Zinsser’s Writing Places

Posted on | June 23, 2009 | No Comments

Like his predecessors William Strunk and E.B. White, William Zinsser is probably better known today for his style manual than he is for his many articles and books.¹ Long before he thought of writing a guide to writing Zinsser was a prolific and accomplished author. He worked at the Herald Tribune for more than a decade after World War II. After leaving the Tribune, he wrote for such magazines as The Saturday Evening Post and Life. He wrote books commissioned by such places as “The Book of the Month Club.” After nearly a decade of freelance writing he moved to Yale, where for the first time he taught non-fiction writing. Toward the end of his time at Yale he was prodded into writing a book on writing, which became his famous On Writing Well. Life then took him back to New York, where he spent the remainder of his career teaching and writing. Judging from this book, that career has entered its golden age but has no intention of stopping anytime soon.

Writing Places offers a breezy tour of one writer’s journey through life, from his early years in North Africa where he had to learn to write in any condition. At one point he was pelted with hot sand as a sirocco blew through his tent. From North Africa to the offices of the Herald Tribune in New York to the loggia in his apartment to Yale and back to New York. Zinsser’s little book illustrates a point he makes in the opening pages:

Some writers think they can only write in a cabin in the woods; other think they can only write within sound of human activity. But finally all of us will write wherever we need to write to pay the bills.

Zinsser conveys many lessons in his little book not by telling the reader what to do, but by showing the reader how he, Zinsser, has done it. Writing, for Zinsser, is not an inspired activity but a craft that can be learnt by anybody. Not everybody will be an excellent stylist, but through daily practice and attention to the craft, everybody can write well. Despite his early ecumenical statement, Zinsser doesn’t place much faith in muses or postcard-perfect vistas. In describing one of his writing places, Zinsser declares:
“a writer who thinks he needs scenery to activate his muse is a good candidate for going broke.”

Predictably, Zinsser’s book shows the reader how to write well. Avoiding lists of guidelines or injunctions, Zinsser simply gets on with writing. His prose style manifests the lessons undergirding his book. At the same time, the entire book represents his attempt, largely successful, to write a memoir, which has occupied much of his teaching in recent years. Writing Places should probably be read alongside Zinsser’s recent Writing About Your Life to appreciate how well Zinsser enacts the lessons he tries to convey in his more pedagogical book.

Most interesting in this book is Zinsser’s thoughts, often implicit, on success. Early in his career as a freelance writer, when he worried about supporting his wife and children, he adopted an approach that would infuse his entire career. In talking about having to deal with editors:

My job was to deliver their product and get on with my life. When one of my articles came back in the mail with its timeworn reply—“I’m afraid it’s not quite right for us” or “It doesn’t quite suit our needs at the moment”—I didn’t rail at the editor for not recognizing the jewel he or she had been offered. I wrote a new cover letter to another magazine and got the article back in the mail by noon.

That same attitude helped him find jobs at Yale, “The Book of the Month Club,” and helped him publish numerous articles and books on all manner of subject. It is an attitude that separates successful successful people from those who want to be successful.¹

Zinsser’s book is not perfect. It risks being a bit too breezy; a bit more substance would often have been nice. He dwells on his time at Yale, offering details that shift the focus from writing to the personalities at Yale. That chapter of his life would make fascinating reading and offer a window onto college life at a particular moment, but Writing Places is simply not the place to tell that story. The latter half of the book also risks becoming not a Zinsser’s memoir but a story about On Writing Well. Writing and rewriting and revising that book consumed a large part of Zinsser’s life, but it remained only one part of a larger life, a life eclipsed by one small book.

If you haven’t heard of William Zinsser or if you are not particularly interested in the craft of writing, Writing Places will not appeal to you. If, however, you have any experience with Zinsser’s other writings or want to see how a fine stylist has gone about being a successful writer, sit down with this book for few enjoyable hours.

Buy your copy of Writing Places from Amazon to help Fund My Shelves.

Also mentioned above is Zinsser’s Writing About Your Life:


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¹Strunk was not a prolific author but was more active as an editor. Despite the fact that E.B. White wrote both Charlotte’s Web and Stuart Little, I am willing to bet most people, when asked, would associate his name first and foremost with his editions of Strunk’s style manual rather than his children’s books. Indeed, The Elements of Style is probably as frequently referred to by its informal name “Strunk and White.”⇑
²This is a version of the now threadbare, pseudo-inspirational quotation “Winners lose more than losers do.” These days Terry Paulson is trying to take credit for this line, though I first heard it decades ago from a woman who knew little about inspiration (and nothing about Terry Paulson) but had a remarkably pragmatic approach to life.⇑

Septa R5

Posted on | June 16, 2009 | No Comments

Pluto is icy chunk of space debris!

Posted on | June 16, 2009 | No Comments

Gover Schilling provides a robust history of the search for new planets that has occupied astronomers since William Herschel discovered Uranus, quite by accident in March 1781. Unlike Wientraub, who surveys the history of how planets were defined (see the review of Weintraub’s book), Schilling seems to know what a planet is and assumes that all rational astronomers will likewise know what a planet is. According to Schilling, Pluto is not a planet. Moreover, reasonable astronomers have raised concerns about Pluto’s status for decades until finally, “[i]n the early 1990s, what had been suspected for many years now proved indisputable—Pluto was only one object in an enormous population of small ice dwarfs in the outer regions of the solar system.” Pluto “now has the second-rate status of a dwarf planet.” Schilling’s conclusion will clearly ruffle the feathers of many Plutophiles while, at the same time, garner the cheers of Plutophobes.

Schilling’s book provides a straight-forward narrative, largely triumphalist and rationalist, celebrating the progress of planetary science in exploring the outer reaches of the solar system. He lays the foundations for his project in the opening 25 or so pages, with the discovery of Uranus and then Neptune. In chapter four Schilling already casts doubt on Pluto’s status by portraying Percival Lowell as a man fascinated by a mysterious Planet X. While he stops short of claiming that Lowell fabricated the orbital deviations he found in Uranus, Schilling certainly draws them into question and portrays Clyde Tombaugh’s discovery of Pluto as largely accidental:

Tombaugh had not taken much notice of Lowell’s calculations. Lowell had first predicted that Planet X would be found in the constellation Libra, but changed his mind a few years later, deciding that the search should focus on Gemini. Tombaugh found this all a little vague, and resolved to search the entire zodiac.

By page 37, Pluto has been discovered and is already in jeopardy: “But it did not take long for doubt to set in. PLanet X proved to move in an elongated and highly inclined orbit, and was much smaller than had been expected … [T]he discovery of Planet X so close to the predicted position must have been sheer coincidence.”

The remaining 240 pages detail the discovery of additional small objects around the edges of the solar system, including Pluto’s partner Charon, Nix and Hydra, other ice dwarfs, comets and the Oort Cloud, asteroids, the Kuiper Belt, and other flotsam and jetsam from the early formation of the solar system. The hero in Schilling’s story is technology: as astronomers are able to exploit increasingly powerful technological tools they discover more about the nature of the solar system. Tombaugh’s mechanical blink comparator is replaced by more modern comparators, which are then replaced by CCD digital images and software analysis. Better and larger telescopes are built and continue to be built, telescopes that allow for greater resolution of distant objects. Urbain Le Verrier’s painstaking mathematical analysis is replaced by Robin Canup’s and Hal Levinson’s computer-driven theoretical models that enable astronomers to simulate scenarios at will.

Along the way, a number of people play supporting roles, people whose lives are caricatured in the opening pages of many chapters. Intended to put human faces on the march of science, these exaggerated snapshots detract from Schilling’s argument and suggest that he doesn’t, in fact, think humans play any real role in science:

Robin Canup has difficulty keeping her hands still. On her computer monitor, a cosmic ballet is being played out before her eyes. There is no sound, but you can easily imagine music accompanying the dance. One minute it is subdued and serene, like an ethereal violin, and then it is dynamic and dramatic, with a lot of brass and percussion. Two dancers fall into each other’s arms and a shower of sparks explode into surrounding space. Glowing fragments trace graceful paths across the three-dimensional stage, under the strict choreography of the force of gravity. Some of them merge to form a new ballerina, and the performance ends with an intimate pas de deux. Robin sits transfixed to the screen as the drama unfolds, her shoulders and wrists swaying slightly back and forth in the heavenly breeze, as though her slender body wishes to join the dance.

Directly below this paragraph is a picture of Robin Canup dancing in “Paquita.” Often the details seem contrived, too quotidian to have been remarkable and remembered by the people involved. If these banal minutia (e.g., Mike Brown’s wife saying “That’s nice honey. You won’t forget to pick up some milk on your way home this afternoon now, will you?”) have not been fabricated by Schilling, they have been embellished by the people involved.

Although Schilling gently chastises the people, astronomers and non-astronomers alike, whose emotional attachment to Pluto prevents them from seeing it as just another small icy rock, he has himself an emotional attachment to science’s power to uncover inexorably the truth. Consequently, he is as invested in arguing that Pluto is not a planet as its defenders are committed to saving Pluto. At no point does he seem to ask: Why do we care wether or not Pluto is a planet? Or even: What is a planet and how has the definition varied over time? Such an omission is regrettable, particularly since so much time an energy was devoted to defining a planet preceding and during the IAU 2006 meeting in Prague.

The blurb on the publisher’s website claims that this book reads like a scientific detective story and offers insight into the minds and motivations of the planetary astronomers investigating the outer reaches of the solar system. That claim is rather inflated and a bit misleading. If, however, you are looking for a basic narrative of the recent developments in astronomy that have been enlisted in the debates about Pluto’s planetary status, The Hunt for Planet X will fulfill your needs. If you are looking for something more philosophical, or if you are committed to Pluto as a planet, you will be somewhat disappointed.

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Dogwood Flower

Posted on | June 15, 2009 | No Comments

Reflectorman

Posted on | June 11, 2009 | No Comments

Power lines and insulators

Posted on | June 10, 2009 | No Comments

Water drop

Posted on | June 9, 2009 | No Comments

Russo’s That Old Cape Magic

Posted on | June 9, 2009 | No Comments

It pays to have friends who run bookstores. One of mine just gave me a pre-release copy of Richard Russo’s That Old Cape Magic. I confess to wanting to read Russo’s earlier works, especially Empire Falls, but have never got around to it. Consequently, I was delighted when my friend phoned and said she had a copy of his new book.

I also admit that it makes me feel special to have a book that is not due out until the end of the summer. Sort of like I’m part of the cool clique (not that I know what that would feel like, as I’ve never been part of any group that was even vaguely cool).

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  Poincare’s Prize: The Hundred-Year Quest to Solve One of Math’s Greatest Puzzles by George G. Szpiro

Recent books:

• Writing Places: The Life Journey of a Writer and Teacher by William Zinsser
• The Hunt for Planet X: New Worlds and the Fate of Pluto by Govert Schilling
• The House of Wittgenstein: A Family at War by Alexander Waugh
• Man in the Dark: A Novel by Paul Auster
• Curiosity And Wonder from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment by R.J.W. Evans and Alexander Marr (eds.)

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