Sometimes the caliber of an author’s writing is so fine, the standard so high, I inch my way down the page, sentence by sentence, stopping, agog, to admire the dexterity. How do they do it?
One area of writing, William Zinsser warns, in which writers—professional and amateur—have difficulty dodging the cliché is location writing. Imagine, then, the joys of reading authors who braved the abyss, and survived, to light the way for the rest of us. Here are three masters.
E. B. White’s contribution comes from Writings from the New Yorker 1925-1976: 3/24/51
A CITY BACK YARD on many a winter’s day is as shabby and unpromising a spot as the eye can rest on: the sour soil, the flaking surfaces of wall and fence, the bare branch, the doom-sprinkled sky. The tone of our back yard this past month, however, has been greatly heightened by the presence of a number of juncos, the dressiest of winter birds. Even the drabbest yardscape achieves something like elegance when a junco alights in the foreground—a beautifully turned-out little character who looks as though he were on his way to an afternoon wedding.
In the mid-sixties, Joan Didion tackled the sprawling state of California itself in a 1966 Saturday Evening Post essay, reprinted in her 1968 book, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, as “Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream.” Quoted here from Zinsser’s On Writing Well:
This is the California where it is easy to Dial-A-Devotion, but hard to buy a book. This is the country of the teased hair and the Capris and the girls for whom all life’s promise comes down to a waltz-length white wedding dress and the birth of a Kimberly or a Sherry or a Debbi and a Tijuana divorce and a return to hairdressers’ school. “We were just crazy kids,” they say without regret, and look to the future. The future always looks good in the golden land, because no one remembers the past. Here is where the hot wind blows and the old ways do not seem relevant, where the divorce rate is double the national average and where one person in every 38 lives in a trailer. Here is the last stop for all those who come from somewhere else, for all those who drifted away from the cold and the past and the old ways. Here is where they are trying to find a new life style, trying to find it in the only places they know to look: the movies and the newspapers.
Finally, a fragment of Zinsser’s citation of non-fiction writer John McPhee’s excerpt from Coming into the Country, about Alaska’s bid for a possible new capital:
A pedestrian today in Juneau, head down and charging, can be stopped for no gain by the wind. There are railings along the streets by which senators and representatives can haul themselves to work. Over the past couple of years, a succession of wind gauges were placed on a ridge above the town. They could measure velocities up to 200 miles per hour. They did not survive.
So how does an author avoid the bogs and sink holes of cliché and write well about a place? Zinsser reduces his advice to two principles: one of style, the other of substance. If you want to soak up more on the topic and don’t have a copy of On Writing Well, follow this link to an article excerpting Zinsser’s wisdom on the subject: https://rolfpotts.com/zinsser-travel-article/