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Writing About Your Life: A Journey into the Past
An ingeniously constructed teaching memoir from the author of the bestselling On Writing Well -- "You learn without knowing it." (Frank McCourt, author of Angela's Ashes)
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.
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.
228 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2004
54 people are currently reading
1,560 people want to read
About the author
William Zinsser
48 books498 followersWilliam Knowlton Zinsser is an American writer, editor, literary critic, and teacher. He began his career as a journalist for the New York Herald Tribune, where he worked as a feature writer, drama editor, film critic, and editorial writer. He has been a longtime contributor to leading magazines.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 105 reviews
January 20, 2011
This guy could write a manual about cleaning my dog's ears and I would love it. I loved all of it, but if I had to pick favorite parts, I would choose chapters 1 ('Message on My Machine') and 11 ('Writing as a Ministry'). I cry easily during movies and Kodak commercials (not that I've seen one of those in a long time), but no so much with books. Before this book, I think 'A Thousand Splendid Suns' by Khaled Hosseini is the only book that made me cry. I didn't expect to have such an emotional reaction to an instructional book of sorts on writing, but I should have known better. It's not just a book about writing. He shares stories about his life and the people he's met along the way. Pages 185-189, about a veteran going back to Normandy with his grandsons, and then about the author's class reunion at Princeton with others who had left college to fight in WWII, got me. I highly recommend it, even if you don't plan on writing about your life.
September 3, 2024
I enjoyed this very much. Zinsser is a master of words, an excellent storyteller, and he offers such practical advice about how to write about our own lives. This is just the book I was hoping it would be!
Zinsser and I have led very different lives, so I don't always understand his references to musicians or artists or other cultural icons. But that's part of the point, isn't it? Memoir gives us the opportunity to walk in someone else's shoes for a while.
Zinsser and I have led very different lives, so I don't always understand his references to musicians or artists or other cultural icons. But that's part of the point, isn't it? Memoir gives us the opportunity to walk in someone else's shoes for a while.
January 10, 2011
This book is angeringly awful! First it should be called "Zinsser Writing About Zinsser's life." The chapters, each one more obtuse and irrelevant than the previous, just tell stupid vignettes about his life. In the beginning he would crowbar in a writing tip every few pages or so (the types of trite tips you can find anywhere: "Good writers write what they know" and tripe like that). However, as the chapters progressed he stopped even pretending that this was a book purporting to teach writing; Zinsser unabashedly rambles about his life for entire chapters, only to end them with some gem like "Good advice for a writer to keep in mind: make your writing useful" (156). This book is USELESS. The prose is prosaic to the extreme, and Zissner does not have any flair for creating vivid description. I would give this negative stars if I could. I guess I should just be thankful that I did not have to actually teach it!
If you want to learn how to write, read the greats (Nabokov for starters), dissect their writing, and learn the craft. Do NOT waste time with this trash.
(p.s. Perhaps this book would make a good drinking game. Rules: drink every time Zinsser blatantly gives himself a mastabatory pat on the back by mentioning going to Princeton or teaching at Yale.)
If you want to learn how to write, read the greats (Nabokov for starters), dissect their writing, and learn the craft. Do NOT waste time with this trash.
(p.s. Perhaps this book would make a good drinking game. Rules: drink every time Zinsser blatantly gives himself a mastabatory pat on the back by mentioning going to Princeton or teaching at Yale.)
July 6, 2013
Writing About Your Life by William Zinsser is a sort of metacognitive how-to book. The majority of the text consists of his own autobiography sprinkled with bits and pieces of invaluable advice to writers. He does more showing instead of telling. In general, I liked his approach and found it to be a quick read. There are some gems of advice I will quote later in this review, but I have to admit, I wish there was more dissection of his own writing going on. I would have liked to see some “non” examples in addition to his writing exemplars. What did other drafts look like? I valued the moment when he shared a sample of his writing that was culturally insensitive and juxtaposed it to a more redeeming piece he wrote later on once he realized that it was not okay to use “the literary convention to treat indigenous people as comic props” (71). That is the kind of thing I would have liked to see more of. I would have loved some more think aloud stuff going on to try and piece together what he is doing.
Here is a collection of some of the most notable quotes I found in the book:
• “I didn’t set out to write about any of those themes…those other themes came tugging at my sleeve. And of course they belonged in my story” (5).
• “Writing about one’s life is a powerful human need” (6).
• “Beware of deciding in advance how your memoir or your family history will be organized and what it will say. Don’t visualize the finished product at the end of your journey; it will look different when you get there…trust the process, and the product will take care of itself…think small” (6).
• “Remember this when you write about your own life. Don’t rummage around in your past for “important events…write about small, self-contained incidents that are still vivid in your memory…think small and you’ll wind up finding the big themes in your family saga” (7).
• “There are many good reasons for writing that have nothing to do with getting published” (7).
• “There’s a gap between wanting to write about your life and actually sitting down and doing it” (7).
• “To write well about your life you only have to be true to yourself” (8).
• “Happy is bad news for writers. The only ones who can make a go of it are songwriters” (11).
• “Be content to tell your small portion of a larger story. Too short is always better than too long” (16).
• “Specific detail is the foundation of nonfiction writing, and nowhere is it more important than in a memoir” (18).
• “In a lifetime of travels no city has called me back as often as Rome” (21).
• “The craft I wanted to learn would not be mastered without hard and steady application” (21).
• “The point is people. Look for human connection as you make your journey. Connect us to the people who connected with you” (23).
• “My memoir has unity of point of view. It’s told from the perspective of the boy I was at Deerfield, not the grown-up I was when I wrote it” (25).
• “Get your unities straight before your start. Choose one time frame—one version of your remembered truth—and stay with it” (26).
• “One of the pleasures of writing a memoir is to repay the debts of childhood” (27).
• “The problem is that an interesting life doesn’t make an interesting memoir. Only small pieces of a life make an interesting memoir” (29).
• “Is there a story I can tell her?...Tell stories whenever you can. People love to be told stories” (30).
• “One reason I enjoyed using that story is that I’ve never seen it written or heard it told by anyone else” (32).
• “One of my most-reprinted articles…pleaded for the right to fail…especially its young people…Often the only way for boys and girls to find their proper road is to take a hundred side trips, poking out in different directions, faltering, pulling back and starting again…’Don’t be afraid to fail.’ Failure isn’t the end of the world. Countless people have had a bout of failure and come out stronger as a result. Many have even come out famous” (40).
• “Your biggest stories will often have less to do with their subject than with their significance: not what you did in a certain situation, but how that situation affected you” (41).
• “Given a choice between two projects—the one you feel you ought to write and one that sounds like fun—go for the one you’ll enjoy working on. It will show in your writing” (48).
• “Travel writing: the writer is a patsy, a rube, someone a little out of his depth. This gives the reader the enormous pleasure of feeling superior” (50).
• “Writing is such hard and lonely work that I look for any opportunity to cheer myself up” (50-51).
• “Always make sure your readers know what they need to know at every stage of the journey” (53).
• “God gave writers the asterisk” (54).
• “Always look for ways to break your long projects into manageable chunks of writing time and energy” (59).
• “In May 1954 I finally saw the girl I wanted to marry…I made a double proposal: that we get married and take a trip across the heart of Africa” (63).
• On travel writing: “Its roots were not in journalism but in humor writing: the lighthearted travel book and the comic novel. Often the two were interchangeable” (71).
• “I seem to have felt that my first obligation was to entertain the reader and only secondly to understand and explain the cultures I was writing about. I now see that I had those priorities exactly backward” (72).
• “But the worst thing about this kind of writing is that most of it isn’t true” (74).
• “Overnight, the genre was extinct. The colonial powers were ousted by indigenous people everywhere who were understood to have their own cultural integrity. They were no longer called “natives” and they weren’t “picturesque.” Travel writers would have to work harder to tell their story. It had been much too easy for much too long” (74).
• “In the magazine articles that I wrote about those trips I learned to leave my cultural assumptions at home. I now try to catch the intention of every place I write about: to see it for what it is, or for what it’s trying to be, not for what I might have expected or wanted it to be. Travel writing is not unlike detective work; it depends on the gathering of dozens of small details” (75).
• “I’ve used writing to give myself an interesting life and a continuing education” (83).
• “Tell your story plainly and its deeper truths will emerge” (104).
• “You must relentlessly distill and condense” (107).
• “A memoir doesn’t try to be comprehension; it’s only a slice of one person’s life or one family’s life” (111).
• “If your sister has a problem with your version of the story, she can write her own version” (112).
• “Treat the past and its participants with fairness and respect” (112).
• “Don’t waste energy railing at the publishing profession. It has been careless with writers forever and isn’t going to change” (126).
• “I’ve never spent any time moping about rejection…Don’t weaken yourself with negative energy. If you’re a writer you’ll need all the positive energy you can generate” (127).
• “Your options are not as limited as you think” (134).
• “The best books…are written out of some inner core of conviction” (154).
• “Good advice for a writer to keep in mind: make your writing useful” (156).
• “Select, focus and reduce…believe in the validity of…life and…write about it with confidence and enjoyment” (158).
• “Good writers make their own luck” (159).
• “I decided that although nobody’s life makes any sense, if you’re going to make a book out of it you might as well make it into a story. I remember saying to my wife, “I am going upstairs to invent the story of my life”” (162).
• “We like to think an interesting life will simply fall into place on the page. It won’t; life is too disorganized” (162).
• “They assume that they start at the beginning (“I was born”) and summarize the high points of their life in chronological order. I don’t think writing works that way….Here’s the advice I give: Go to your desk on Monday morning and think of some event that’s unusually vivid in your memory…On Tuesday morning, do it again…Do that every day—preferably, at the same time of day…Keep this up for two months, or three months. Don’t fidget. Don’t be impatient to start writing your “memoir”—the one you had in mind before you began. Then, one day, take all your entries out of the folder and spread them out on the floor” (165).
• “All writing is talking to someone else on paper. Talk like yourself” (166).
• “In the course of writing this memoir I’ve learned all sorts of things, quite inadvertently, about myself and about various relationships. But these things are not important to the book, and I easily leave them out. I leave out many things that were important to my life but of no concern for the book” (166).
• “Keep your unities intact….Now all you have to do is start. Please trust the process. If the process is sound, the product will take care of itself” (167).
• “The past is better confronted than avoided—a valuable lesson for all memoirists fearful of opening Pandora’s box” (168).
• “You, too can use writing to break out of society’s confining boxes. Be true to the culture you were born into. Have the courage to tell your story as only you can tell it” (170-171).
• The best books are ones “written with love. They elevate the pain of the past with forgiveness, arriving at a larger truth about families in various stages of brokenness. There’s no self-pity, no whining, no hunger for revenge…We are not victims, they want us to know. We come from a tribe of fallible people, prisoners of our own destructiveness, and we have endured to tell the story without judgment and to get on with our lives” (172).
• “If you use memoir to look for your own humanity and the humanity of the people who crossed your life, however much pain they caused you, readers will connect with your journey. What they won’t connect with is whining. Dispose of that anger somewhere else. Get your intention clear before you start and tell your story with integrity” (173).
• “Why was I the chosen witness?...Writers who go on spiritual quests put themselves in a position to observe spiritual transactions. But I could also argue that I was put there by God—A god who wants to make sure his best stories get told. Most people are on some kind of pilgrimage, whether or not they recognize it as such. If you put your writing in the form of a quest you will make a connection with your reader that will surprise you with its power” (182).
• “Tell ordinary stories and write out your own humanity” (200).
“Write about things that are important to you, not about what you think readers will want to read, or editors will want to publish or agents will want to sell…If it’s important to you, it will be important to other people” (202).
“It comes down to permission. I’m struck by how scarce the commodity is” (215).
“When you write, call on the best of your character. And make sure you’re living the life you want to live” (216-7).
“If you feel a certain emotion while you’re playing the piano...your listeners will feel it, too….It’s the same advice I give to writers” (222).
“Old age hasn’t turned out to be a closing door” (225).
“it’s a privilege to write for one other person. Do it with gratitude and with pleasure” (228).
Here is a collection of some of the most notable quotes I found in the book:
• “I didn’t set out to write about any of those themes…those other themes came tugging at my sleeve. And of course they belonged in my story” (5).
• “Writing about one’s life is a powerful human need” (6).
• “Beware of deciding in advance how your memoir or your family history will be organized and what it will say. Don’t visualize the finished product at the end of your journey; it will look different when you get there…trust the process, and the product will take care of itself…think small” (6).
• “Remember this when you write about your own life. Don’t rummage around in your past for “important events…write about small, self-contained incidents that are still vivid in your memory…think small and you’ll wind up finding the big themes in your family saga” (7).
• “There are many good reasons for writing that have nothing to do with getting published” (7).
• “There’s a gap between wanting to write about your life and actually sitting down and doing it” (7).
• “To write well about your life you only have to be true to yourself” (8).
• “Happy is bad news for writers. The only ones who can make a go of it are songwriters” (11).
• “Be content to tell your small portion of a larger story. Too short is always better than too long” (16).
• “Specific detail is the foundation of nonfiction writing, and nowhere is it more important than in a memoir” (18).
• “In a lifetime of travels no city has called me back as often as Rome” (21).
• “The craft I wanted to learn would not be mastered without hard and steady application” (21).
• “The point is people. Look for human connection as you make your journey. Connect us to the people who connected with you” (23).
• “My memoir has unity of point of view. It’s told from the perspective of the boy I was at Deerfield, not the grown-up I was when I wrote it” (25).
• “Get your unities straight before your start. Choose one time frame—one version of your remembered truth—and stay with it” (26).
• “One of the pleasures of writing a memoir is to repay the debts of childhood” (27).
• “The problem is that an interesting life doesn’t make an interesting memoir. Only small pieces of a life make an interesting memoir” (29).
• “Is there a story I can tell her?...Tell stories whenever you can. People love to be told stories” (30).
• “One reason I enjoyed using that story is that I’ve never seen it written or heard it told by anyone else” (32).
• “One of my most-reprinted articles…pleaded for the right to fail…especially its young people…Often the only way for boys and girls to find their proper road is to take a hundred side trips, poking out in different directions, faltering, pulling back and starting again…’Don’t be afraid to fail.’ Failure isn’t the end of the world. Countless people have had a bout of failure and come out stronger as a result. Many have even come out famous” (40).
• “Your biggest stories will often have less to do with their subject than with their significance: not what you did in a certain situation, but how that situation affected you” (41).
• “Given a choice between two projects—the one you feel you ought to write and one that sounds like fun—go for the one you’ll enjoy working on. It will show in your writing” (48).
• “Travel writing: the writer is a patsy, a rube, someone a little out of his depth. This gives the reader the enormous pleasure of feeling superior” (50).
• “Writing is such hard and lonely work that I look for any opportunity to cheer myself up” (50-51).
• “Always make sure your readers know what they need to know at every stage of the journey” (53).
• “God gave writers the asterisk” (54).
• “Always look for ways to break your long projects into manageable chunks of writing time and energy” (59).
• “In May 1954 I finally saw the girl I wanted to marry…I made a double proposal: that we get married and take a trip across the heart of Africa” (63).
• On travel writing: “Its roots were not in journalism but in humor writing: the lighthearted travel book and the comic novel. Often the two were interchangeable” (71).
• “I seem to have felt that my first obligation was to entertain the reader and only secondly to understand and explain the cultures I was writing about. I now see that I had those priorities exactly backward” (72).
• “But the worst thing about this kind of writing is that most of it isn’t true” (74).
• “Overnight, the genre was extinct. The colonial powers were ousted by indigenous people everywhere who were understood to have their own cultural integrity. They were no longer called “natives” and they weren’t “picturesque.” Travel writers would have to work harder to tell their story. It had been much too easy for much too long” (74).
• “In the magazine articles that I wrote about those trips I learned to leave my cultural assumptions at home. I now try to catch the intention of every place I write about: to see it for what it is, or for what it’s trying to be, not for what I might have expected or wanted it to be. Travel writing is not unlike detective work; it depends on the gathering of dozens of small details” (75).
• “I’ve used writing to give myself an interesting life and a continuing education” (83).
• “Tell your story plainly and its deeper truths will emerge” (104).
• “You must relentlessly distill and condense” (107).
• “A memoir doesn’t try to be comprehension; it’s only a slice of one person’s life or one family’s life” (111).
• “If your sister has a problem with your version of the story, she can write her own version” (112).
• “Treat the past and its participants with fairness and respect” (112).
• “Don’t waste energy railing at the publishing profession. It has been careless with writers forever and isn’t going to change” (126).
• “I’ve never spent any time moping about rejection…Don’t weaken yourself with negative energy. If you’re a writer you’ll need all the positive energy you can generate” (127).
• “Your options are not as limited as you think” (134).
• “The best books…are written out of some inner core of conviction” (154).
• “Good advice for a writer to keep in mind: make your writing useful” (156).
• “Select, focus and reduce…believe in the validity of…life and…write about it with confidence and enjoyment” (158).
• “Good writers make their own luck” (159).
• “I decided that although nobody’s life makes any sense, if you’re going to make a book out of it you might as well make it into a story. I remember saying to my wife, “I am going upstairs to invent the story of my life”” (162).
• “We like to think an interesting life will simply fall into place on the page. It won’t; life is too disorganized” (162).
• “They assume that they start at the beginning (“I was born”) and summarize the high points of their life in chronological order. I don’t think writing works that way….Here’s the advice I give: Go to your desk on Monday morning and think of some event that’s unusually vivid in your memory…On Tuesday morning, do it again…Do that every day—preferably, at the same time of day…Keep this up for two months, or three months. Don’t fidget. Don’t be impatient to start writing your “memoir”—the one you had in mind before you began. Then, one day, take all your entries out of the folder and spread them out on the floor” (165).
• “All writing is talking to someone else on paper. Talk like yourself” (166).
• “In the course of writing this memoir I’ve learned all sorts of things, quite inadvertently, about myself and about various relationships. But these things are not important to the book, and I easily leave them out. I leave out many things that were important to my life but of no concern for the book” (166).
• “Keep your unities intact….Now all you have to do is start. Please trust the process. If the process is sound, the product will take care of itself” (167).
• “The past is better confronted than avoided—a valuable lesson for all memoirists fearful of opening Pandora’s box” (168).
• “You, too can use writing to break out of society’s confining boxes. Be true to the culture you were born into. Have the courage to tell your story as only you can tell it” (170-171).
• The best books are ones “written with love. They elevate the pain of the past with forgiveness, arriving at a larger truth about families in various stages of brokenness. There’s no self-pity, no whining, no hunger for revenge…We are not victims, they want us to know. We come from a tribe of fallible people, prisoners of our own destructiveness, and we have endured to tell the story without judgment and to get on with our lives” (172).
• “If you use memoir to look for your own humanity and the humanity of the people who crossed your life, however much pain they caused you, readers will connect with your journey. What they won’t connect with is whining. Dispose of that anger somewhere else. Get your intention clear before you start and tell your story with integrity” (173).
• “Why was I the chosen witness?...Writers who go on spiritual quests put themselves in a position to observe spiritual transactions. But I could also argue that I was put there by God—A god who wants to make sure his best stories get told. Most people are on some kind of pilgrimage, whether or not they recognize it as such. If you put your writing in the form of a quest you will make a connection with your reader that will surprise you with its power” (182).
• “Tell ordinary stories and write out your own humanity” (200).
“Write about things that are important to you, not about what you think readers will want to read, or editors will want to publish or agents will want to sell…If it’s important to you, it will be important to other people” (202).
“It comes down to permission. I’m struck by how scarce the commodity is” (215).
“When you write, call on the best of your character. And make sure you’re living the life you want to live” (216-7).
“If you feel a certain emotion while you’re playing the piano...your listeners will feel it, too….It’s the same advice I give to writers” (222).
“Old age hasn’t turned out to be a closing door” (225).
“it’s a privilege to write for one other person. Do it with gratitude and with pleasure” (228).
December 11, 2021
This book was a rejuvenator of my spirit, which in the past six years has suffered some extra-large slings and arrows, but I ainʻt complaining! Iʻm cool.
As I said in earlier comments on this book, the method in the madness of Zinsser is apparently overlooked by those who buy and/or read this book to get step-by-step instructions on memoir writing.
The title is the key: My pal Bill--I donʻt think he would mind that, right?--demonstrated writing about his life so that you would have a long and detailed example of just how he approached and addressed that enterprise. In other words, my man Bill shows you rather than tells you how he writes memoir. For anyone not looking for steps, outlines, lists of questions, and progress charts, the book is a delight.
And for those whiners who feel ripped off, pages 163-166 (of the paperback 228) contain all the most explicit advice on memoir writing in the book, so quit whimpering and find a copy machine.
Other wonderful observations and great advice are sprinkled liberally through the text and his own memoir-writing, like Easter eggs "hidden" for a three-year-old.
I feel better after reading this book, and I hope you will, too. Reading chronicles of a well-spent life is a joy and an inspiration.
I should note, too, that Zinsser has other great books about writing and of writing, of which I recommend On Writing Well, a trove of wealth garnered from multiple disciplines.
Thank you, Bill, and good luck with your lives to everyone else.
As I said in earlier comments on this book, the method in the madness of Zinsser is apparently overlooked by those who buy and/or read this book to get step-by-step instructions on memoir writing.
The title is the key: My pal Bill--I donʻt think he would mind that, right?--demonstrated writing about his life so that you would have a long and detailed example of just how he approached and addressed that enterprise. In other words, my man Bill shows you rather than tells you how he writes memoir. For anyone not looking for steps, outlines, lists of questions, and progress charts, the book is a delight.
And for those whiners who feel ripped off, pages 163-166 (of the paperback 228) contain all the most explicit advice on memoir writing in the book, so quit whimpering and find a copy machine.
Other wonderful observations and great advice are sprinkled liberally through the text and his own memoir-writing, like Easter eggs "hidden" for a three-year-old.
I feel better after reading this book, and I hope you will, too. Reading chronicles of a well-spent life is a joy and an inspiration.
I should note, too, that Zinsser has other great books about writing and of writing, of which I recommend On Writing Well, a trove of wealth garnered from multiple disciplines.
Thank you, Bill, and good luck with your lives to everyone else.
December 16, 2011
I am reading "Writing About Your Life: A Journey into the Past" for the second time. Zinsser has been a guide for me since the day I began my first book, Deep Church, almost seven years ago. My friend, lawyer and author Michael Carroll, gave me Zinsser's most famous book, "On Writing Well" to celebrate my first book contract. On Writing Well inspired, guided, and shaped me as a writer. As I begin the rewrite for my second book, I look to Zinsser again, this time to his book on memoirs, which I first read during our travels last year in England. It is outstanding and full of good, sound common sense. Not to mention Zinserr's warm and engaging style. I can only aspire to write as clearly, evocatively, and with a touch of humor as Zinsser does on every page.
September 6, 2024
I wish that the book solely focused on just how to write a memoir. I didn’t realize it would be a whole novel about the author’s life and then brief reflections on how he wrote about it.
That being said, those brief reflections were great! They were extremely clear and valuable and I found myself highlighting good chunks of information.
But, some of the life stories did bore me and I skimmed through a good amount of this book to reach the advice sections. Some stories like the honeymoon and the baseball game were cute and interesting, but most of him traveling around or writing for jobs wasn’t interesting.
Lastly, the book did feel a little braggy since the author slipped in a lot about how he did so many talks for audiences and interviewed famous people and got to be in movies and teach all these classes on writing. Which is great for credibility but I didn’t see the value in choosing those stories when they all seemed like just bragging about accomplishments.
That being said, those brief reflections were great! They were extremely clear and valuable and I found myself highlighting good chunks of information.
But, some of the life stories did bore me and I skimmed through a good amount of this book to reach the advice sections. Some stories like the honeymoon and the baseball game were cute and interesting, but most of him traveling around or writing for jobs wasn’t interesting.
Lastly, the book did feel a little braggy since the author slipped in a lot about how he did so many talks for audiences and interviewed famous people and got to be in movies and teach all these classes on writing. Which is great for credibility but I didn’t see the value in choosing those stories when they all seemed like just bragging about accomplishments.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
July 5, 2024
The author uses excerpts from his own memoir to illustrate how to write a memoir. Most of each chapter is long excerpts from books and articles he has written, and lengthy stories about his travels and his family and different jobs that he has had. We hear about his old friends, his old bosses, his old editors and agents. We hear about the commencement speech he gave at that college, and the writing class he taught at that other college. We have to read about the school where he attended as a boy, and the house he lived in, and his father's old shellac business that is still around today.
And then after we have slogged through all these long stories, we get a paragraph or two about how this illustrates some important point about writing a memoir.
I skimmed through the stories, and then read the parts that were actually about writing. The bits that were about writing had excellent advice, but this entire book should have been condensed into an essay.
And then after we have slogged through all these long stories, we get a paragraph or two about how this illustrates some important point about writing a memoir.
I skimmed through the stories, and then read the parts that were actually about writing. The bits that were about writing had excellent advice, but this entire book should have been condensed into an essay.
July 20, 2020
I absolutely love and recommend another of the author's books, "On Writing Well", to anyone who puts pen to paper. It's a great motivational book that should be re-read it every once-in-a-while. It's a true 5/5. This book, "Writing about Your Life", is both the author's own memoir and an instruction book for writing your own. Many of the stories in the book were presented in "On Writing Well." If you don't own "On Writing Well," you may enjoy this book because it is well-written, entertaining and includes reference to some truly great memoirs. Hence the 3/5 rating.
July 17, 2023
I wrote a sort of memoir years ago, and I wish I had read this book before writing it. It almost makes me want to go back and rewrite it at some point. Like is other book, Zinsser provides a ton of great advice while also reminding you to cut a lot of the stuff you don’t need out of the book. Great book for anyone planning on writing a memoir.
July 26, 2021
I can claim that William Zinsser is either the best or one of the best who can teach you how to write in general and memoirs in specific. His style, easy though elegant reflects his writing rules, humanity and brevity.
His books is a must read for anyone who would like to write a memoire a self liberating or discovering experience.
His books is a must read for anyone who would like to write a memoire a self liberating or discovering experience.
February 4, 2023
Soort case-study van z'n terecht bejubelde 'On writing well'. Haast niets nieuws onder de zon helaas.
March 11, 2025
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. A brief digression before we get into this one. I did not start an editing business (Ultreya Editorial - visit today!) only because I’m great at it and know I can earn a living in the field. When I journey with a client, we work together to nurture their passion, boost their self-confidence, deepen their intuition, and fine-tune their craft.
It comes down to love. What drove me to enter this arena (and review books like this) 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 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.
If you want 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.
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. A brief digression before we get into this one. I did not start an editing business (Ultreya Editorial - visit today!) only because I’m great at it and know I can earn a living in the field. When I journey with a client, we work together to nurture their passion, boost their self-confidence, deepen their intuition, and fine-tune their craft.
It comes down to love. What drove me to enter this arena (and review books like this) 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 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.
If you want 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.
April 16, 2012
What better way to teach writing memoir than writing snippets and commenting on it and giving technical background and why he wrote as he did. The first chapters are better than later chapters, being more rich with instruction. The book is very enjoyable to read and I found good advice. It was helpful to have a writing sample in front of me and understand why an experienced writer/teacher wrote the way he did.
Zinsser says to think small and write about small self-contained that are vivid. He explains if you remember them, then the incident will contain larger truths and show you to universal themes.
In the first chapter he gives us permission to write about our experience. Mr. Zinsser is a compassionate astute teacher.
Zinsser says to think small and write about small self-contained that are vivid. He explains if you remember them, then the incident will contain larger truths and show you to universal themes.
In the first chapter he gives us permission to write about our experience. Mr. Zinsser is a compassionate astute teacher.
December 2, 2019
Nothing about this book resembled a "how-to" for aspiring authors. Instead, Zinsser chose to write about events that transpired in his own life, as though compiling them would be interesting or inspiring to us mere mortals. A lot of "Writing About Your Life" reads as a self-congratulatory letter from the author to himself where he pats himself on the back time and time again for his achievements, and I can honestly say that after 328 pages, I learned very little that was new or groundbreaking about the art of writing memoir.
That said, I think I'd like the author as a person far better than I liked his book -- I could relate to his hunger for travel, novelty, and experience, among other things. I threw in an extra star for that.
The best book I've read to date on truly becoming a better writer is still Stephen King's "On Writing."
That said, I think I'd like the author as a person far better than I liked his book -- I could relate to his hunger for travel, novelty, and experience, among other things. I threw in an extra star for that.
The best book I've read to date on truly becoming a better writer is still Stephen King's "On Writing."
February 24, 2023
https://www.goodreads.com/review/list...
Mildly interesting, but should be "Writing About My Life" by Wm Zinsser. Gets a generous one star for a few good writing tips in the first chapters.
Mildly interesting, but should be "Writing About My Life" by Wm Zinsser. Gets a generous one star for a few good writing tips in the first chapters.
June 8, 2013
I picked this book off my shelf for the second time. By sharing pieces of his writings, Zinsser eloquently models good memoir writing. Think small and don't write "about" anything. Great advice for both readers and writers.
July 6, 2017
I love the way this man writes. He has had a fascinating life and includes it in much of his writing. He tells us to write for ourselves, just how we see it, you don't have to add unnecessary words to make it fancy. I will soon be reading his 'On Writing Well'.
May 21, 2010
Wonderful book about the writing life and writing memoirs. Zinsser is a first rate writer who teaches and delights.
January 28, 2024
William Zinsser lays out his theme in the first chapter of Writing About Your Life A Journey into the Past: “Whatever we call the form – autobiography, memoir, personal history – writing about one’s life is a powerful human need. Who doesn’t want to leave behind some record of his accomplishments and thoughts and emotions? If it’s a family history it will have further value of telling your children and grandchildren who they are and what they have come from. Writers are the custodians of memory, and memories have a way of dying with their owner…”
Zinsser emphasizes two organizational premises:
• “… Beware of deciding in advance how your family history or memoir will be organized and what it will say… it will look different when you get there…”
• “… think small… Write about small, self-contained incidents that are still vivid in your memory.”
But mostly, he emphasizes his preferred attitude of a writer whose work he would want to read: “enjoyment, confidence, curiosity, intention, integrity, courage, and grace”. With this ‘attitude adjustment’, we are invited to follow this exuberant ‘pied piper’ of writing, in the discovery of our story.
In a series of his explorations of self, through writing, Zinsser takes us on a magic carpet ride of memoir. Here are a sampling of what I found to be among its pearls:
• “Don’t be afraid to fail. Failure isn’t the end of the world…We need mavericks and dreamers more than we need junior vice presidents…”
• “Remember this when you write about your own life. Your biggest stories will often have less to do with their subject than with their significance: not what you did in a certain situation, but how the situation affected you. Walden isn’t really a book about how Henry David Thoreau spent his days at Walden Pond. It’s about what went through his head for two years at Walden Pond.”
• “You’ve had such an interesting life. When are you going to write your memoir? …. The problem is that an interesting life doesn’t make an interesting memoir. Only small pieces of life make an interesting memoir…”
• “Instead of writing a memoir, I’ve cannibalized my life for its memorable moments, dropping them into my articles and books… Tell stories whenever you can…”
• “Conveying a sense of enjoyment is one of my main goals as a writer…”
• “… I now try to catch the intention of every place I write about; to see it for what it is, or for what it’s trying to be, not for what I might have expected or wanted it to be. Travel writing is not unlike detective work; it depends on the gathering of dozens of small details. My pleasure is to make a narrative arrangement of those details that will tell the reader something he or she didn’t know before – something interesting or amusing. But they also have to have details that interest or amuse me. Mere observing and reporting are not enough. You must make some personal connection with the place you’re writing about.”
• “… ultimately, it’s people – memorable people – who make certain places stick in our minds forever…”
• “I’ve used writing to give myself an interesting life and a continuing education – to see the world.”
• “I mention the aliveness of Hall and Stevenson (James Norman Hall of Mutiny On the Bounty, and Robert Louis Stevenson of Kidnapped and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde) to remind you not to overlook the dead when you travel as a writer in search of interesting people…”
• “All writing is a journey, and it begins with an invitation…”
• “Organizing a long project is the most underestimated task in nonfiction writing. You must relentlessly distill and condense. Herman Melville couldn’t write a book about whaling. He had to write about one man and one whale…”
• “Terror reduction is one of my goals as a writing teacher… choose one narrative that tells a coherent story and discard everything else… A memoir doesn’t try to be comprehensive… Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes ends when he finally escapes the slums of Limerick.”
• “You’re under no obligation to ask all your brothers or sisters or cousins how they remember the family saga… They will all remember it differently. There is no one authorized version of the shared past…If your sister has a problem with your version of the story, she can write her own version. Each will have its integrity…”
• “What did I tell alternative seekers…? I told them the story of my alternative life: how I periodically uprooted myself and how I never did – or continued to do - what I was expected to do. I didn’t go into the family business; I didn’t stay at the Herald Tribune; I didn’t stay in New York;… I always left when the work ceased to be fulfilling. I urged students not to be prisoners of expectations that were not the right ones for them – other people’s expectations. I saluted my father for not holding me to his expectations for me.”
• “It’s a privilege to write for one other person. Do it with gratitude and pleasure.”
I learned a lot from Writing About Life A Journey into the Past. Most of all, it reinforced my desire to continue to use my writing to follow my bliss or live my Tao.
Zinsser emphasizes two organizational premises:
• “… Beware of deciding in advance how your family history or memoir will be organized and what it will say… it will look different when you get there…”
• “… think small… Write about small, self-contained incidents that are still vivid in your memory.”
But mostly, he emphasizes his preferred attitude of a writer whose work he would want to read: “enjoyment, confidence, curiosity, intention, integrity, courage, and grace”. With this ‘attitude adjustment’, we are invited to follow this exuberant ‘pied piper’ of writing, in the discovery of our story.
In a series of his explorations of self, through writing, Zinsser takes us on a magic carpet ride of memoir. Here are a sampling of what I found to be among its pearls:
• “Don’t be afraid to fail. Failure isn’t the end of the world…We need mavericks and dreamers more than we need junior vice presidents…”
• “Remember this when you write about your own life. Your biggest stories will often have less to do with their subject than with their significance: not what you did in a certain situation, but how the situation affected you. Walden isn’t really a book about how Henry David Thoreau spent his days at Walden Pond. It’s about what went through his head for two years at Walden Pond.”
• “You’ve had such an interesting life. When are you going to write your memoir? …. The problem is that an interesting life doesn’t make an interesting memoir. Only small pieces of life make an interesting memoir…”
• “Instead of writing a memoir, I’ve cannibalized my life for its memorable moments, dropping them into my articles and books… Tell stories whenever you can…”
• “Conveying a sense of enjoyment is one of my main goals as a writer…”
• “… I now try to catch the intention of every place I write about; to see it for what it is, or for what it’s trying to be, not for what I might have expected or wanted it to be. Travel writing is not unlike detective work; it depends on the gathering of dozens of small details. My pleasure is to make a narrative arrangement of those details that will tell the reader something he or she didn’t know before – something interesting or amusing. But they also have to have details that interest or amuse me. Mere observing and reporting are not enough. You must make some personal connection with the place you’re writing about.”
• “… ultimately, it’s people – memorable people – who make certain places stick in our minds forever…”
• “I’ve used writing to give myself an interesting life and a continuing education – to see the world.”
• “I mention the aliveness of Hall and Stevenson (James Norman Hall of Mutiny On the Bounty, and Robert Louis Stevenson of Kidnapped and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde) to remind you not to overlook the dead when you travel as a writer in search of interesting people…”
• “All writing is a journey, and it begins with an invitation…”
• “Organizing a long project is the most underestimated task in nonfiction writing. You must relentlessly distill and condense. Herman Melville couldn’t write a book about whaling. He had to write about one man and one whale…”
• “Terror reduction is one of my goals as a writing teacher… choose one narrative that tells a coherent story and discard everything else… A memoir doesn’t try to be comprehensive… Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes ends when he finally escapes the slums of Limerick.”
• “You’re under no obligation to ask all your brothers or sisters or cousins how they remember the family saga… They will all remember it differently. There is no one authorized version of the shared past…If your sister has a problem with your version of the story, she can write her own version. Each will have its integrity…”
• “What did I tell alternative seekers…? I told them the story of my alternative life: how I periodically uprooted myself and how I never did – or continued to do - what I was expected to do. I didn’t go into the family business; I didn’t stay at the Herald Tribune; I didn’t stay in New York;… I always left when the work ceased to be fulfilling. I urged students not to be prisoners of expectations that were not the right ones for them – other people’s expectations. I saluted my father for not holding me to his expectations for me.”
• “It’s a privilege to write for one other person. Do it with gratitude and pleasure.”
I learned a lot from Writing About Life A Journey into the Past. Most of all, it reinforced my desire to continue to use my writing to follow my bliss or live my Tao.
November 3, 2019
William Zinsser is famous for being an excellent coach for writers. He has mastered the art of communicating through words. He has followed an alternative career path that has brought him success and fulfillment. He shares his insights in this memoir of his life while coaching the reader how to write about her/his own life.
Zinsser’s style is humble and consistently strikes the right tone for sharing the memory. That skill – sharing memories – is the essence of a memoir and is exactly what this work comports to the reader. Instead of merely preaching rules at us, Zinsser illustrates his principles by showing us from his life what he remembers about the past.
He demonstrates that good memoirs do not have axes to grind and are not overtly polemical. Instead, he nimbly and gently brings us into his own past. His writing is always respectful and stays far away from a judgmental tone. He invites the reader to explore the world with curiosity much as Zinsser models a curiously exploration of his own world.
I’m left curious to explore some of the writers that Zinsser cites as interesting authors of memoirs. I’m also left wanting to read his other work on writing a memoir entitled Inventing the Truth. His writing is so easy-going – deceptively so as he makes communicating complex ideas seem so easy. One can see why Yale undergraduates loved his writing classes and his serving as headmaster of a college.
I recommend this book to anyone who loves writing and wants to learn how to master this craft with her/his entire life.
Zinsser’s style is humble and consistently strikes the right tone for sharing the memory. That skill – sharing memories – is the essence of a memoir and is exactly what this work comports to the reader. Instead of merely preaching rules at us, Zinsser illustrates his principles by showing us from his life what he remembers about the past.
He demonstrates that good memoirs do not have axes to grind and are not overtly polemical. Instead, he nimbly and gently brings us into his own past. His writing is always respectful and stays far away from a judgmental tone. He invites the reader to explore the world with curiosity much as Zinsser models a curiously exploration of his own world.
I’m left curious to explore some of the writers that Zinsser cites as interesting authors of memoirs. I’m also left wanting to read his other work on writing a memoir entitled Inventing the Truth. His writing is so easy-going – deceptively so as he makes communicating complex ideas seem so easy. One can see why Yale undergraduates loved his writing classes and his serving as headmaster of a college.
I recommend this book to anyone who loves writing and wants to learn how to master this craft with her/his entire life.
November 10, 2020
It was a pleasure to read William Zinsser's "Writing About Your Life" as I contemplate how I might one day formalize writing about my own life. I've been a journal-er, if not a journalist, for years. For now, the book is helpful as I edit the memoirs of others.
I first encountered William Zinsser's "On Writing Well" in the early 1980s when as a non-traditional student (older than 22, younger than 32) I was finishing an English degree. The book was already in its second edition. I remember fondly the professor who first introduced me to the book in his "Expository Writing" class. I now have the "original" second edition as well as a used copy of the fourth edition on my shelf.
Zinsser published "Writing About Your Life" in 2004, when he was 82 years old. He'd had an off-Broadway show (composer and lyricist for "What's the Point?") just a couple of years prior and in the previous twenty years had decided to become a performing musician as a pianist after a long career of being a working writer and a teacher of writing. Reading the last chapter of this book, in which he talks about his lifelong love of the piano, helped me to feel a secondary kinship with the author as I too have found a renewed joy in returning to the piano post-retirement.
I enjoyed the whole of this book as the author used various stories of his own life and, in true writing teacher fashion, sprinkled in plenty of see-what-I-did-theres. I did see what he did there and will go forth and continue to help other writers write the stories that they want to tell.
I first encountered William Zinsser's "On Writing Well" in the early 1980s when as a non-traditional student (older than 22, younger than 32) I was finishing an English degree. The book was already in its second edition. I remember fondly the professor who first introduced me to the book in his "Expository Writing" class. I now have the "original" second edition as well as a used copy of the fourth edition on my shelf.
Zinsser published "Writing About Your Life" in 2004, when he was 82 years old. He'd had an off-Broadway show (composer and lyricist for "What's the Point?") just a couple of years prior and in the previous twenty years had decided to become a performing musician as a pianist after a long career of being a working writer and a teacher of writing. Reading the last chapter of this book, in which he talks about his lifelong love of the piano, helped me to feel a secondary kinship with the author as I too have found a renewed joy in returning to the piano post-retirement.
I enjoyed the whole of this book as the author used various stories of his own life and, in true writing teacher fashion, sprinkled in plenty of see-what-I-did-theres. I did see what he did there and will go forth and continue to help other writers write the stories that they want to tell.
December 8, 2020
Here is a memoir from a distinguished writing teacher and editor with a long and successful career. He gives the reader tips on writing about our own lives while sharing experiences and epiphanies from his life. He traveled widely to exotic places and wrote stories about the places he visited and got paid for it. Lucky man. He didn't mind changing career paths when one avenue became tiring or less engaging, always taking along his writing and editing skills wherever he ventured. Mr. Zinsser prepared in advance the talks he gave to students and writers all over the country and abroad. Sometimes the lecterns were wobbly or its light didn't work and he would have to ad lib a talk he meant to read. Now, in retirement he has honed his piano playing skills and performs gigs with a saxophonist friend for fun and pay. Instead of the irritation of dark lecterns he endured during his speeches at various venues in his former work, he's juggling the uncertainties of playing pianos when the sustaining pedal is broken or the tuning is a little off. This reader admires Zinsser's ability to adapt in older age, when most of us get a little stuck in our ways. I like that and I like this book.
September 27, 2018
What I thought would be an instruction manual on how to write memoirs turned out to be a moving memoir about the author’s life. Embedded in a series of short narratives, many of them excerpts from previously published articles, are William Zinsser’s comments that illustrate how and why his approach to writing one's story is positive and effective. I discovered through reading this book about writing about your life, that I was increasingly immersed in the author’s life experiences. One of my favorite quotes toward the end of the book is, “Most people are some kind of pilgrimage, whether or not they recognize it as such. If you put your writing in the form of a quest you will make a connection with your readers that will surprise you with its power.” I came away wishing I could have met Mr. Zinsser, who led such a rich life, or sat in any of his inspiring class lectures to hear his stories in person. Short of that, I will refer back to this book to revisit its many lessons.
November 4, 2018
This is the second book I’ve read by William Zinsser and I can’t say I’ve ever come across such warm and encouraging writing before. This book is about so much more than just writing - it’s about life, storytelling, focusing on what’s important and having faith in yourself and your voice. I read the book over a few months, not because it was boring, but because every chapter would resonate so strongly with me and move me in such a deep sense, it was hard to continue reading without reflecting on what I had just experienced through his words. I was moved to tears a few times and found myself turning to the back flap over and over again to see a picture of Mr. Zinsser in admiration of his ability to inspire, move and connect with the reader. It would have been such an honour to meet him and tell him how much his words meant to me and helped me in my own journey of learning more about myself and my past through writing.
April 22, 2023
Reading Zinsser is like eating honey: easy, sweet, fulfilling, and energizing. In this book, he tells his own life story and, in the process, leaves some tips about writing memoirs: write about people, not places; write about your feelings and thoughts; write about things which you enjoy writing about.
From his own life story, I loved the fact that, whenever he found himself in a job that was not fulfilling, he immediately quit.
Some of my favourite sentences:
"I urged the Yale students not to become the prisoner of expectations that were not the right ones for them—other people's expectations."
"If you can do something that gives people pleasure, you ought to do it."
"When you write about your life, stop worrying about editors and publishers and agents and about all the readers you hope to reach. It's a privilege to write for one other person. Do it with gratitude and with pleasure.
From his own life story, I loved the fact that, whenever he found himself in a job that was not fulfilling, he immediately quit.
Some of my favourite sentences:
"I urged the Yale students not to become the prisoner of expectations that were not the right ones for them—other people's expectations."
"If you can do something that gives people pleasure, you ought to do it."
"When you write about your life, stop worrying about editors and publishers and agents and about all the readers you hope to reach. It's a privilege to write for one other person. Do it with gratitude and with pleasure.
July 12, 2018
This is a very empowering piece of work as Zinsser advocates letting go of the things I thought important and to go find out what really is important. “Give yourself permission to risk the unknown. Dare to not do what the world expects you to do.” The only flaw in his permission is that he does a lot of name-dropping in his anecdotes and unfortunately is still measuring success by the fact that many of those who stepped outside the expectations still made good in an expected way.
All that aside, the book contains some great methodology for the writing of memoir.
All that aside, the book contains some great methodology for the writing of memoir.
November 10, 2023
I enjoy writing and years ago I discovered William Zinsser’s classic book, On Writing Well. It is a treasure. Writing About Your Life is also a wonderful book. It is informative, thought-provoking and entertaining. Zinsser has a way of weaving writing advice into personal stories. In this regard, I appreciated learning more about Zinsser’s personal and professional life, especially the years he spent at the New York Herald. In sum, a great book.
July 20, 2024
Example driven, a proper journey through example and experience. I found myself reading about a baseball machine and reading it in detail (!) - I have no idea about baseball never having watched a game or played it. But Zinsser brought the enthusiasm and rememberance to the details that it didn't matter.
Repleat with good advice, permissions and confirmations, this is a go to if you want to write about your life in whatever form.
Repleat with good advice, permissions and confirmations, this is a go to if you want to write about your life in whatever form.
December 20, 2020
This is an enjoyable book, both a memoir and a how-to book. I was looking for a guide on how-to write a memoir and found this and I really liked how Zinsser took me on a ride through his life while showing how to assemble a story. I had only known his book, How to Write Well, so this was a terrific discovery.
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