Growing up, I’ve always been closer to my Dad’s family. – not just because there were more of them (15 siblings!!) but for all the stories and memories I have heard from them. I attempted to put together a book with these stories and memories, but many of a siblings have an inner critic that prevents them from being happy about their writing. I can honestly say that they all write well. Sadly, the reluctance of all to put their thoughts down bombed that project. Now three have them have passed away and taken their memories with them! When I read the extract from On Writing Well which I’ve shared here, I knew I must urge them and other families to write their family memoirs.
Description of book
On Writing Well by William Zinsser has been praised for its sound advice, its clarity and the warmth of its style. It is a book for everybody who wants to learn how to write or who needs to do some writing to get through the day, as almost everybody does in the age of e-mail and the Internet. Whether you want to write about people or places, science and technology, business, sports, the arts or about yourself in the increasingly popular memoir genre, On Writing Well offers you fundamental principles as well as the insights of a distinguished writer and teacher. With more than a million copies sole, this volume has stood the test of time and remains a valuable resource for writers and would-be writers.
About the author
William 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.
Excerpt from On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction
One of the saddest sentences I know is “I wish I had asked my mother about that.” Or my father. Or my grandmother. Or my grandfather. As every parent knows, our children are not as fascinated by our fascinating lives as we are. Only when they have children of their own—and feel the first twinges of their own advancing age—do they suddenly want to know more about their family heritage and its accretions of anecdote and lore. “What exactly were those stories my dad used to tell about coming to America?” “Where exactly was that farm in the Midwest where my mother grew up?”
Writers are the custodians of memory, and that’s what this chapter is about: how to leave some kind of record of your life and of the family you were born into. That record can take many shapes. It can be a formal memoir—a careful act of literary construction. It can be an informal family history, written to tell your children and your grandchildren about the family they were born into. It can be the oral history that you extract by tape recorder from a parent or a grandparent too old or too sick to do any writing. Or it can be anything else you want it to be: some hybrid mixture of history and reminiscence. Whatever it is, it’s an important kind of writing. Memories too often die with their owner, and time too often surprises us by running out.
My father, a businessman with no literary pretensions, wrote two family histories in his old age. It was the perfect task for a man with few gifts for self-amusement. Sitting in his favorite green leather armchair in an apartment high above Park Avenue, he wrote a history of his side of the family—the Zinssers and the Scharmanns—going back to 19th-century Germany. Then he wrote a history of the family shellac business on West 59th Street that his grandfather founded in 1849. He wrote with a pencil on a yellow legal pad, never pausing—then or ever again—to rewrite. He had no patience with any enterprise that obliged him to reexamine or slow down. On the golf course, walking toward his ball, he would assess the situation, pick a club out of the bag and swing at the ball as he approached it, hardly breaking stride.
When my father finished writing his histories he had them typed, mimeographed and bound in a plastic cover. He gave a copy, personally inscribed, to each of his three daughters, to their husbands, to me, to my wife, and to his 15 grandchildren, some of whom couldn’t yet read. I like the fact that they all got their own copy; it recognized each of them as an equal partner in the family saga. How many of those grandchildren spent any time with the histories I have no idea. But I’ll bet some of them did, and I like to think that those 15 copies are now squirreled away somewhere in their homes from Maine to California, waiting for the next generation.
What my father did strikes me as a model for a family history that doesn’t aspire to be anything more; the idea of having it published wouldn’t have occurred to him. There are many good reasons for writing that have nothing to do with being published. Writing is a powerful search mechanism, and one of its satisfactions is to come to terms with your life narrative. Another is to work through some of life’s hardest knocks—loss, grief, illness, addiction, disappointment, failure—and to find understanding and solace.
Not being a writer, my father never worried about finding his “style.” He just wrote the way he talked, and now, when I read his sentences, I hear his personality and his humor, his idioms and his usages, many of them an echo of his college years in the early 1900s. I also hear his honesty. He wasn’t sentimental about blood ties, and I smile at his terse appraisals of Uncle X, “a second-rater,” or Cousin Y, who “never amounted to much.”
Remember this when you write your own family history. Don’t try to be a “writer.” It now occurs to me that my father was a more natural writer than I am, with my constant fiddling and fussing. Be yourself and your readers will follow you anywhere. Try to commit an act of writing and they will jump overboard to get away. Your product is you. The crucial transaction in memoir and family history is the transaction between you and your remembered experiences and emotions.
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Books on writing can be pretty intimidating but On Writing Well seems to be a practical book written in an interesting manner. Will check it out!
I always tend to skip lines in an article if there is unnecessary beating about the bush happening in the text. I always feel we should write the way we speak. To the point, clear and with a good flow of thoughts and ideas. The problem with this is that your moods tend to reflect in your writing! Which, at times, can be a bad for the post.
Good post and this looks like an interesting book.
Memories too often die with their owner – that statement itself strikes a cord. Made me realize there’s no right time to document the stories of my parents. And they sure had a more adventurous life than me. We sometimes think too much about writing styles and grammar, but the more important thing is to get started and write our heart out. Thank you for this post.
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Writing in our own voice is what my friend told me when I began writing, years ago. She being my bestie, told me upfront that whatever I was writing didn’t sound like me, it sounded very artificial.
Writing in your own voice makes your writing authentic. And, that’s how I aspire to write: in my voice, in my style, even if it means using simple words and sentences and a relatable style.
How good it felt reading that passage at the end of this post!
Thank you, Corinne! This makes me feel so good! 🙂