OK, let's get back to "On Writing Well"

"Are you hanging on to something useless just because you think it's beautiful?" Zinsser asks at the end of Chapter 3.



Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch (left) had an answer to that back in 1916: Murder your darlings.



That was his answer in his essay "On the Art of Writing."



In writing, style is not extraneous ornamentation, and the rule to be obeyed when it appears in your writing is this: "Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing . . . delete it before sending your manuscript to press. Murder your darlings."



Orwell and Tuchman have their versions of this, and I especially like Tuchman's (thanks again, Andy): "The historian is continually being beguiled down fascinating byways and sidetracks. But the art of writing – the test of the artist – is to resist beguilement and cleave to the subject.”



My wife, the magazine editor, put it this way (in a handout you'll be getting this quarter):



Kill your babies: Reporters work hard gathering information, and often this spawns paragraphs in stories that reporters find too fascinating to leave out. But practice birth control: If the stuff seems extraneous, wanders from the main topic, makes you want to move on to something else, kill it.



Later in his book, Zinsser gives a good rule of thumb on this: Make sure that everything in your writing is doing work. If it's not, get rid of it.