Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

Some tips from William Zinsser that have helped me as a writer. These tips come from his book, “Writing About Your Life.”

Here are some tips from William Zinsser about writing. They come from:

Writing About Your Life

Marlowe and Company, 1979, ISBN 1-56924-468-5

These tips are for writing memoirs, but I find they apply well to just about any type of writing.

Here’s the advice I give:

Go to your desk on Monday morning and think of some event that’s unusually vivid in your memory…

Call that memory back and write it up. Describe what happened and how you felt about it. What you write doesn’t have to be long: one page, two pages, five pages. But the episode should be complete in itself: one story with a beginning and an end. When you finish it, put what you’ve written in a manila folder and get on with your life: go to work, take a walk, pick up the kids.

On Tuesday morning, do it again…Write up Tuesday’s memory and put it in the folder.

Do that every day…

Keep this up for two months, or three months. Don’t fidget. Don’t be impatient to start writing you “memoir”…Then one day, take all your entries out of the folder and spread them out on the floor…

…you’ll notice that the entries you wrote in the second month are warmer than the ones you wrote in the first month…

…You couldn’t have arrived at the confidence of the second month without doing the stretching exercises of the first month.

There you have it.

1. Write everyday.
2. Write for 6o or 90 days in a row.
3. You will be writing better at the end of the exercise.