“Sentences are a little like purses. . . .”

 

After you’ve written a few chapters of your memoir, or even a few vignettes, reward yourself by taking a break—a productive break, one that will not delay progress on finishing your story.

 

How does that work?

 

Read what you’ve written with fresh eyes, your oldest writings first.

 

Read aloud. Even more helpful, I find, is using the “read aloud” feature on my computer. Your ears will catch what your mind skips over.

 

Today we’ll look at how to best fashion your sentences.

 

Specifically, scrutinize how your sentences read, how they flow, how they sound, and whether they make sense.

 

First, let’s acknowledge this:

“Very few sentences come out right the first time,

or even the second or third time.”

(William Zinsser, Writing About Your Life)

 

As you write, believe this:

rewriting is not punishment.

Even pros and experienced writers

revise their sentences numerous times.

 

For the sake of your readers, commit to crafting good sentences. Why? First, you want readers to enjoy your story and, second, you also want them to understand your message. 

 

“Just as there are arts of weaving and fly-fishing and dancing, so there are arts of sentence making,” write Collette and Johnson, authors of Finding Common Ground, A Guide to Personal, Professional, and Public Writing.

 

“. . . Writing is a partnership with the reader. . . . The way you put your stories together counts a good deal toward how your reader will understand what you say.

 

“You can . . . arrange, rearrange, or prearrange them to suit particular purposes.

 

“The writer shapes the sentence to indicate how readers should construe the meaning . . . . Building a sentence, then, is a way of defining and specifying meaning, of focusing a reader’s attention. . . .” (Finding Common Ground)

 

As you begin to evaluate your sentences, Bill Roorback points out that “sentences are a little like purses: They come in various sizes and can hold a little or a lot.” (Writing Life Stories)

 

So, let’s start by looking at those of the smaller size:

 

Short Sentences:

 

“ . . . In artful prose, [sentence] length is controlled and varied. Some stylists write short sentences to strike a note of urgency.” (Joseph F. Williams, Style: Ten Lessons in Clarity and Grace)

 

“ . . . Short sharp sentences increase tension in a scene.” (Lynda  R. Young)

 

For example, here’s how Kristen Welch writes short sentences to express tension and urgency:

 

“She came to us alone, with a baby she didn’t want stirring in her womb.

 

“Orphaned at a young age, she wandered this earth unloved and unwanted.

 

“Charity came to us broken, detached, angry.

 

“Outwardly she pushed others away, isolating herself through pain, distancing her heart from love.

 

“But we loved her anyway. We set firm boundaries and we loved. We prayed. We fasted. We begged God to draw her close. We shed so many tears over this child having a child.

 

“We feared for her unborn son. How would this detached girl attach to a baby she never wanted?

 

“He was born to an angry mother. She didn’t want him.

 

“And we didn’t know what to do. . . .” (Kristen Welch, We Are THAT family)

 

 

Sentence Fragments:

 

Consider writing short sentences here and there in your vignettes, but also think about writing sentence fragments—incomplete sentences and thoughts.

 

Grammatically, sentence fragments are incorrect, but “There are occasions when a sentence fragment can be stylistically effective, exactly what you want and no more. [For example] ‘Harrison Ford has said that he would be more than willing to take on another Indiana Jones project. In a New York Minute.’ As long as you are clearly in control of the situation, this is permissible, but [doing so] depends on the circumstances.” (CCC Foundation)

 

Breaking the rules occasionally with sentence fragments can add punch to your writing. Or sizzle. Or grief.

 

 

Next week we’ll look at long sentences

but for now, examine your rough drafts

and look for sentences that need spiffing up.

 

Where can you write “quick, breathless utterances” (Williams),

like Kristen Welch did, to create tension,

urgency, drama, or emotion?

 

Where might sentence fragments

work even more effectively than complete sentences?

 

And throughout, ask yourself:

Will readers understand

what I’m trying to get across?

Have I written each sentence clearly?

 

And remember, rewriting is not punishment.

(Smile!)

Hemingway’s encouragement for you

 

“Don’t be discouraged because there’s a lot of technical work to writing. There is, and you can’t get out of it,” said Ernest Hemingway, advising beginning writer Arnold Samuelson, age 19.

 

“It’s your object to convey everything to the reader so that he remembers it not as a story he had read but something that happened to himself.”

 

Read that last part again:

“. . . so that he remembers it not as a story he had read

but something that happened to himself.”

 

You want readers to experience your story alongside you. That’s how you can make a difference in their lives. That’s how God can use your story to inspire, heal, and mentor your readers.

 

Work hard to make write that kind of memoir.

 

Join (or form) a writing group—a good one. Critique each other’s manuscripts.

 

Attend writers’ conferences.

 

Study the best writing books available:

• On Writing Well by William Zinsser
• The Writer’s Portable Mentor by Priscilla Long
• Writing the Memoir by Judith Barrington
• The Memoir and the Memoirist by Thomas Larson
• Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir, edited by William Zinsser
• Writing for Story by Jon Franklin
• Handling the Truth by Beth Kephart
• Writing Tools by Roy Peter Clark

 

To make your memoir the very best it can be,

you’ll need to make revisions and edits,

but it will be worth it in the end.

 

Remember Jeff Goins’ words:

“Never, ever, ever underestimate the power your words can have.” 

 

Pray about your writing and rewriting.

Ask God to guide your work

and use your finished memoir to bless others.

 

Back to Basics: Beat back the past with grace and tell your readers “We are not victims”

It used to be that people didn’t include scandalous stuff in their memoirs. We lived in a modest, dignified culture. 

 

But then things changed. Memoirists tossed out gentility and decorum, and our society entered into what William Zinsser calls “The memoir-crazed 1990s.” 

 

It was a time, he says, when people disclosed shocking information, indulged in self-pity, and sought revenge, a time when “no remembered episode was too squalid, no family too dysfunctional, to be trotted out for the titillation of the masses.”

 

But, he points out, those types of memoirs didn’t stand the test of time. (Hooray!)

 

That era did have a few good memoirs, though.

 

“The memoirs we do remember from the 1990s,” says Zinsser, “are the ones that were written with love and forgiveness, like Mary Karr’s The Liar’s Club, Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes, Tobias Wolff’s This Boy’s Life, and Pete Hamill’s A Drinking Life.” (From “How to Write a Memoir” in The American Scholar.)

 

“Anyone might think” he says, “the domestic chaos and alcoholism and violence that enveloped those writers when they were young would have long since hardened the heart.” 

 

And yet they did not have hardened hearts. For example, “The marvel of Frank McCourt’s childhood is that he survived it. . . . The second marvel is that he was able to triumph over it in Angela’s Ashes, beating back the past with grace and humor and with the power of language.”

 

Each of those four authors “look back with compassion. . . .  These books…were written with love. They elevate the pain of the past with forgiveness, arriving at a larger truth about families in various stages of brokenness.  . . .

 

“There’s no self-pity, no whining, no hunger for revenge; the authors are as honest about their young selves as they are about the sins of their elders. (Writing About Your Life)  (If you missed it, be sure to read Don’t start writing your memoir until . . .)

 

“We are not victims, they want us to know. . . . We have endured to tell the story without judgment and to get on with our  lives. . . .”  (Zinsser, Writing About Your Life)

 

If you’re writing about pain caused by others, be cautious and honest about your motives.

 

Avoid writing:

• to get revenge, settle the score, or retaliate,
• to humiliate a person, company, or organization,
• to get readers to pity you,
• to get readers to take sides with you, or
• to indulge in self-pity.

 

Examine your heart and if you find even traces of writing for any of those reasons, stop! That’s not what memoir is about.

 

Extend to others the same forgiveness, grace, and mercy God has extended to you. (See last week’s post, How do you write about your family’s baggage?)

 

Let the following dwell in your heart and mind as you write:

 

“At our best,

memoirists hope it is silence we are breaking,

and not another person.”

(Kelly McMasters)

 

Zinsser counsels us:

 

“If you use memoir to look for your own humanity

and the humanity of the people who crossed your life,

however much pain they caused you,

readers will connect with your journey.

 

What they won’t connect with is whining.

Dispose of that anger somewhere else.”

 

That somewhere else could be in your journal—for your eyes only—or in a fictionalized version of your story.

 

Or it could be a first draft. Dr. Linda Joy Myers advises,

 

“Write your first draft as a healing draft.

Get out what you need to say.

Make it bold and real.

Then stand back and think about

how you want to revise it for publication.”

(Will My Family Get Angry About My Memoir?)

 

In that rough draft, write about the injustices, mistreatment, hurt feelings, anger, scars, and tears. Write about destroyed dreams, confusion, hopelessness.

 

Write it all. Write it as a prayer.

Write until you know God has heard you.

Write it as a way of asking Him

to help you forgive and move on.

 

Since that process usually takes time, set aside your private writing (rough draft) for a week or a month or a year. Listen for God, let Him work in your heart and mind.

 

Your goal is to move from anger to forgiveness, from pain to compassion. When you succeed in that, you can throw away that rough draft, or at least commit to keeping it private.

 

And then rewrite your memoir.

 

Rewrite deliberately to “elevate the pain of the past with forgiveness.”

 

Rewrite with integrity.

Delete the wallowing.

Write not as a wounded victim,

but as one who has triumphed,

as one who has forgiven, healed,

and moved forward in a good way.

 

Write like Frank McCourt did:

Beat back the past with grace—

and maybe even with a little humor.

 

  

Back to Basics: Are you paralyzed by the thought of writing your memoir?

 

“Most people embarking on writing a memoir are paralyzed by the size of the task,” writes William Zinsser.

 

“Where to start? Where to stop? How to shape the story?

 

“The past looms over them in a thousand fragments, defying them to impose on it some kind of order.

 

“Because of that anxiety, many memoirs linger for years half written, or never written at all.” (William Zinsser, How to Write a Memoir)

 

Does that describe you?

If so, take a deep breath.

Let me offer you some help.

 

I recommend that you begin by coming up with a structure for your memoir.

 

“The structure is the framework you write into,

your security blanket, your assurance that all your hard work

will result in a completed manuscript.”

(Priscilla Long, The Writer’s Portable Mentor)

 

When we talk about structuring your memoir, then, we’re talking about its organization. You’ll need to determine the best sequence of events.

 

Remember our earlier post about story arc? Click on Your memoir’s all-important story arc and Your memoir’s middle and end.

 

To jog your memory, let’s review a story arc, as well as the basics of story:

 

Memoirs read like novels (but unlike novels, they are true accounts). Jon Franklin (Writing for Story) explains: “A story consists of a sequence of actions that occur when a sympathetic character encounters a complicating situation that he confronts and solves.”

Franklin says, in other words, that a quality story “will consist of a real person who is confronted with a significant problem, who struggles diligently to solve that problem, and who ultimately succeeds—and in doing so becomes a different character.”

Dr. Linda Joy Myers says it this way: “The main character . . . —in a memoir it’s you!—is changed significantly by events, actions, decisions, and epiphanies. The growth and change of the main character is imperative in any story, and is the primary reason a memoir is written—to show the arc of character change from beginning to end.”

 

The story arc is like a thread, a path from beginning to end, making clear that character change.

 

Okay, back to your memoir’s structure:

 

I recommend that you tell your story chronologically—with a beginning, a middle, and an end. It’s straightforward: Arrange chapters according to date. That will be your structure.

 

With that in mind, let’s talk about flashbacks.

 

Tiffany Yates Martin offers this succinct definition of flashbacks: “. . . [S]eparate, self-contained scenes that serve to fill in essential backstory. . . . [They are] events . . . that happened before the events of the current story. . . .”

 

So how, specifically, could a flashback work in your memoir?

 

Two ways.

 

The first way: Some memoirists, even though writing a chronological account, begin their books with a flashback.

Here’s how that works: Place a compelling segment of your story in Chapter 1 (or perhaps in the first part of Chapter 1)—something intriguing or mysterious that will hook your readers. Something riveting or gripping.

 

After you’ve sufficiently developed that attention-getting opening, flashback to what led up to that experience—to where and how it all got started.

 

Note:

Often writers signal to readers

that they’re entering a flashback scene

by using the word “had.”

 

Here’s an example from my friend Shel Arensen, who was a college kid at the time, trying to get home for Christmas. Notice the word “had” in the sixth paragraph. That signaled to readers that the paragraph was a flashback—he was offering readers some background info.

 

Alone in Amsterdam, by Shel Arensen

 

I opened my eyes, suddenly awake. An eerie sense of uneasiness crept over me. Had I heard someone moving in the room? It was too dark to see. Then I heard the door click.

 

I sat upright in bed, straining to see who might have invaded the barracks-style hostel room where I was staying in Amsterdam, Holland. I sat perfectly still, hardly breathing, for several minutes. No one else stirred.

 

“I must have been imagining things,” I told myself. . . .

 

I decided to lie on my stomach. . . . When I turned over, I noticed what was wrong!

 

My pants, hanging on the wall near my bed, were twisted, and the lining of my pocket was hanging out. . . . I reached for my wallet. It was gone!

 

My misfortunes had started the day before when I arrived at Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam. I was to make connections there for Kenya, where my missionary parents lived.

 

“I’m sorry,” the voice of the ticket agent had grated in my ears, “but tonight’s flight to Nairobi is full. We can’t take any more passengers. . . . I will confirm your ticket for the next plane to Nairobi.”

 

“When will that be?” I questioned.

 

“Next Thursday—Christmas Day. Here’s your ticket. Enjoy Amsterdam. Who’s next in line, please?”

 

. . . Stunned and bewildered, I wandered over to a bench to collect my thoughts. . . .

It was Sunday night. . . . Now I would be unable to leave Amsterdam until Christmas—four days later. . . .

 

Did you notice the word “had” in the fifth paragraph? Using the word “had” in your manuscript will alert your readers that you’re going to take them back in time and offer significant information.

Here’s the second way of using flashbacks: While writing a chronological account, you can insert flashbacks throughout your memoir.

In other words, at key places you’ll interrupt the chronological order by flashing back to something that happened earlier—because you want to explain something to readers about that.

 

Here’s an example of a brief flashback from my memoir, Please, God, Don’t Make Me Go: A Foot-Dragger’s Memoir. I was sitting in the co-pilot’s seat next to the pilot, Roland, in a small plane in the skies over South America. 

 

Dipping low, three or four seconds from touchdown, the wing on my side catapulted into the air and we veered to the left, the lopsided plane convulsing, engines roaring. Red lights flashed in the cockpit. A buzzer bawled somewhere. Roland jerked levers and slapped switches and punched buttons.

 

Dear God! I prayed, but I couldn’t say more. I couldn’t breathe. Of all the potential dangers I’d worried about—kidnapping, murder, drug cartel and guerrilla activity—I’d never imagined a plane crash.

 

Because our pilots often flew into the riskiest places on earth, they had been trained to have the engines at full throttle when approaching an airstrip in case they had to abort the landing. Grazing animals, curious children, or downed trees were common reasons to abort. Some landing strips clung to mountainsides and others were dangerously short. And sometimes armed insurgents swarmed remote airstrips. All were good reasons to be revved up at full throttle and ready to liff back into the air.

 

So, when that wicked horizontal wind shear jerked the plane vertical and tried to smash us to the ground, Roland wasn’t about to let that happen. His extensive training kicked in and he yanked the plane, vibrating and throbbing, into a steep climb heavenward.

 

After a brutal thirty seconds or so, Roland leveled the plane and it stopped trembling. “Whew,” he wheezed, sucking in a breath. “That was a sharp side wind. It blew in from nowhere.”

 

Notice the word “had” in the third paragraph. That’s how I pointed toward the upcoming flashback.

 

Here are phrases that could give you ideas for announcing you’re taking readers into a flashback:

 

“Before I had been invited on the trip. . . .”

“The year before, she had. . . .”

“Seven weeks earlier we had. . . .”

 

Question: Did you notice where I transitioned out of the flashback? It began with “So, when that wicked horizontal wind. . . .” With that phrase, I alerted readers that we were transitioning out of the flashback and returning to the chronological story.

 

That’s what you’ll want to do, too. Toward the end of your flashback, make it clear you’re transitioning out of it. Avoid confusing your readers: Write your way back to the scene you and the reader were in before you began your flashback, and then continue the chronological order of events.

 

Flashbacks can be very effective, but they’re not easy to pull off well. After all, you’re interrupting the reader’s involvement in your story.

 

Your job is to take readers back in time with you, and then smoothly, gracefully invite them to re-enter the main flow of the story.

 

Your desired outcome is

to hand your readers a coherent,

organized, satisfying memoir.

 

So set aside time to experiment with your memoir’s structure. Remember: You’ll no doubt revise your rough draft several times before you find the best structure.

 

You can do this! Yes, you can!

 

Back to Basics: Write a believable story by including the stink, slime, and grime

 

Readers want stories that catch their attention and reach into their hearts. They want stories that will stick—stories that will make a difference in their lives. 

 

To that end, in recent weeks we’ve worked on creating well-rounded main characters your readers can relate to. (Click on How to create “a sensory world that you and your readers can inhabit together” as well as Refuse to let cardboard characters lurk in your memoir.)

 

We’ve also worked on crafting the best descriptions of your memoir’s key places so readers feel they’re with you at that place.  (See The importance of “place,” and How’s your progress in describing your memoir’s key places?)

 

In addition, you’ll want to write a believable story.

And for that, you must include 

the stink, the slime, and the grime.

 

In Walker in the City (1951), Alfred Kazin has returned to his childhood home in the Brownsville district of Brooklyn. He writes about everyday sights and experiences. He creates vivid images and includes sensory details:

 

“The greasy, spattered front steps, just off the Chinese hand laundry in the basement, led into what must have been the vestibule of a traditionally stately Brooklyn Heights mansion. Despite the metal shields holding up the battered front door, you could see that it once had been a beautiful door….

 

“…I step off the train at Rockaway Avenue, smell the leak out of the men’s room, then the pickles from the stand below the subway steps…. An instant rage comes over me, mixed with dread and some unexpected tenderness.

 

“It is always the old women in their shapeless flowered housedresses and ritual wigs I see first; they give Brownsville back to me. In their soft dumpy bodies and the unbudging way they occupy the tenement stoops, their hands blankly folded in each other as if they had been sitting on those stoops from the beginning of time, I sense again the old foreboding that all my life would be like this.” (From Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir, William Zinsser)

 

Perhaps your story is set in a country’s slums. Remember from our recent posts: Show, don’t tell.

 

Instead of telling people that children clawed through acres of garbage searching for something to eat—show readers. Describe the raw sewage flowing between row after row of rusty, crumbling, patched-together dwellings. Include sensory details:  smells, sounds, feels, tastes, and sights.

 

Show, don’t tell the extreme poverty of the slum-dwellers and their lack of good nutrition. Show the people too poor to get medical help for their diseases. Show the high mortality rate among children under age five. Show the dense population, filth, and environmental hazards. Include the high unemployment rate and the lack of educational opportunities. Show that almost no slum-dwellers have electricity or running water. Show the kidnappings and rapes.

 

“Some budding memoirists rush through a scene

without stopping to smell the rain on the pavement.

Granted, you don't want

to overwhelm your readers with details;

you have to keep the story moving along.

If the scene or event is crucial,

slow down and describe it so that the reader

can experience it with you.”

Sharon DeBartolo Carmack

 

Use specific words, compelling words. Gritty words.

Study old photos to discern specific details you might have forgotten. Did you write letters or emails about your experience? Did you keep a diary?  If so, they’re great resources for you.

 

Avoid sugar-coating.

Recreate your experience so readers will feel

they’re beside you, encountering what you did.

 

“ . . . feel the rush and throb of real life.”

O. Henry

 

Remember this good advice from Rhys Alexander:

 

“Detail makes the difference between 

boring and terrific writing. 

It’s the difference between a pencil sketch 

and a lush oil painting. 

As a writer, words are your paint. 

Use all the colors.” 

(“Writing Gooder”)

 

Back to Basics: Knowing the unique features of memoir will help you tell your story

 

Since we have new people joining us here at SM 101, we’re reviewing (1) what a memoir is, and (2) how best to write one. (Check out two recent blog posts: Back to Basics: What is a Memoir? and Back to Basics: Why should you write your memoir?)

 

A memoir is so much more than spinning yarns and telling tales.

 

That  means you need to understand what a memoir is

in order to

write it in the most effective way.

 

Below you’ll find some gems—some nitty-gritty basics—to help you get started, to help you keep writing, and to publish your memoir.

 

 

“Rather than simply telling a story from her life,

the memoirist both tells the story

and muses upon it,

trying to unravel what it means

in light of her current knowledge. . . .

Memoir includes retrospection as an essential part of the story.

Your reader . . . [is] interested in how you now, 

looking back on it, understand it.”

(Judith Barrington, Writing the Memoir)

 

 

“Remember this when you write about your own life.

Your biggest stories will often have less to do with their subject

than with their significance:

not what you did in a certain situation,

but how that situation affected you.”

(William Zinsser, Writing About Your Life)

 

 

“Memoir is not about what you did.

Memoir is about what you did with it.”

(Marion Roach Smith)

 

 

“Memoir is about something you know

after something you’ve been through.”

(Marion Roach Smith)

 

 

Writing a memoir “offers . . . the opportunity to recall, assess,

reflect, and find meaning. . . . Most memoir writing experts agree

that the primary importance of memoir writing

is the resolution, clarity, healing and dignity gained by the author. . . .

Writing memoir is an adventure in attitudes,

with unexpected personal revelations, discoveries and resolution.”

(Sharon Lippincott, author of The Heart and Craft of Lifestory Writing,

and two memoirs)

 

 

“The main character . . . —in a memoir it’s you!—is changed

significantly by events, actions, decisions, and epiphanies.

The growth and change of the main character

is imperative in any story,

and is the primary reason a memoir is written—

to show the arc of character change from beginning to end.”

(Dr. Linda Joy Myers)

 

 

Take in these significant quotes about memoirs. Ponder them in relation to the stories you want to include in your memoir.

 

The better you understand and apply the above, the better your writing experience—and your finished memoir—will be.

 

Come back next week for more inspiration on writing your memoir!

 

No one wants to stop reading to look up a word in a dictionary

 

“What does parsimonious mean?” my highly educated husband asked. Dave was reading Eisenhower in War and Peace, by Jean Edward Smith.

 

Parsimonious. I’d known of the word most of my life. It always reminded me of parsnips. But did I know what it meant?

 

Um . . . No, I didn’t. Neither did Dave, and we felt embarrassed.

 

I stood up, walked to my desk, and opened my thesaurus. Here’s what I read aloud to Dave:

 

not enough

retentive

mean

selfish

self-restrained

 

We were both still puzzled so I asked him to read me the sentence with parsimonious in it.

 

“Eisenhower . . . was parsimonious with the lives of the troops entrusted to his command. . . .”

 

Eisenhower was not enough with the lives of the troops?

Eisenhower was retentive with the lives of his troops?

Eisenhower was mean with the lives of his troops?

Eisenhower was selfish with the lives of his troops?

Eisenhower was self-restrained with the lives of his troops?

 

That last meaning, self-restrained, had potential, so I checked that out in the thesaurus: self-controlled, self-disciplined, restrained. Self-restraint also has to do with being frugal, temperate, not excessive, moderate, measured, limited.

 

We concluded Ike valued his troops’ lives and was frugal when it came to endangering them. He practiced self-restraint when it came to sending troops into harm’s way: He recognized the danger he could put them in but exercised restraint so no one would suffer or die unnecessarily. 

 

OK, that’s enough about parsimonious. My point is this: When you write your memoir, use words your readers will understand.

 

No one appreciates having to stand up, walk over to the bookshelf, take down the dictionary or thesaurus, and look up a word.

 

In fact, I suspect most readers simply won’t do it.

 

Your goal is to make it easy for everyone to read your memoir.

 

Many years ago, journalism instructors taught us to write for an eighth-grade audience. That’s not a typo. Eighth graders!

 

Recently I ran across that same advice.

 

And it’s good advice. It yields benefits:

 

“We shouldn’t discount simple writing,

but instead embrace it. . . .

We should aim to reduce complexity in our writing

as much as possible.

We won’t lose credibility in doing so.

Our readers will comprehend and retain

our ideas more reliably.

And we’ll have a higher likelihood

of reaching more people.”

Shane Snow,

“This Surprising Reading Level Analysis

Will Change the Way You Write” (emphasis mine)

 

You can still use interesting, expressive, musical, graphic, textured, dazzling words—words that zing—as long as they’re familiar to your readers, effective words like:

 

skedaddle

befuddle

jolly

jovial

harrumph

hooligan

ruffian

rascal

scaliwag

scoundrel

paunchy

tattered

merry

beguiling

spirited

whimsical

 

Dear William Zinsser wrote about the importance of choosing words: “Banality is the enemy of good writing. The challenge is to not write like everybody else.” Writers should avoid a word that’s merely serviceable—useful, practical—or dull, he said, and instead strive for freshness.

 

I jotted down a few simple yet vivid words penned by Zinsser in his Writing About Your Life:

 

a sea of codgers, codging the time away

a courtly man

a lofty wicker chair

he listened . . . with exquisite courtesy

a cultivated man

a rangy, easygoing man

a compact man

he had a scholar’s face: intelligent and quizzical

 

A word of caution: Use your dictionary and thesaurus wisely. Janice Hardy blogged about “an episode of Friends where the dumb-yet-lovable Joey wrote a letter of recommendation. To sound smart, he used the thesaurus and replaced all his ‘dumb’ words with ‘smart ones.’” Janice continued, “‘They’re warm, nice people with big hearts’ became ‘They’re humid, pre-possessing homo sapiens with full-sized aortic pumps.’”

 

So go ahead and use words with sparkle and pizzazz—just choose words that most people understand.