The hard part of writing is the thinking

From William Zinsser on writing & keeping up to date his book, On Writing Well:

(The hard part of writing isn’t the writing; it’s the thinking.)

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

I would treat the English language spaciously, as a gift waiting for anyone to unwrap, not as a narrow universe of grammar and syntax.

As an editor I knew that almost anything can be cut to 300 words; the material is somewhere in the marble, waiting to be quarried out.

writers must set higher standards for their work than anyone else does—and must defend what they write against every editor or publisher or agent who tries to distort or dilute it.

Women, in particular, felt that they needed permission to believe in their remembered truth.

The long sentence

I love a long sentence, written well. I love to hear a long, well-written sentence read aloud. The cadence, the music, the breath. I love to take a good breath and read a good long sentence aloud especially if that good long sentence is mine. I love to hear its sound, how it plays out.

The other night at a writers’ thing I read a piece I’ve recently written aloud. Someone reported afterward, as a criticism, he had counted 75 words to one of my sentences. My thought was: And?

Composing

Putting pieces in a specific order at a specific time.

How does that work?

I was reading a short story and, finished, went back to a phrase that stayed with me: a sliver of birthday cake, and next thing I knew I was writing a poem about a satin slipper.

How did that happen? I don’t really want to know. The best times are those with mystery.