Murder Your Darlings: And Other Gentle Writing Advice from Aristotle to Zinsser

by Roy Peter Clark

Overview

From one of America's most influential teachers, a collection of the best writing advice distilled from fifty language books — from Aristotle to Strunk and White.


With so many excellent writing guides lining bookstore shelves, it can be hard to know where to look for the best advice. Should you go with Natalie Goldberg or Anne Lamott? Maybe William Zinsser or Stephen King would be more appropriate. Then again, what about the classics — Strunk and White, or even Aristotle himself?


Thankfully, your search is over. In Murder Your Darlings, Roy Peter Clark, who has been a beloved and revered writing teacher to children and Pulitzer Prize winners alike for more than thirty years, has compiled a remarkable collection of more than 100 of the best writing tips from fifty of the best writing books of all time.


With a chapter devoted to each key strategy, Clark expands and contextualizes the original author's suggestions and offers anecdotes about how each one helped him or other writers sharpen their skills. An invaluable resource for writers of all kinds, Murder Your Darlings is an inspiring and edifying ode to the craft of writing.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780316481885
Publisher:	Little, Brown and Company
Publication date:	01/21/2020
Pages:	352
Product dimensions:	5.70(w) x 8.20(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

Roy Peter Clark is senior scholar at the Poynter Institute, one of the most prestigious schools for journalists in the world. He has taught writing at every level — from schoolchildren to Pulitzer Prize-winning authors — for more than forty years.
 
A writer who teaches and a teacher who writes, he has authored or edited nineteen books on writing and journalism, including The Art of X-Ray Reading, How to Write Short, Writing Tools, The Glamour of Grammar, and Help! for Writers. He lives in St. Petersburg, Florida, where he is considered a garage-band legend.

Table of Contents

Introduction: A Writing Book about Writing Books 3

Part I Language and Craft 11

1 Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch: Murder your darlings. 13

2 William Zinsser: Find and cut the clutter. 20

3 Donald Hall: Learn to live inside words. 27

4 George Campbell: Shape a sentence for the desired effect. 34

5 John McPhee: Work from a plan. 41

Part II Voice and Style 47

6 William Strunk Jr. and E. B. White: Recognize two contradictory meanings of style. 49

7 Gary Provost and Ursula K. Le Guin: Vary sentence length to create a pleasing rhythm. 58

8 Vera John-Steiner: Use visual markings to spark your creative process. 68

9 Constance Hale and Jessie Scanlon: Tune your voice for the digital age. 78

10 Ben Yagoda: Turn the dials that adjust the way you sound as a writer. 86

Part III Confidence and Identity 97

11 Donald Murray: Learn the steps of the writing process. 99

12 Anne Lamott: Keep writing; things will get better. 108

13 Peter Elbow: Write freely to discover what you want to say. 116

14 Dorothea Brande and Brenda Ueland: Say it loud: "I am a writer." 125

15 Stephen King: Develop the writing habit. 139

Part IV Storytelling and Character 147

16 Brian Boyd: Understand the value of storytelling. 149

17 James Wood: Prefer the complex human narrator. 160

18 Northrop Frye: Write for sequence, then for theme. 170

19 Lajos Egri: Distill your story into five words-maybe three. 178

20 E. M. Forster: Add dimension to characters. 185

21 Gay Talese and Tom Wolfe: Report for story. 193

Part V Rhetoric and Audience 203

22 Louise M. Rosenblatt: Anticipate the needs of readers. 205

23 Quintilian: Embrace rhetoric as the source of language power. 213

24 Aristotle: Influence the emotional responses of your audience. 220

25 Vivian Gornick and Mary Karr: Sign a social contract with the reader. 229

26 Rudolf Flesch and Robert Gunning: Write to the level of your reader-and a little higher. 239

Part VI Mission and Purpose 253

27 S. I. Hayakawa: Learn the strategies that make reports reliable. 255

28 Kurt Vonnegut and Lee Stringer: Write to make your soul grow. 265

29 Horace: Write to delight and instruct. 273

30 Edward R. Murrow: Become the eyes and ears of the audience. 282

31 Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, and Neil Postman: Choose advocacy over propaganda. 291

32 Natalie Goldberg and Charles Johnson: Be a writer-and so much more. 299

Afterword 311

Acknowledgments 313

Appendix: Books Roy Peter Clark 316

Bibliography 319

Index 329

Editorial Reviews

2019-09-29
A jam-packed book of advice for would-be writers.

Poynter Institute senior scholar Clark (The Art of X-Ray Reading: How the Secrets of 25 Great Works of Literature Will Improve Your Writing, 2017, etc.) has become something of a guru when it comes to how-to writing books. Written in his usual easygoing, conversational, and encouraging style, his latest is a compilation of writing advice from more than 50 of his favorite books about writing. Covering a wide range of topics, including language and craft, voice and style, storytelling and character, and rhetoric and audience, the author focuses on one or two writing lessons from each book. In each chapter, Clark also provides a pedagogical "Tool Box" of ideas and suggestions and "Lessons" for students to try out: "Read a lot and write a lot"; "Write Up to your readers, not Down." The book's title comes from Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch's On the Art of Writing (1916), in which the author suggested, "Draft, purge, murder. Before you murder that darling, you must create it." Clark argues that William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White's The Elements of Style is the "great-granddaddy" of all books on writing. For "millions of reluctant writers," it told them that the "writing craft is not an act of magic, but the applied use of both rules and tools." Besides the old standards, there are some nice surprises—e.g., George Campbell's The Philosophy of Rhetoric, a "must read" that "was published in a significant year: 1776." Stephen King's "odd bit of advice" in On Writing—to read "bad writing so you can learn what not to write"—is practical and wise. Clark deftly mixes writing advice with personal memoir and toots his own horn in an appendix that includes summaries of his own books, including Writing Tools—"more than 200,000 copies have been sold in several formats."

A generous, witty, and exuberant teacher inspires writers to "know more and feel more."

Kirkus Reviews

"What emerges is an all-encompassing guide to a life spent with words...Reading Clark is like sitting in on a conversational master class. Writer-readers will clamor for more."
—Courtney Eathorne, Booklist

"A party-popper of inspiration."
—Mignon Fogarty, author of Grammar Girl's Quick and Dirty Tips for Better Writing

"With his latest work, Murder Your Darlings, Roy Peter Clark once again proves he is America's writing coach. Having compiled, dissected, and analyzed the best writing tips from the best books on writing, Clark has done all lovers of the written word a tremendous favor. Murder Your Darlings is sure to become the go-to source, not only for writing tips but also for Clark's unique insight and practical instruction. A terrific addition to any bookshelf."
—Lori Roy, two-time Edgar award-winning author of Gone Too Long

"This book is magic. Open any page of Murder Your Darlings and dive in. You'll quickly find yourself pulled into Roy Peter Clark's folksy and gentle voice, and his distillation of the wisdom of more than 50 writing books. Through this appreciation, he opens the door to writing books ancient and modern, and to scores of inspiring strategies and tools. He zeroes in on the craft, but also the soul of writing — our voice and identity as writers, as well as our mission and purpose. Along the way, 'America's Writing Coach' encourages us with his greatest lesson — that we can all get better, every day. I am in love with Murder Your Darlings. This is the book I want to give to every writer."
—Diana K. Sugg, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, and Writing Coach and Enterprise Editor at The Baltimore Sun

"I met Roy Peter Clark over forty years ago, when the Pulitzer-winning editor of the St. Petersburg Times, Eugene C. Patterson, himself an elegant stylist, hired Roy as one of the first "writing coaches" in a large American newsroom. Roy not only improved the literary quality of an already fluent newspaper, he helped invent the profession of journalistic coaching. Murder Your Darlings sums up the best wisdom of a discipline in which Roy was a pioneer and remains a star."
—Howell Raines, author of Fly Fishing Through the Midlife Crisis

From the Publisher