In an attempt to write on this page coherently, I read all of the following books and took notes during each:

• On Writing - Stephen King
• On Writing Well - William Zinsser
• The elements of style - Strunk and White
• Zen In The Art of Writing - Ray Bradbury
• Creative nonfiction : researching and crafting stories of real life - Philip Gerard
• How to write a lot - Paul Silvia

I have roughly sorted this list by “how many people on the internet recommend these books as the entry point for aspiring writers”. I’m going to split the points I share here into 3 categories:

• What these books (mostly) agree on
• Where these books clash
• A breakdown of who I would recommend each of these books to

What these books (mostly) agree on

Scheduling, and writer’s block

The first point is really boring and “uncool”, which I think makes it even clearer that it’s what matters if everyone’s still willing to say it… To write well, you need to write regularly and follow a schedule. That’s it.

On this topic, Zinsser hedges. He notes that sometimes writing is hard, and he pushes through because it’s his job, but gives an anecdote about doing a panel with a writer who was all in favour of “going with the flow” and only writing when it was fun. Stephen King and Ray Bradbury, both American authors of a tougher, gnarlier generation, don’t mince their words. Bradbury recommends 1-2,000 words a day, a short story every week, all year. He considers himself to have produced nothing properly original or creative in his first million words. King recommends a novel should only be written at a pace of at least 2 hours a day, 6 days a week, so that it reads like a cohesive project. He argues that you change as a person enough month to month that if you spend 18 months writing your manuscript, the writer at the start will be writing differently from the writer at the end.

I find his argument compelling that if you’re going to take writing seriously, you must allocate significant time and have a professional attitude. No disrespect to anyone like this, but I bet you know at least one person who’s told you they’d always like to write a book or “fancy themselves as an author one day”. The ubiquity of this sentiment suggests that the just-write-when-you-feel-like-it structure doesn’t work for most people. On the flipside, have you ever met anyone who sets aside 12 hours a week for their hobby and sucks at it? I bet any guitarists, drummers, singers, actors or painters you know who do it 12 hours or more a week are pretty damn good.

The final thing I’ll say on the matter is regarding Paul Silvia’s particularly spicy opinion: “Writer’s block only happens to people who believe in writer’s block”. He speaks from the perspective of a writer of academic literature and non-fiction, which does caveat his audacious claim. But his idea is that people who strictly enforce a “sit down and work on my writing for 2 hours this morning” policy don’t get stuck the way flexibly scheduled people do. Stephen King thinks writer’s block is because “a writer is scared of a bad idea, is being a perfectionist, or hasn’t read enough”. When he got stuck and fell out of love with a long manuscript, he put it away and kept writing and kept reading other things, and described the moment of realisation how to fix his “writer’s block” piece as a sudden revelation that hit him months later.

Read read read

The next, relatively unglamorous, universally agreed-upon trait of a writer is to be a reader. If you want to write documentaries… watch documentaries. If you want to write horror, read horror. This is a point that King, Gerard and Zinsser all strongly advocate for reading about what you write.

Zinsser explains that every genre has its techniques, its phrasings and mannerisms, and we all apply these in day-to-day life, but the writer needs to try and absorb their genre until the vocabulary that’s acceptable, the structure, the sentence lengths… all naturally enter the writer’s words. An example of this would be that you don’t write your emails the same way you would speak to a child, or the same way you’d give a speech. Even within emails, you don’t invite your colleagues to drink the same way you tell someone they are being made redundant. We quietly know the words that feel right and wrong to use in these places, and if you consume your genre vociferously, you’ll learn these nuances for your own genre.

Bradbury actually goes one further in a way that wholeheartedly resonates with me as a quizzer and a natural “rabbit hole researcher”. Bradbury says:

“In your reading, find books to improve your color sense, your sense of shape and size in the world. Why not learn about the sense of smell and hearing?” “(Read) Books of essays. Here again, pick and choose, amble along the centuries.“ “You can never tell when you might want to know the finer points of being a pedestrian, keeping bees, carving headstones, or rolling hoops. “

I personally don’t think this is a stretch to call ‘wider advice for life’ than just for the writer. He advocates for a sort of healthy exploration of history, crafts and the sciences in a way that likely would benefit far more people than just writers. Whether you’re willing to go down the Bradbury route or the simpler “read the topics you write” route, it’s universally agreed that reading is one of the greatest tools for a writer.

How to write for a Target Audience

The answer? You don’t. End of section. The message strongly advocated for by Gerard and Zinsser is to write for yourself. Trust that your enthusiasm will naturally carry it to its correct audience. As previously mentioned, Bradbury thinks style and making your work appealing to the audience comes from copious practice, and a trust that it will just happen at some point. Gerard said:

“Your passion is your voice”

Which is lovely, and paired with Zinsser’s view that style is natural, is assuring but doesn’t feel very practical or helpful to the writer. But both offer some practical guidance, too. Gerard encourages the aspiring writer to ask themselves “who am I? Why am I writing this? What do I believe in? Where is my passion?“. The idea is that the writer who is self-aware of these things and introspective is less likely to “erase their voice” through not including their own passion and emotion in the piece.

Zinsser encourages the slightly unusual advice of writing lots in First Person:

“Writing is an act of ego, and you might as well admit it”

The premise of the argument is that this is the easiest voice to sound natural in. Me telling you a story is easier to make feel natural than me trying to sound like a 3rd person book reviewer I’ve read.

As naturally follows from “just write with your heart” thinking, most of these authors also strongly advocate for writing about any topic you want. Really, the biggest ‘theory’ of Gerard’s book that’s repeated throughout is write what you find interesting, whatever it is. To put it bluntly, he thinks that you could make readers of all backgrounds and ages interested in any topic. This idea that you should never dumb down your concepts is either not mentioned or firmly championed in all 6 listed books. This leaves the question, though… if you’re not meant to shy away from writing Astrophysics when you’re delivering to a non-scientific audience… how will they be able to read it?

How to make your work readable

“The Writer Labours so the reader doesn’t have to” - P. Gerard (Page 97)

Just write in whatever style feels natural, and write about whatever you want… But there are important caveats that all these authors recognise. I’ve not really mentioned Strunk and White’s manual on style yet, and that’s because these two were extremely rigid on how to write, to the point that its critics say it produces technically capable but dull writers. What they do agree on with the more “free yourself” minded books is this:

Kill Clutter. Kill unnecessary Jargon; all terminology present must be irreplaceable in the text.

You do not “Anticipate rain shortly”… you “think it’ll rain soon”. Don’t get drawn into common convoluted phrasing.

Omit needless words… Sounds like killing clutter again, but it’s so important it should be said twice.

It’s extremely common (anecdotally) for people ages 14-21 to write excessively long sentences with 4-5 commas. The best way I’ve found (inspired by these books) is to rethink the comma as a secondary device to a full stop. The same is true with connecting words; if your two points really do follow on from each other, then they will do so without a “hence” or “therefore”. This paragraph has no connectors and minimal commas, but it should not feel jilted to read. I’m still trying to work on it, and much of the work on this blog fails at this criterion, but that’s why I didn’t write any of these books about being a writer.

The promise of the above techniques is that, whether it’s astrophysics or gardening, by removing all unnecessary terminology, drifty rambling sentences and cliché phrases, you will make something that is readable to anybody with good reading comprehension. The secondary promise that follows from this is that your reward is a reader who doesn’t feel belittled or talked down to. It’s well known that everyone likes to be treated as a capable adult, especially before we’ve become one.

Where these books clash

Be a word nerd or don’t, “nerds” didn’t exist before 1950

William Zinsser probably would never admit such a thing… but he is anti-Strunk-and-White, which is a scandalous idea in the writing world. His chapter on the development and changes of language was the most damning demolition of Strunk and White’s book, though. Their 1959 handbook is a minor reworking of a 1920s piece, and they view vocabulary and sentence structure ideas as fixed facts that should be adhered to.

Zinsser, however, was a member of a dictionary committee for the appraisal of “usage” of words in the 1960s and 70s. 53% of the committee rejected the term ‘Senior Citizen’, they admitted the hip new word… Trek. Be honest, you have said trek before without giving a second thought to its age or origin. It just is a word that’s there, except we borrowed it from the Dutch relatively recently.

The same changes occur in structures and acceptable suffix-ing. We shouldn’t get hung up on 100-year-old ideas on sentences. Not least because I just said “get hung up on”, which would offend Strunk in at least two different ways, but (hopefully) it didn’t feel unnatural to you, and therefore it was correctly used.

On Editing

It might not shock you to hear that Ray “Write 52 stories a year” Bradbury is much less keen on writers stopping to contemplate. Perhaps one quick revision before that 7-10,000 word piece gets sent off to a newspaper. Zinsser lives on the other end of the spectrum. I suspect “On Writing Well” is short because it would take Zinsser a lifetime to produce a Lord of the Rings-type trilogy. Every sentence has its purpose, and he implies that much of his work has been through 4 or 5 revisions.

Gerard recommends editing in chunks. Regularly go back and edit the small chunk you’ve written that day or week, and then if it’s a large piece, do a large revision of the whole thing at the end too.

King’s view on editing shares one trait with Gerard, but he makes it his number 1 editing manifesto point: give the piece room to breathe. He says all books should rest in a drawer for 6 weeks before you look at them again to make a second draft. Gerard acknowledges it’s easier to cut out words once you’ve given yourself some time to be less attached to them. For King, it sounds like some kind of burnout prevention recovery process, as much as it is a literary one.

Silvia speaks mainly of writing academically and producing high volume, so much of his focus is on the efficiencies that can be gained by learning to make the first draft already great, so it only needs 2 sets of revisions, not 4. I got the impression he saw reducing time editing as a goal, while Zinsser and Gerard actively enjoy taking the metaphorical scalpel to their page.

Obviously, part of the fluctuation in advice is related to differences in genre. If articles were only placed on this blog with a 6-week resting time between drafts, then it would be quite an empty blog. Another core reason that opinions are split on editing, I think, is technological. Ray Bradbury is from an era where his stories were typewriter projects, which are significantly more arduous to edit than computer documents. It is plausible he may have edited more had it been possible to. The flipside, though, is the argument that technology means you need to edit less, because you can rely on various internet and offline tools to fix all your typos and tell you when you’ve written something nonsensical.

I think my personal takeaway from this is that there’s no correct way to go about editing, other than making sure you do it if the piece is important to you. Let the stakes of the piece and your own personal whims decide where you sit on the “churn it out” to “surgically dismantle every sentence” spectrum.

I will admit that I have not once ever edited a YouTube Shorts script. I want them to feel off the cuff, and as long as the sentence is possible for me to read off the autocue, that’s good for me on such low-stakes matters.

Do you bend to the will of the people, or bend the people to your will?

It shouldn’t be too surprising that something as subjective as stubbornness on your own ideas is inconsistent between writers. Stephen King is adamant in “On Writing” that you should never write something because that’s what’s in. You may argue that King continuing to stick loyally to horror once he found success would be catering to public demand, but from his anecdotes, I really do get the impression he always wanted to write horror and would’ve done it his whole life even if sales started to slump.

The case for never yielding to the commercial market is that it will become inauthentic, and hence worse.

“If you are writing without zest, without gusto, without love, without fun, you are only half a writer. It means you are so busy keeping one eye on the commercial market, or one ear peeled for the avant-garde coterie, that you are not being yourself “ - Zen In the Art of Writing Page 4.

This passage is what Bradbury has to say on the matter. He, too, is suspicious that any fiction you write to sell will lack the necessary heart to sell. Philip Gerard takes a more subtle approach. He mostly is in favour of “find the right publisher for your ideas, rather than the right ideas for a publisher”… but once you’ve got a written script, he recommends a range of ways to consider how to market it. Instead of changing your script, it’s more about changing your message about that script.

He essentially says: “In the real world, whether you like it or not, a book will end up in a genre on a computer database”. He goes into quite extensive detail on the process of titling work and using the title and subjective ways to classify the genre of your story to get the most out of it. Bradbury focused on the heart and gusto of the writer, but we must acknowledge that he aspired to, and made it into the science fiction magazine “Amazing Stories” that had a large influence on what science fiction people read at the time. Hugo Gernsback was notoriously opinionated about what should count as good sci-fi, and to get into his very successful magazine, you had to bend your pieces to his (agreed to be very capable) viewpoint.

I wouldn’t wish to go as far as calling him a hypocrite. I think the point here is that Bradbury was writing what he loved… Science Fiction. And only then was he using editing to make his work meet the demanded style for “good sci-fi”. The recommendation, therefore, is that someone who doesn’t love sci–fi should never try to do what he did to be published. But if you’ve got something you would really enjoy writing about that’s got commercial potential: Don’t shy away from tweaking, titling and reframing your work to bring you that financial success.

A breakdown of who I would recommend each of these books to

Elements of Style

Starting with the book I’ve mostly mentioned with suspicion so far, Elements of Style. This book is short and easy to digest and likely will make anyone who stopped writing after GCSEs a better writer. There is a strong argument that if you first learn to write to strict rules, once you’re a coherent deliverer of your message, it is then that you can start breaking the rules. Even for this audience, I would encourage you to read it and view its preachings as “One of the many possible ways to write well” rather than the way to write well. I personally struggled to engage with it, it did not inspire anything in me.

On Writing Well

At the other end of the inspiration spectrum is Zinsser’s On Writing Well. Please read it if you’ve got this far in my piece, you’re interested enough in the topic that you should give it a go. It’s short, wittily written with his extremely edited and curated style, and the book inspired me into action in a way that none of the other writing books did. His “Bracketing Technique” for editing is good fun, and I think this book changed how I wrote my university essays, as well as all other media. There isn’t really an age or education limit on this book either, if you can read this article… His book is easier.

On Writing

This book is laced with personal anecdotes that make it so much more than a writing book if you’re a Stephen King fan. But if you’re not, then especially the long diversion to discuss how a major car crash disrupted his writing of the book feels like it gets in the way of his writing opinions. He is blunt in this book just as he is in much of his fiction. If you need a guy to tell you to pull yourself together, start writing like you mean it and go send 300 emails to potential publishers and that you can become a writer, but it’s time to damn well grab it by the scruff of the neck… This is the book for you. I wasn’t really in that stage when I encountered this book, so it had less of an effect on me, but I found the directness refreshing, and it made it an easier read.

How to Write A Lot - Paul Silvia

This book is tailored to academics, as in PhD+ audiences, really. I was hoping that it would have value to me when writing university essays, and it sort of did, but many of the ideas in this book do overlap with Zinsser’s technical advice and King’s “just pull yourself together” advice, so in most cases, I would recommend reading the other two ahead of this. I do think it’s worth a read for the minority subsection of people reading this article who are starting/part of the academia process. I would say that none of the information in this book is bad. I don’t have many criticisms other than its overlap with other texts.

Creative Non-Fiction: Researching and crafting stories of real life

This is a pleasant read, and it has information on the legalities of non-fiction writing, conducting interviews and provides an insight into the journalism side of his work that none of these other books has. If you’re interested in documentaries, newsprint pieces, exposés or non-fiction book writing, this book pairs well with Zinsser’s. They are relatively aligned ideologically but delve into different aspects of the practical process, and this book is a couple of decades newer. I do think this book could be of value to fiction writers too, if they just skip chapters 4,5 and 7. A lot of the best fiction out there aims to make you forget that you’re reading fiction until you put the book down and remember where you are. Accordingly, it can serve you well to borrow ideas from creative non-fiction.

Zen In The Art Of Writing

This book is actually a collection of essays, and it’s quite short, which makes it easily digestible. In a way, it feels like if Stephen King had been told for ‘On Writing’ “you’re only allowed to pick 8 anecdotes for the book”. You get a much more abridged, highlighted version of Bradbury’s life as a writer. Bradbury at times borders on melodramatic, but I found it endearing. His eccentricities help remove any inhibitions he has to share his thoughts, but he does not force ideas about writing on the reader as fact. The book is great for anyone interested in getting that motivational kick mixed with practical ideas, in a much more condensed and consumable package than ‘On Writing’.