Sublime

a career of trying to write clearly and—as an editor and a teacher—to help other people to write clearly. I’ve become a clarity nut.

A story with too many villains falls apart for lack of clarity.

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

(If you want to study the master of the well-constructed chapter—and plot and flat-out gorgeous writing—read Raymond Chandler. The Long Goodbye is my favorite.)

He warned the students against any effort by an editor to inject his own point of view into a writer’s work or to try to make him something other than what he is.

Atwater, trained originally as a background man for news dailies, constructed his own WITW pieces by pouring into his notebooks and word processor an enormous waterfall of prose which was then filtered more and more closely down to 400 words of commercial sediment.