Writing Places: The Life Journey of a Writer and Teacher

Except for the bed—almost certain death for a freelancer—it was a perfect writer’s space, suspended above the hubbub, with a view across fields and privet hedges in every direction.

The numbers that mean the most to me are the hundreds of readers who have written or called to say how much they like the book and how much it helped them. Surprisingly often they use the phrase “You changed my life!” I don’t take that to mean that they found Buddhist enlightenment or quit smoking. What they mainly mean is that I cleaned out the sl

In those books I learned to gather hundreds of facts and to let those facts speak for themselves, unvarnished. I learned to generate emotion by getting other people to tell me things they felt strongly about, not by waxing emotional myself. I learned not to wax. Those

The store was established in 1977 by two men from Bombay, and I once asked one of them, Mohan, how many customers it gets every day; it’s open from 6:00 A.M. to 8:00 P.M. He thought a moment and estimated the number at 4,000. By my own calculations that seemed about right: figure 14 hours times 60 minutes times 4 or 5 customers in any one minute. N

I typed the usual something: “Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of the party.” Or maybe it was the one about the quick brown fox jumping over the lazy sleeping dog, which uses all 26 letters of the alphabet. I don’t think I did “Pack my box with five dozen liquor jugs,” that printer’s darling, which uses the 26 letters more succin

My sentences almost never come out right at first, and I endlessly try to repair them.

I also tried to stop using phrases like “of course” and adverbs like “surprisingly,” “predictably,” “understandably” and “ironically,” which place a value on a sentence before the reader has a chance to read it. Readers, I learned, are not as dumb as the writer thinks; they must be given room to play their role in the act of writing—to discover for

I’ve never let my writing define my life; I want to be a person first and then a writer. I’ve never worked at night or on weekends.

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