Writing About Your Life A Journey into the Past

by Zinsser, William

• ISBN13: 9781569243794
• ISBN10: 1569243794
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2005-03-28
• Publisher: Da Capo Press

Summary

Written with elegance, warmth, and humor, this highly original "teaching memoir" by William Zinsserrenowned bestselling author of On Writing Well gives you the tools to organize and recover your past, and the confidence to believe in your life narrative. His method is to take you on a memoir of his own: 13 chapters in which he recalls dramatic, amusing, and often surprising moments in his long and varied life as a writer, editor, teacher, and traveler. Along the way, Zinsser pauses to explain the technical decisions he made as he wrote about his life. 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.

Author Biography

William Zinsser began his career with the New York Herald Tribune and wrote regularly for leading magazines. His seventeen books, in addition to On Writing Well, include Writing to Learn, American Places, Mitchell & Ruff: An American Profile in Jazz, and Easy to Remember: The Great American Songwriters and Their Songs. He taught writing at Yale and at the New School. William Zinsser died in 2015.

Table of Contents

Messages on My Machine	1	(10)
Writing About School	11	(18)
The Larger World	29	(14)
A Sense of Enjoyment	43	(20)
Writing About Places	63	(18)
People Along the Way	81	(18)
The Uses of Memory	99	(18)
An Academic Life	117	(24)
Books of the Month	141	(16)
How to Write a Memoir	157	(18)
Writing as a Ministry	175	(16)
Recovering the Past	191	(20)
Change Is a Tonic	211