Roy Peter Clark - Writing Tools: 55 Essential Strategies for Every Writer

What if we polled readers to determine the most influential writing books of all time? The winner, no doubt, would be The Elements of Style by the teacher/student team of William Strunk Jr. and E. B. White. I own a dozen copies in different editions. Any book that sells more than ten million copies in a half-century deserves the equivalent of a platinum record.

Next on the list would be On Writing Well by William Zinsser, which has sold more than one million copies over the last thirty years. If I had to summarize Zinssers advice in three words, it would be Dump the clutter. My appreciation for this book is marked by my affection for the man. I met him just after its publication and reunited with him by phone just before his death at the age of ninety-two. By then he was blind, but still working with visiting writers in his Manhattan apartment, and taking lessons from a poetry tutor.

If you checked lists of writing books at online booksellers, you would find Strunk and White along with Zinsser at the top. Not far below, you would find books such as:

Writing Down the Bones, by Natalie Goldberg

Bird by Bird, by Anne Lamott

On Writing, by Stephen King

These are noble and practical writing guides that deserve their place on your bookshelf, within arms reach of your computer. What I like best about them is that they combine narratives of the writers life with elements of the writers craft.

Over the last ten years there has been one pretty little book, thanks to designer Keith Hayes, that has elbowed its way into the company of these classics. You are holding it in your hands: Writing Tools: 50 Essential Strategies for Every Writer. For this Tenth Anniversary Edition weve brought you five new tools, for a total of fifty-five.

Students, teachers, journalists, and freelance writers often ask me, What one book should I buy to grow as a writer? I used to say The Complete Works of William Shakespeare or The Great Gatsby or Flannery OConnor: The Collected Works. Those are still good answers. No, they will respond, I mean what one writing book.

For a long time my answer was The Elements of Style. Then I started recommending On Writing Well. Now I say Writing Tools. I understand the immodesty and self-interest in that statement. But I say it anyway, in a spirit that I think rests in the heart of every passionate and influential writer: I believe in the work.

If you believe in the idea that motivates this book, that America should strive to become a nation of writers, then why not shout it out?

Ive been busy in the decade since the publication of Writing Tools. What followed that firstborn were these siblings: The Glamour of Grammar, Help! For Writers, How to Write Short, and The Art of X-Ray Reading, all published by Little, Brown. My confidence in this body of work has come from loyal readers. I hear from them all the time, and from all over the world. One wrote to say he was stuck writing his novel until someone handed him a copy of Writing Tools. Countless readers have testified that they keep the short list of tools at their workstations. High school students send me selfies in which theyre holding the book.

The most dramatic response came from a man in a store named Kramerbooks in Washington, DC. I just happened to be visiting with my brother Vincent, who noticed the man holding a copy of one of my books. Vincent ventured to tell him that the author was in the mens room but would be happy to sign it for him.

I did sign the book, as the man, almost tearful, told of how he nearly gave up graduate studies because of an inability to write a thesis, and how his sister, a college professor, had encouraged him by giving him a copy of Writing Tools. He earned his degree.

In my last conversation with Bill Zinsser, he offered me a word of encouragement: Lets keep this mission going. I took him to mean the craft of writing, the humanity of writing, the power of storytelling in the interests of literacy, learning, community, and democracy. That is where I plant my flag, and so, I venture to say, do my brothers and sisters of the word: Strunk, White, Zinsser, Goldberg, Lamott, and King. Read me. And read them, too.