The reader is someone with an attention span of about 30 seconds.

William Zinsser
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  2. Writing doesn’t get any easier with time or talent. If writing is easy for you, you’re probably still learning the craft. You haven’t perfected your style or landed upon your “voice.” You haven’t learned to analyze your writing with a critical eye, to rip it... - Darynda Jones

  3. I always worked until I had something done and I always stopped when I knew what was going to happen next. That way I could be sure of going on the next day. - Ernest Hemingway

  4. I believe that fiction with its untrammelled nature, speaks to no one, and by so doing, speaks to all. - Chigozie Obioma

  5. And doesn't a writer do the same thing? Isn't she knitting together scraps of dreams? She hunts down the most vivid details and links them in sequences that will let a reader see, smell, and hear a world that seems complete in itself; she builds... - Anthony Doerr

More Quotes By William Zinsser
  1. Don’t try to visualize the great mass audience. There is no such audience–every reader is a different person.

  2. Write about small, self-contained incidents that are still vivid in your memory. If you remember them, it's because they contain a larger truth that your readers will recognize in their own lives. Think small and you'll wind up finding the big themes in your family...

  3. I almost always urge people to write in the first person. Writing is an act of ego and you might as well admit it.

  4. Less is more.

  5. There are some writers who sweep us along so strongly in their current of energy-- Normal mailer, Tom Wolfe, Toni Morrison, William F. Buckley, Jr., Hunter Thompson, David Foster Wallace, Dave Eggers--that we assume that when they go to work the words just flow. Nobody...

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