On Writing Well, 30th Anniversary Edition: An Informal Guide to Writing Nonfiction

Write about a field you enjoyed in college and always meant to get back to: history, biography, art, archaeology. No subject is too specialized or too quirky if you make an honest connection with it when you write about it.

There is a deep yearning for human contact and a resentment of bombast.

I’d like every writer to visualize one reader struggling to read what he or she has written.

The man or woman snoozing in a chair with a magazine or a book is a person who was being given too much unnecessary trouble by the writer.

Therefore ask yourself some basic questions before you start. For example: “In what capacity am I going to address the reader?” (Reporter? Provider of information? Average man or woman?) “What pronoun and tense am I going to use?” “What style?” (Impersonal reportorial? Personal but formal? Personal and casual?) “What attitude

“that” is by far the predominant usage.

Pocho is ordinarily a derogatory term in Mexico (to define it succinctly, a pocho is a Mexican slob who has pretensions of being a gringo sonofabitch), but I use it in a very special sense. To me that word has come to mean “uprooted Mexican,” and that’s what I have been all my life.

The longer I work at the craft of writing, the more I realize that there’s nothing more interesting than the truth. What people do—and what people say—continues to take me by surprise with its wonderfulness, or its quirkiness, or its drama, or its humor, or its pain.

I’d like every writer to visualize one reader struggling to read what he or she has written.

Get people talking. Learn to ask questions that will elicit answers about what is most interesting or vivid in their lives. Nothing so animates writing as someone telling what he thinks or what he does—in his own words.