an idea that’s larger than the place itself” (p. 104). And again, he’s not necessarily talking about identifying a creed or a Big Cultural Problem to iron into your work, but something simultaneously deeply personal and mysteriously universal. If that stresses you out, remember that finding the idea is also part of your journey:

“Tell your story plainly and its deeper truths will emerge” (p. 104).

Let’s return to the theme of love, which is the vitalizing force of this book and the reason why I recommend it to anyone who wishes to write memoir (or who wishes to write, period).

In Chapter 3, Zinsser shares a touching meditation on “the right to fail” (p. 40). He caps his musings with a reference to Walden, and observes that “your biggest stories will often have less to do with…what you did in a certain situation, but how that situation affected you” (p. 41). Without saying a single explicit word in this direction, Zinsser encourages us to think of Thoreau not as the titan of literature he is now but as someone who was once just like you and me, and who dared to try something new without any guarantee of how it would turn out. In other words, he encourages you to imagine yourself as the next Thoreau (or Woolf, or McCourt, or Karr)…and to remember that the only way to find out if you’ll be that person is to accept the dare in your own soul. As a byproduct, Zinsser also shows here, yet again, that there are ways to get a message across without being explicit.

This pattern of exhortation; this aura he projects of a friendly teacher, a comrade to every hopeful writer, attends us through the entire book. Even when Zinsser falls prey to class blindness (a fair few of his stories are casually exotic after the fashion of our perennial coastal elites, but this only becomes truly uncomfortable once, when in the final chapter Zinsser becomes positively giddy at being a regular old working stiff for the first time in his seventies), my confidence never flagged that he sincerely wants every writer, regardless of so-called pedigree, to enjoy the confidence, courage, agency, and diversity of experience which he has.

At the literal heart of the book, on page 114, while waxing romantic about baseball, Zinsser shares a sentiment from former Pittsburgh Pirates pitching coach Ray Miller: “‘The biggest part of my job,’ [Miller] told me, ‘is to make every kid believe he can perform…without falling apart.’” Reading this, I heard Zinsser shouting between the lines, “This, exactly! This is what I want for you, aspiring writer.”

He shows us what everything means one last time in the closing chapter, when he returns to the role of amateur late in life to pursue a dream of becoming a jazz pianist. What he illuminates is that writing—life—is about giving ourselves permission. Feeling. Hoping. Trying. Says Zinsser, near the very end (letting jazz musician and instructor Dwike Mitchell speak for him),

“‘I learned long ago…that it does no good to complain…. Instead you say, ‘What does [the piano, the story, the situation, the self] do? Let’s check it out” (p. 226, 227).

Indeed, fellow travelers: check it out! Check out Writing About Your Life, and every day check out yourself and the world around you for the beautiful insights and contributions only you can add to life. I believe in you. I hope you believe in you, too.

Come back often for book reviews and advice about the craft of writing.

And if you are not here just to read reviews and get tips, but to take full advantage of my services and carry your writing to the next level, then contact me today! Let’s discuss how I can help you go further on the road of resonating than you thought possible.