Unit 10 The TransactionWilliam Zinsser1 About ten years ago a school in Connecticut held “a day devoted to the arts,” and I was asked if I would come and talk about writing as a vocation. When I arrived I found that a second speaker had been invited Dr. Brock (as Ill call him), a surgeon who had recently begun to write and had sold some stories to national magazines. He was going to talk about writing as an avocation. That made us a panel, and we sat down to face a crowd of student newspaper editors, English teachers and parents, all eager to learn the secrets of our glamorous work.2 Dr. Brock was dressed in a bright red jacket, looking vaguely bohemian, as authors are supposed to look, and the first question went to him. What was it like to be a writer?3 He said it was tremendous fun. Coming home from an arduous day at the hospital, he would go straight to his yellow pad and write his tensions away. The words just flowed. It was easy.4 I then said that writing wasnt easy and it wasnt fun. It was hard and lonely, and the words seldom just flowed.5 Next Dr. Brock was asked if it was important to rewrite. “Absolutely not,” he said. “Let it all hang out, and whatever form the sentences take will reflect the writer at his most natural.”6 I then said that rewriting is the essence of writing. I pointed out that professional writers rewrite their sentences repeatedly and then rewrite what they have rewritten. I mentioned that E. B. White and James Thurber rewrote their pieces eight or nine times.7 “What do you do on days when it isnt going well?” Dr. Brock was asked. He said he just stopped writing and put the work aside for a day when it would go better.8 I then said that the professional writer must establish a daily schedule and stick to it. I said that writing is a craft, not an art, and that the man who runs away from his craft because he lacks inspiration is fooling himself. He is also going broke.9 “What if youre feeling depressed or unhappy?” a student asked. “Wont that affect your writing?”10 Probably it will, Dr. Brock replied. Go fishing. Take a walk. 11 Probably it wont, I said. If your job is to write every day, you learn to do it like any other job.12 A student asked if we found it useful to circulate in the literary world. Dr. Brock said that he was greatly enjoying his new life as a man of letters, and he told several stories of being taken to lunch by his publisher and his agent at chic Manhattan restaurants where writers and editors gather. I said that professional writers are solitary drudges who seldom see other writers.13 “Do you put symbolism in your writing?” a student asked me.14 “Not if I can help it,” I replied. I have an unbroken record of missing the deeper meaning in any story, play or movie, and as for dance and mime, I have never had even a remote notion of what is being conveyed.15 “I love symbols!” Dr. Brock exclaimed, and he described with gusto the joys of weaving them through his work.16 So the morning went, and it was a revelation to all of us. At the end Dr. Brock told me he was enormously interested in my answers it had never occurred to him that writing could be hard. I told him I was just as interested in his answers it had never occurred to me that writing could be easy. (Maybe I should take up surgery on the side.)17 As for the students, anyone might think we left them bewildered. But in fact we probably gave them a broader glimpse of the writing process than if only one of us had talked. For of course there isnt any “right” way to do such intensely personal work. There are all kinds of writers and all kinds of methods, and any method that helps people to say what they want to say is the right method for them.18 Some people write by day, others by night. Some people need silence, others turn on the radio. Some write by hand, some by typewriter or word processor, some by talking into a tape recorder. Some people write their first draft in one long burst and then revise; others cant write the second paragraph until they have fiddled endlessly with the first.19 But all of them are vulnerable and all of them are tense. They are driven by a compulsion to put some part of themselves on paper, and yet they dont just write what comes naturally. They sit down to commit an act of literature, and the self who emerges on paper is a far stiffer person than the one who sat down. The problem is to find the real man or woman behind all the tension.20 For ultimately the product that any writer has to sell is not the subject being written about, but who he or she is. I often find myself reading with interest about a topic I never thought would interest me some unusual scientific quest, for instance. What holds me is the enthusiasm of the writer for his field. How was he drawn into it? What emotional baggage did he bring along? How did it change his life? Its not necessary to want to spend a year alone at Walden Pond t