Summaries and Customer Reviews are supplied by Amazon.com
Summary:
This highly original book by William Zinsser, author of the classic guide On Writing Well, tells you how to write about the people and places and events in your life that have been important to you—whether you’re writing a memoir, a family history or just a recollection of experiences you’d like to preserve or more fully understand. Zinsser’s method is to take you on a memoir of his own: 13 chapters in which he recalls dramatic, amusing and often inspiring moments in his long and unusually varied life as a writer, editor, teacher and traveler.
Along the way in these memoirs William Zinsser pauses to explain the technical decisions he made as he wrote them. They are the same decisions you’ll have to make as you write about your own life: matters of selection, condensation, focus, attitude, voice and tone. Written with elegance, warmth and humor, Writing About Your Life gives you the tools to organize and recover your past and the confidence to believe in your life narrative. It also gives you permission—through the example of a life enriched by change and risk—to make bold life choices of your own.
Customer Reviews:
Average Customer Rating:
First rate
Customer Rating:
Zinsser weaves "how to" tips and discussion into his own memoirs. His section on cutting a broad project (write about baseball) down to manageable size (Pirates in spring training) is excellent for its step-by-step thinking process. He offers equally good thinking on many other things that can cause perplexion.
a wonderfully smart tool
Customer Rating:
If one is interested in learning how to write about ones' life (memories) this book is fantastic. Its both interesting and informitive. I really enjoy it and I'm hard to please.
Won't Learn Much From Reading This
Customer Rating:
This book is a bunch of introspection. While he may be telling some interesting stories, the book will not teach you how to write a memoir or anything else for that matter. I have three master's degrees and a BA in English. Getting none of those degrees taught me to write. You learn to write from imitating good writing. If you want to be a writer, then read good writing of the type you'd like to write. I've found a few of technique books to be useful: The First Five Pages, Technique in Fiction, and Self-Editing for Fiction writers. Reading while writing helps a great deal. And reading as a writer helps. Also, developing control over sentence structure is a must, along with your imagination and mature insights.
Writing About Your Life: A Journey into the Past
Customer Rating:
William Zinsser is the premiere writing coach of our day!
Great, but not so great...
Customer Rating:
No doubt Zinsser knows how to teach writing, but I'm amazed over the gap between his writing principles and the style with which he writes about his own life. Such a small portion of the book teaches how to write well while the greater amount is devoted to example. When Zinsser writes about his own life, I can hardly stand reading it anymore because it is so boring. At first I thought his life was going to be fascinating to read about since he has done so much. However, he seems to have mastered the art of taking something with so much potential and turning it into material too dry and stale to enjoy. What this book has taught me is that I'd rather read an entertaining story written with bad grammar and spelling any day over something an English teach would give an A+ on which will put you to sleep. Sorry Zinsser for such harsh critism, but I know English teachers...they aren't too sparing on critism either.
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