David Paul Deavel nominates Ben Yagoda’s How to Not Write Bad as a successor to The Elements Of Style. Part of why he’s impressed:
As good as most of his guidance and judgments are, what I like most about Yagoda’s book is the more general advice he gives to those who really want to write better. It primarily involves habits of reading and thinking rather than learning specific rules. Yagoda is skeptical of accounts of the past in which everyone was writing elegant letters with classical and biblical allusions between battles of the Civil War. There may have been great letters, but few were writing them. Today more people than ever are writing on blogs and other social media. The problem is that most of this digital writing is not all that good due to the fact that it is done in a rather mindless fashion. Most people are “multi-tasking,” which is a perfect condition in which to write bad. Precision, accuracy, and diction that avoid ambiguity, vagueness, and cliché will inevitably be sacrificed when one is not “mindful” or concentrated on the difficult task of writing. Yagoda says what my students and I need to hear: Turn off the radio, the phone, and the social media if you want to write something that’s not bad.
Emma Woolf similarly tries to limit distractions when writing:
Isolation is a big part of writing (if you crave constant company then writing’s probably not for you) because you need to be alone simply to get the words down.
But you also need to experience life and people and relationships in order to have something to write about. When I went freelance a few years ago, after a decade in publishing, I found the enforced solitude hard. I missed the banter and time-wasting with colleagues, I even missed the silly office politics. These days I escape writing-at-home madness at the British Library: in its hallowed reading rooms, surrounded by other freelancers, I feel less caged (and you can’t work there in pajamas).
Avoiding the distractions of social media and the Internet is another problem for writers these days. I struggle with this: currently my screensaver is the warning from Jonathan Franzen: “It’s doubtful that anyone with an Internet connection at his workplace is writing good fiction.” It was Franzen who told Time magazine he’d resorted to pouring super-glue into his Ethernet port to deprive himself of Internet access. (He went on to write the novel Freedom, so it obviously worked for him.) Other writers, including Zadie Smith, use applications that prevent them from going online; I haven’t tried this software yet, but I’m considering it.
The Dish 