on-writing-well

288 ON WRITING WELL
erosity and wished me well in my chosen field. No boy could
receive a finer gift. I was liberated from having to fulfill somebody
else's expectations, which were not the right ones for me. I
was free to succeed or fail on my own terms.
Only later did I realize that I took along on my journey
another gift from my father: a bone-deep belief that quality is its
own reward. I, too, have never gone into a store looking for a
bargain. Although my mother was the literary one in our family—magpie
collector of books, lover of the English language,
writer of dazzling letters—it was from the world of business that
I absorbed my craftsman's ethic, and over the years, when I
found myself endlessly rewriting what I had endlessly rewritten,
determined to write better than everybody who was competing
for the same space, the inner voice I was hearing was the voice
of my father talking about shellac.
Besides wanting to write as well as possible, I wanted to
write as entertainingly as possible. When I tell aspiring writers
that they should think of themselves as part entertainer, they
don't like to hear it—the word smacks of carnivals and jugglers
and clowns. But to succeed you must make your piece jump out
of a newspaper or a magazine by being more diverting than
everyone else's piece. You must find some way to elevate your
act of writing into an entertainment. Usually this means giving
the reader an enjoyable surprise. Any number of devices will do
the job: humor, anecdote, paradox, an unexpected quotation, a
powerful fact, an outlandish detail, a circuitous approach, an elegant
arrangement of words. These seeming amusements in fact
become your "style." When we say we like a writer's style, what
we mean is that we like his personality as he expresses it on paper.
Given a choice between two traveling companions—and a writer
is someone who asks us to travel with him—we usually choose the
one who we think will make an effort to brighten the trip.
Unlike medicine or the other sciences, writing has no new
discoveries to spring on us. We're in no danger of reading in our