“Most first drafts can be cut by 50 percent without losing any information or losing the author’s voice.”

“But the secret of good writing is to strip every sentence to its cleanest components. Every words that serves no function, every long word that could be a short word, every adverb that carries the same meaning that’s already in the verb, every passive construction that leaves the reader unsure of who is doing what–these are the thousand and one adulterants that weaken the strength of a sentence. And they usually occur in proportion to education and rank,”

“Every writing project must be reduced before you start to write.”

“Most writers sow adjectives almost unconsciously into the soil of their prose to make it more lush and pretty, and the sentences become longer and longer as they fill up with stately elms and frisky kittens and hard-bitten detectives and sleepy lagoons. This is adjective-by-habit – a habit you should get rid of. Not every oak has to be gnarled. The adjective exists solely as a decoration is a self-indulgence for the writer and a burden for the reader.”

“Today the outlandish becomes routine overnight. The humorist is trying to say that it’s still outlandish.”

“Good writing has an aliveness that keeps the reader reading from one paragraph to the next, and it’s not a question of gimmicks to “personalize” the author. It’s a question of using the English language in a way that will achieve the greatest clarity and strength.”

“One man’s romantic sunrise is another man’s hangover.”

“Good writing is lean and confident.”

[perfectpullquote align=”full” bordertop=”false” cite=”” link=”” color=”#4476a5″ class=”” size=”22″]“Look for the clutter in your writing and prune it ruthlessly. Be grateful for everything you can throw away. Reexamine each sentence you put on paper. Is every word doing new work? Can any thought be expressed with more economy? Is anything pompous or pretentious or faddish? Are you hanging on to something useless just because you think it’s beautiful? Simplify, simplify.”[/perfectpullquote]

“Adjectives are used as nouns (“greats,” “notables”). Nouns are used as verbs (“to host”), or they are chopped off to form verbs (“enthuse,” “emote”), or they are padded to form verbs (“beef up,” “put teeth into”). This is a world where eminent people are “famed” and their associates are “staffers,” where the future is always “upcoming” and someone is forever “firing off” a note. Nobody in America has sent a note or a memo or a telegram in years. Famed diplomat Condoleezza Rice, who hosts foreign notables to beef up the morale of top State Department staffers, sits down and fires off a lot of notes. Notes that are fired off are always fired in anger and from a sitting position. What the weapon is I’ve never found out.”

“Nobody turns so quickly into a bore as a traveler home from his travels. He enjoyed his trip so much that he wants to tell us all about it—and “all” is what we don’t want to hear. We only want to hear some.”

“But nothing has replaced the writer. He or she is still stuck with the same old job of saying something that other people will want to read.”

“The adjective that exists solely as decoration is a self-indulgence for the writer and a burden for the reader.”

“I use “perpetrated” because it’s the kind of word that passive-voice writers are fond of. They prefer long words of Latin origin to short Anglo-Saxon words—which compounds their trouble and makes their sentences still more glutinous. Short is better than long.”

“Writing is an intimate transaction between two people, conducted on paper…”

“Go to your desk on Monday morning and write about some event that’s still vivid in your memory. It doesn’t have to be long—three pages, five pages—but it should have a beginning and an end. Put that episode in a folder and get on with your life. On Tuesday morning, do the same thing. Tuesday’s episode doesn’t have to be related to Monday’s episode. Take whatever memory comes calling; your subconscious mind, having been put to work, will start delivering your past. Keep this up for two months, or three months, or six months. 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 their folder and spread them on the floor. (The floor is often a writer’s best friend.) Read them through and see what they tell you and what patterns emerge. They will tell you what your memoir is about—and what it’s not about.”

“It requires writers to do two things that by their metabolism are impossible. They must relax, and they must have confidence.”

“There is no minimum length for a sentence that’s acceptable in the eyes of God.”

“Don’t fight such a current if it feels right. Trust your material if it’s taking you into terrain you didn’t intend to enter but where the vibrations are good. Adjust your style accordingly and proceed to whatever destination you reach. Don’t become the prisoner of a preconceived plan. Writing is no respecter of blueprints.”

“But apart from these lazinesses of logic, what makes the story so tired is the failure of the writer to reach for anything but the nearest cliche’. “Shouldered his way,” “only to be met,” “crashing into his face,” “waging a lonely war,” “corruption that is rife,” “sending shock waves,” “New York’s finest,” – these dreary phrases constitute writing at its most banal. We know just what to expect. No surprise awaits us in the form of an unusual word, an oblique look. We are in the hands of a hack, and we know it right away, We stop reading.”

“You won’t write well until you understand that writing is an evolving process, not a finished product. Nobody expects you to get it right the first time, or even the second time.”

“Soon after you confront the matter of preserving your identity, another question will occur to you: “Who am I writing for?” It’s a fundamental question, and it has a fundamental answer: You are writing for yourself. Don’t try to visualize the great mass audience. There is no such audience—every reader is a different person. Don’t try to guess what sort of thing editors want to publish or what you think the country is in a mood to read. Editors and readers don’t know what they want to read until they read it. Besides, they’re always looking for something new. Don’t worry about whether the reader will “get it” if you indulge a sudden impulse for humor. If it amuses you in the act of writing, put it in. (It can always be taken out, but only you can put it in.) You are writing primarily to please yourself, and if you go about it with enjoyment you will also entertain the readers who are worth writing for. If you lose the dullards back in the dust, you don’t want them anyway. This”

[perfectpullquote align=”left” bordertop=”false” cite=”” link=”” color=”#4476a5″ class=”” size=”22″]“The most important sentence in any article is the first one. If it doesn’t induce the reader to proceed to the second sentence, your article is dead. And if the second sentence doesn’t induce him to continue to the third sentence, it’s equally dead.”[/perfectpullquote]

“Writing is such a lonely work that I try to keep myself cheered up.”

“There are some writers who sweep us along so strongly in their current of energy–Normal mailer, Tom Wolfe, Toni Morrison, William F. Buckley, Jr., Hunter Thompson, David Foster Wallace, Dave Eggers–that we assume that when they go to work the words just flow. Nobody thinks of the effort they made every morning to turn on the switch. You also have to turn on the switch. Nobody is going to do it for you.”

“Nobody has made the point better than George Orwell in his translation into modern bureaucratic fuzz of this famous verse from Ecclesiastes: I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favor to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all. Orwell’s version goes: Objective consideration of contemporary phenomena compels the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.”

“I’m often dismayed by the sludge I see appearing on my screen if I approach writing as a task–the day’s work–and not with some enjoyment.”

“When we say we like a writer’s style, what we mean is that we like his personality as he expresses it on paper. Given a choice between two traveling companions—and a writer is someone who asks us to travel with him—we usually choose the one who we think will make an effort to brighten the trip.”

“And yet, on balance, affirmative action has, I think, been a qualified success.” A 13-word sentence with five hedging words. I give it first prize as the most wishy-washy sentence in modern public discourse,”

“The race in writing is not to the swift but to the original.”

“The final advantage is the same that applies in every other competitive venture. If you would like to write better than everyone else, you have to want to write better than everyone else. You must take an obsessive pride in the smallest details of your craft. And you must be willing to defend what you’ve written against the various middlemen–editors, agents, and publishers–whose sights may be different from yours, whose standards are not as high. Too many writers are browbeaten into settling for less than their best.”

“They sit down to commit an act of literature, and the self who emerges on paper is far stiffer than the person who sat down to write. The problem is to find the real man or woman behind the tension. Ultimately the product that any writer has to sell is not the subject being written about, but who he or she is.”

“Sell yourself, and your subject will exert its own appeal. Believe in your own identity and your own opinions. Writing is an act of ego, and you might as well admit it. Use its energy to keep yourself going.”

[perfectpullquote align=”right” bordertop=”false” cite=”” link=”” color=”#4476a5″ class=”” size=”22″]“Writing is thinking on paper. Anyone who thinks clearly can write clearly, about anything at all.”[/perfectpullquote]

“Most nonfiction writers have a definitiveness complex. They feel that they are under some obligation—to the subject, to their honor, to the gods of writing—to make their article the last word. It’s a commendable impulse, but there is no last word. What you think is definitive today will turn undefinitive by tonight, and writers who doggedly pursue every last fact will find themselves pursuing the rainbow and never settling down to write. Nobody can write a book or an article “about” something. Tolstoy couldn’t write a book about war and peace, or Melville a book about whaling. They made certain reductive decisions about time and place and about individual characters in that time and place—one man pursuing one whale. Every writing project must be reduced before you start to write. Therefore think small. Decide what corner of your subject you’re going to bite off, and be content to cover it well and stop.”

“Never say anything in writing that you wouldn’t comfortably say in conversation. If you’re not a person who says “indeed” or “moreover,” or who calls someone an individual (“he’s a fine individual”), please don’t write it.”

“But on the question of who you’re writing for, don’t be eager to please.”

“Don’t annoy your readers by over-explaining—by telling them something they already know or can figure out.”

“Clichés are the enemy of taste.”

“Myself’ is the refuge of idiots taught early that ‘me’ is a dirty word.”

“Every writer is starting from a different point and is bound for a different destination. Yet many writers are paralyzed by the thought that they are competing with everybody else who is trying to write and presumably doing it better. […] Forget the competition and go at your own pace. Your only contest is with yourself.”

“Truth needs no adornment.”

“Remember that words are the only tools you’ve got. Learn to use them with originality and care. And also remember: somebody out there is listening.”

“Unfortunately, an equally strong negative current—fear—is at work. Fear of writing gets planted in most Americans at an early age, usually at school, and it never entirely goes away. The blank piece of paper or the blank computer screen, waiting to be filled with our wonderful words, can freeze us into not writing any words at all, or writing words that are less than wonderful.”

“An occasional short sentence can carry a tremendous punch. It stays in the reader’s ear.”

“Yet many writers are paralyzed by the thought that they are competing with everybody else who is trying to write and presumably doing it better. This can often happen in a writing class. Inexperienced students are chilled to find themselves in the same class with students whose byline has appeared in the college newspaper. But writing for the college paper is no great credential; I’ve often found that the hares who write for the paper are overtaken by the tortoises who move studiously toward the goal of mastering the craft.”

“There was a time when neighbors took care of each other,” he recalled. [Put “remembered” first to establish a reflective tone.] However, it no longer seemed to happen that way. [The contrast provided by “however” must come first. Start with “however.” Establish local America as well.]] He wondered if it was because everyone in the modern world was so busy. [All of these sentences are the same length and have the same soporific rhythm; turn this into a question?] It occurred to him that people today have so many things to do that they don’t have time for old-fashioned friendship. [The sentence essentially repeats the previous sentence; kill it or warm it up with specific details.] Things didn’t work that way in America in previous eras. [The reader is still in the present; reverse the sentence to tell him that he is now in the past. “America” is no longer needed if inserted earlier.] And he knew that in other countries the situation was very different, as he remembered from his years living in the villages of Spain and Italy. [The reader is still in America. He uses a negative transition word to bring him to Europe. The sentence is also too flaccid. Break it into two sentences]? It almost seemed to him that as people became wealthier and built their homes further apart, they became more isolated from the essentials of life. [Irony has been put off too long. Plant the irony early. Refine the paradox about wealth]. And there was another thought that troubled him. [This is the real point of the paragraph; it signals to the reader that it is important. Avoid the weak construction “there was.”] His friends had abandoned him when he needed them most during his recent illness. [Reshape to end with “more”; the last word is the one that stays in the reader’s ear and gives the sentence its punch. Hold the illness for the next sentence; it’s a separate thought]. It was almost as if they found him guilty of doing something shameful. [Introduce illness here as the reason for the shame. omit “guilty”; it is implied.] He remembered reading somewhere about societies in primitive parts of the world in which the sick were shunned, though he had never heard of such a ritual in America. [The sentence begins slowly and remains lazy and boring. Break it up into shorter units. Break the ironic point.]” is implied.] He remembered reading somewhere about societies in primitive parts of the world in which the sick were shunned, though he had never heard of such a ritual in America. [The sentence begins slowly and remains lazy and boring. Break it up into shorter units. Break the ironic point.]” is implied.] He remembered reading somewhere about societies in primitive parts of the world in which the sick were shunned, though he had never heard of such a ritual in America. [The sentence begins slowly and remains lazy and boring. Break it up into shorter units. Break up the ironic point].”

“Nobody told all the new computer writers that the essence of writing is rewriting.”

“Don’t start a sentence with “however”—it hangs there like a wet dishrag. And don’t end with “however”—by that time it has lost its howeverness.”

“Take an adult chemist or physicist or engineer and ask him or her to write a report, and you’ll see something close to panic. “No! Don’t make us write!” they say. They also have a common affliction: fear of writing.”

“And yet, on balance, affirmative action has, I think, been a qualified success.” A 13-word sentence with five hedging words. I give it first prize as the most wishy-washy sentence in modern public discourse, though a rival would be his analysis of how to ease boredom among assembly-line workers: “And so, at last, I come to the one firm conviction that I mentioned at the beginning: it is that the subject is too new for final judgments.”