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“Writers,” he says, “learn by writing and by imitating others.”<br />
This doesn't mean plagiarizing, but rather reading what interests us and<br />
learning how writers we like work their craft.<br />
For his part, Zinsser learned by imitating the baseball writers he<br />
read in the New York dailies. He spent his youth pouring over the baseball<br />
pages of the New York Herald Tribune, the New York Times and the<br />
Evening Star. He revered the baseball writers of the day; he calls them his<br />
Faulkner and his Hemingway.<br />
He also imitated noted essayist E.B White. Alongside On Writing<br />
Well, the book on writing taking up the most space on shelves in the<br />
country is Strunk and White's The Elements of Style. E.B.White learned<br />
from William Strunk and later updated his teacher's little style handbook.<br />
There is a framed photograph of White at his typewriter in the boathouse<br />
where he wrote hanging on the wall of Zinsser's office. It's right<br />
next to the photo of Babe Ruth at the plate in 1926 at Fenway Park.<br />
Zinsser emulated White for decades. He wanted not only to write<br />
like White, but, he realized too late, he wanted to be E.B. White. He was<br />
in his early 50s when he broke out and finally understood that Bill Zinsser<br />
wasn't E.B. White. This epiphany changed his life.<br />
During a summer vacation from his teaching job at Yale, Zinsser<br />
and his wife had rented a cabin on the shore. He sat in the shed looking<br />
out at the water—much as White had done in his boathouse—and began<br />
writing a book about writing. He wrote a book in Bill Zinsser's voice<br />
telling Bill Zinsser's stories and teaching Bill Zinsser's methods. When it<br />
was done, he was liberated from E.B. White.<br />
That liberation manifests itself in his teaching, particularly in his<br />
ideas about memoir. Zinsser teaches his students to embrace the process<br />
not to fear it, and in doing so he frees them to write. "People are afraid to<br />
sit down and 'commit an act of writing'. They are scared to death they'll<br />
do something wrong. I teach them to write for themselves, to strip away<br />
the clutter and find their humanity."<br />
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