Zinsser Wrote Well
In the early 1950s, when my mother lived in mid-town Manhattan, and worked at the United Nations building, her painfully cosmopolitan colleagues would often make jokes at the expense of the most successful magazine in the history of the world. “If you are short of money,” they would say, “you can always write something for the Reader’s Digest.”
As Fate has a sense of humor, the early 1970s found my mother with a son who devoured every issue of the Reader’s Digest that he could get his hands on. “This,” thought the lad, “is how I want to write.” And so he did.
In the years that followed, teachers thought poorly of the way I wrote. “Your writing,” they would say, “is too journalistic.” Editors, however, took a different view, as did readers. They preferred the good plain writing of the ‘fifties and the ‘sixties to the pretentious, sophisticated stylings of the tragically hip.
In 1982, while looking for something else in the tiny book shop on the Marine Base at Quantico, I discovered On Writing Well. Written by William Zinsser, who had done a great deal of work for, and with, newspapers and magazines, it both argued for, and modeled, the style of writing I had learned by reading dusty back issues of the Reader’s Digest.
Coincidentally, I also grew up on modern Reader's Digest in the 00's. Though the very full shelves of my childhood home also helped - I had Childcraft encyclopedias, Narnia (all seven books in one big one!), Tolkien (can't remember which one) and a lot of books about business and finance. My father would put me in the playpen in front of CNN when I would wake up in the early morning so he could get some sleep.
I suppose that made me destined to a good grasp of English.
Zinsser and Reader's Digest were two of my early influences as well. Particularly for essays. They are still solid.
Hemingway another early influence. He got his start on the Kansas City Star, my hometown newspaper, writing from the Italian Front in WWI. Speaking of war reporters, Lee McCardell, a reporter for the Baltimore Sun is another interesting one from the next war (WWII) with a very light clean writing style. He embedded himself with the 29th Division in England and when they went ashore on D-Day and he followed the 79th Division then through France - he was the first reporter into Metz, first into St. Avold, first into Saarlautern - until he got sent home. His papers are in The Library of Congress.
History needs to stick to the facts, although I think there's room to offer some good, educated guesses based on a panoply of evidence across disciplines in absence of primary sources and solid archaeological artifacts. As long as you call them that. Which is why I stick to historical fiction. More wiggle room.
Other early influences were Chesterton and Shaw who served more for humour. Tolkien, Herbert, and Heinlein later of course, though I'm not a fictional world builder. But they do a great job with timeline development. And Stephen King is not just for the shivers, but for the structure and character development. He's solid.
But I found I prefered a more lyrical style largely because history is one big story with lots and lots of little stories nesting inside of it. Human beings are naturally hard-wired for connection, attachment, and co-identification with each other, and it's through story that we understand ourselves and our places in history. A story, particularly those that wind through historically significant turning points, needs both factual accuracy embedded in beautiful imagery, as well as a health dose of Soul. History is what happens to real, living, breathing human beings and it affects them and causes them to think and feel, as humans always do. And history reverberates - it's never really over. It writes itself on the social history like tree rings on a tree, and often, in the DNA of people in the form of epigenetic changes. History reshapes humanity. That shaping alchemy - is the story.
In the last 15 years, I've found the American novelist James Lee Burke to be a huge inspiration. If I grow up to be even a 10th of the writer he is, I'll feel I've accomplished something. If you like a good crime novel with plenty of 20th century American history in it, wrapped around a borrowed morality play from the Classics of the Western canon, Marine vets as protagonists, and written in lyrical Southern noir - he's your huckleberry. His novels are the kind you pick up and can't put down until the end, and then you go through withdrawal for weeks.