William Zinsser—author of 17 books—talks in length on the tri­als and tribu­la­tions of writ­ing ‘On Writ­ing Well’.

My ini­tial fear of immod­esty was mis­guided. The best teach­ers of a craft, I saw, are their own best text­book. Stu­dents who take their classes really want to know how they do what they do—how they grew into their knowl­edge and learned from their wrong turns. There­after, in every edi­tion, I wrote more reveal­ingly, trust­ing my read­ers to trust me if I veered down some unlikely trail of anec­dote to illus­trate a point.

It now occurs to me that I didn’t really find my style until I wrote On Writ­ing Well, at the late age of 52. Until then my style more prob­a­bly reflected who I wanted to be per­ceived as—the urbane colum­nist and humorist and critic. Only when I started writ­ing as a teacher and had no agenda except to be help­ful did my style become inte­grated with my per­son­al­ity and my character.

via Arts and Let­ters Daily