Writing About Your Life: A Journey into the Past PDF
Preview Writing About Your Life: A Journey into the Past
BELVEDERE TIBURON LIBRARY 3 11 02284 9374 Writing About Your Life A Journey into the Past William Zinsser On Writing Well AUTHOR OF U.S. $23.95 T his 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. His 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. It’s a journey full of surprising turns. William Zinsser recalls his school days and influential teachers, his army days in North Africa and Italy, his newspaper days with the legendary New York Herald Tribune, his teaching days at Yale, his role in a Woody Allen movie, his years as a baseball addict and his late-in-life career playing jazz piano. He also recalls a lifetime of exotic travels through Africa, Asia and the South Seas, evoking a gallery of memorable people— a dance teacher in Bali, a French explorer in Tahiti, a Vietnamese poet in Hanoi—whose stories moved him with their power. 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. Writing About Your Life BOOKS IN PRINT BY WILLIAM ZINSSER On Writing Well HarperCollins Writing to Learn HarperCollins Mitchell Ruff Paul Dry Books (formerly Willie and Dwike) Spring Training University of Pittsburgh Press American Places The Akadine Press Easy to Remember: The Great American Songwriters and Their Songs David R. Godine, Publisher Writing About Your Life Marlowe & Company EDITED BY WILLIAM ZINSSER Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir Houghton Mifflin Worlds of Childhood: The Art and Craft of Writing for Children Houghton Mifflin Going on Faith: Writing as a Spiritual Quest Marlowe & Company AUDIO BOOKS BY WILLIAM ZINSSER On Writing Well HarperCollins Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2018 with funding from Kahle/Austin Foundation https://archive.org/details/writingaboutyourOOzins_O Writing About Your Life A Journey into the Past William Zinsser Marlowe & Company New York Writing About Your Life: A Journey into the Past Copyright © 2004 by William K. Zinsser Published by Marlowe & Company An Imprint of Avalon PubHshing Group Incorporated 245 West 17th Street • nth Floor New York, NY 10011-5300 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in whole or in part without written permission from the publisher, except by reviewers who may quote brief excerpts in connection with a review in a newspaper, magazine, or electronic publication; nor may any part of this book be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or other, without written permission from the publisher. Portions of this book first appeared in the New York Times, Travel Holiday, the American Scholar, the Sewanee Review, Lingua Franca, the Atlantic Monthly and in the books Spring Training and Going on Faith. The passage by Russell Baker in chapter 10 and the passage by Ian Frazier in chapter 12 are from Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir, edited by William Zinsser (Houghton Mifflin, 1987,1995,1998). Copyright © 1987 by Russell Baker. Reprinted by permission of Don Congdon Associates, Inc. Copyright © 1998 by Ian Frazier. Reprinted by permission of the author. The passage by Pablo Neruda in chapter 12 is an excerpt from The Gift by Lewis Hyde. Copyright © 1979, 1980, 1983 by W. Lewis Hyde. Used by permission of Random House, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available. ISBN 1-56924-468-5 987654321 Designed by Simon M. Sullivan Printed in the United States of America Distributed by Publishers Group West
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