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Article Excerpt
"You should write a book about how to write," my wife said in June of 1974 when I was complaining to her, as I often did, that I had run out of things to write about. At that time our family lived at Yale, where I taught writing and was master of Branford College. When the academic year ended, we would move to our summer house in Niantic, Connecticut, and there I would hole up for three months doing writing projects of my own. I worked in a shed (below) at the rear of the property, next to some woods, my Underwood typewriter perched on a green metal typing table under a light bulb suspended from the ceiling.
Caroline's suggestion came from out of nowhere--I had never thought of writing a textbook--but it felt right. I had then been teaching my course at Yale for four years, and I liked the idea of trying to capture it in a book. Many questions, however, occurred to me. Whom would I be writing for? What tone should I adopt? How would my book differ from all the other books on writing?
The dominant manual at that time was The Elements of Style, by E. B. White and William Strunk Jr., which was E. B. White's updating of the guide that had most influenced him, written in 1918 by his English professor at Cornell. My problem was that White was the writer who had most influenced me. His was the style--seemingly casual but urbane and wise--that I had long taken as my own model. How could I not agree with everything he said about language and usage in The Elements of Style? He was Goliath standing in my path.
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But when I analyzed White's book, its terrors evaporated. The Elements of Style was essentially a book of pointers and admonitions: Do this, don't do that. As principles they were invaluable, but they were only principles, existing without context or reality. What his book didn't teach was how to apply those principles to the various forms that nonfiction writing can take, each with its special requirements: travel writing, science writing, business writing, the interview, memoir, sports, criticism, humor. That's what I taught in my course, and it's what I would teach in my book. I wouldn't compete with The Elements of Style; I would complement it.
That decision gave me my pedagogical structure. It also finally liberated me from E. B. White. I saw that I was long overdue to stop trying to write like E. B. White--and trying to be E. B. White, the sage essayist. He and I, after all, weren't really much alike. He was a passive observer of events, withdrawn from the tumult, his world bounded by his office at The New Yorker and his house in rural Maine. I was a participant, a seeker of people and far places, change and risk. At Yale I had also become a teacher, my world enlarged by every new student who came along. The personal voice of the teacher, not the literary voice of the essayist, was the one I wanted narrating my book.
For that I would need a new model--a writer I would emulate not for his subject but for his turn of mind, his enjoyment of what he was teaching. That book wouldn't come from a professor of English, squeezing the language dry with rules of rhetoric. It would have to come from an entirely different field, and it did. My model for On Writing Well was American Popular Song: The Great Innovators, 1900-1950, by the composer Alec Wilder.
Wilder's book was one I had been waiting for all my life, the bible that every collector hopes someone will write in the field of his addiction. I was a collector of songs--the thousands of Broadway show tunes, Hollywood movie songs, and popular standards written in the 40-year golden age from Show Boat in 1926 to the rise of rock in the mid-1960s. As a part-time club pianist, I thought I knew them well--the oldest of old friends. Wilder showed me that I didn't.
To write his book, Wilder examined the sheet music of 17,000 songs, selecting 300 in which he felt that the composer had pushed the form into new territory. Along with his text, he provided the pertinent bars of music to illustrate a passage that he found original or somehow touching. But what I loved most about Wilder's book went beyond his erudition. It was his total commitment to his enthusiasms, as if he were saying: "These are just one man's opinions--take 'em or leave 'em." His pleasure was to praise. That connected with my own principle of not teaching by bad example. I may cite some horrible example of jargon or pomposity to warn against the prevailing bloatage,...
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