Curiosity key to improving writing

I've been excavating in my basement storage room to get rid of stuff I'll never need — and discovering treasures I'll never part with. For example, a letter from my cousin David Herzbrun, written from Dusseldorf, Germany, where he was creative director for Europe for the most creative ad agency in America, Doyle Dane Bernbach.

David, 11 years older than I, had been helping me develop as a writer since I was in high school working on the school newspaper. He taught me how to compose headlines and design pages, and he never stopped reminding me to avoid clichés.

In the several years I've been writing this column, it's clear in letters from readers that so many of us, including me, keep striving to make what we write say what we mean.

Accomplished writers have offered us advice:

Stephen King: Kill adverbs that pop up in your writing; an adverb is a crutch for the wrong verb.

August Wilson: Stop trying to sound important; the simpler you say it, the more eloquent it is.

Joseph Conrad: My task is to make you hear, to make you feel — above all — to make you see.

"I've found that I have to a do a lot of things in order to do any of them well. What you learn in one area feeds another. Universal curiosity seems to me the ultimate good in a writer's life. I think that's because, in our craft, ideas feed on anything, but not on nothing.

"Our materials are unlimited. Ideas from architecture, music, religion, medicine, law or anything else — they all can produce ideas for writing. So it's a good idea to keep active — everywhere — while you're working as a writer.

"Eventually everything will go into your writing, without your having to think about it at all."

David's advice was his second gift to me. The first: When I was 9, he let me shoot his BB gun — at fruit hanging from his backyard pear tree.