He's survived by a son and daughter, four grandchildren and his wife, Caroline Fraser Zinsser. But it's very important work, I think, writing family history, whether anyone ever sees it or not.īLOCK: William Zinsser died yesterday in New York at the age of 92. The important thing is to be a recorder of the past. Writers are the custodians of memory so it's extremely important to get to people, interview your parents, your grandparents. ZINSSER: One of the saddest sentences I know is I wish I had asked my mother about that. He had just published a new version with a chapter devoted to memoirs.ĬORNISH: He stressed the need to know the stories of our loved ones before it was too late. When the paper folded in the mid-'60s, he became a freelance writer and later taught at Yale.īLOCK: Zinsser updated "On Writing Well" occasionally, and that's what prompted our chat with him back in 2006. He was also a movie critic and editor at the New York Herald Tribune. So I think the important thing is to get it down.īLOCK: More than a million-and-a-half copies of "On Writing Well" have been sold.ĬORNISH: Zinsser wrote 19 books. They don't really know until they see it. Don't try to think what editors want, what publishers want, what agents want. I think you should write whatever you're writing, you should write entirely for yourself. WILLIAM ZINSSER: I don't think you should never worry what people think of you. Leave the reader thinking you had fun while writing, that you enjoyed it.īLOCK: Zinsser elaborated on that point on this program in 2006. It became an immediate classic.īLOCK: His rules were simple - keep it short, don't use jargon.ĬORNISH: Read everything you write out loud.īLOCK: We do a lot of that here. It was called "On Writing Well," and it was first published in 1976. Actually, he'd probably urge me to rethink that sentence so let's try this again. A man who so generously gave us a some simple rules to help us write better died yesterday.
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