by John McPhee
This book is half writing craft / half memoir. Here are some of his gem’s about writing.
First, one of the graphs that inspired me to buy the book. I am fascinated how he thinks so visually about his structural process.
(The book was second hand and dog eared when I bought it.)
Notes on Structure
Almost always there is considerable tension between chronology and theme, and chronology traditionally wins.
McPhee is talking about non fiction here, but this is doubly true for novels.
Readers are not supposed to notice the structure. It is meant to be about as visible as someone’s bones.
a basic criterion for all structures: they should not be imposed upon the material. They should arise from within it.
This is a very actionable step.
Often, after you have reviewed your notes many times and thought through your material, it is difficult to frame much of a structure until you write a lead. You wade around in your notes, getting nowhere. You don’t see a pattern. You don’t know what to do. So stop everything. Stop looking at the notes. Hunt through your mind for a good beginning. Then write it. Write a lead.
I would go so far as to suggest that you should always write your lead (redoing it and polishing it until you are satisfied that it will serve) before you go at the big pile of raw material and sort it into a structure.
I wonder if writing a novel that is underpinned with research and note making could move forward similarly to the process of writing non fiction. I’m curious about this as I am someone who is more comfortable writing non fiction and trying to find my feet with novels.
The lead—like the title—should be a flashlight that shines down into the story. A lead is a promise. It promises that the piece of writing is going to be like this. If it is not going to be so, don’t use the lead.
More stunning imagery. I love the idea of the lead as a flashlight shining down through a story.
Another way to prime the pump is to write by hand… get away from the computer, lie down somewhere with pencil and pad, and think it over. This can do wonders at any point in a piece and is especially helpful when you have written nothing at all. Sooner or later something comes to you. Without getting up, you roll over and scribble on the pad. Go on scribbling as long as the words develop. Then get up and copy what you have written into your computer file.
Another actionable tip. And yet acknowledging what works for him is not universal:
Alternating between handwriting and computer typing almost always moves me along, but that doesn’t mean it will work for you.
Finding Your Style
Young writers find out what kinds of writers they are by experiment.
If they choose from the outset to practice exclusively a form of writing because it is praised in the classroom or otherwise carries appealing prestige, they are vastly increasing the risk inherent in taking up writing in the first place. It is so easy to misjudge yourself and get stuck in the wrong genre.
You avoid that, early on, by writing in every genre. If you are telling yourself you’re a poet, write poems. Write a lot of poems. If fewer than one work out, throw them all away; you’re not a poet. Maybe you’re a novelist. You won’t know until you have written several novels.
This is so interesting. Particularly the bit about getting stuck writing in a way that was praised in school.
Young writers generally need a long while to assess their own variety, to learn what kinds of writers they most suitably and effectively are…
“Though a man be more prone and able for one kind of writing than another, yet he must exercise all.” Ben Jonson
One of my favorite quotes in the book.
No one will ever write in just the way that you do, or in just the way that anyone else does. Because of this fact, there is no real competition between writers. What appears to be competition is actually nothing more than jealousy and gossip. Writing is a matter strictly of developing oneself. You compete only with yourself. You develop yourself by writing. An editor’s goal is to help writers make the most of the patterns that are unique about them.
On omission and selection,
Writing is selection.
… You select what goes in and you decide what stays out. At base you have only one criterion: If something interests you, it goes in—if not, it stays out.
… Forget market research. Never market-research your writing. Write on subjects in which you have enough interest on your own to see you through all the stops, starts, hesitations, and other impediments along the way. Ideally, a piece of writing should grow to whatever length is sustained by its selected material—that much and no more.
Drafting
McPhee on the difference between drafts and a ratio of how long each draft takes that he observed in his own writing over time.
First drafts are slow and develop clumsily because every sentence affects not only those before it but also those that follow. The first draft of my book on California geology took two gloomy years; the second, third, and fourth drafts took about six months altogether. That four-to-one ratio in writing time—first draft versus the other drafts combined—has for me been consistent in projects of any length, even if the first draft takes only a few days or weeks. There are psychological differences from phase to phase, and the first is the phase of the pit and the pendulum. After that, it seems as if a different person is taking over. Dread largely disappears. Problems become less threatening, more interesting. Experience is more helpful, as if an amateur is being replaced by a professional. Days go by quickly and not a few could be called pleasant, I’ll admit.
I’m intrigued to see him using the same metaphor as Neil Gaiman [[Throwing Mud at the Wall]]. I wonder who said it first and if one is referencing the other or if it arose naturally because it is so fitting to the task at hand.
The way to do a piece of writing is three or four times over, never once. For me, the hardest part comes first, getting something—anything—out in front of me. Sometimes in a nervous frenzy I just fling words as if I were flinging mud at a wall.
And in a letter to his daughter (writer Jenny McPhee),
You finish that first awful blurting, and then you put the thing aside. You get in your car and drive home. On the way, your mind is still knitting at the words. You think of a better way to say something, a good phrase to correct a certain problem. Without the drafted version—if it did not exist—you obviously would not be thinking of things that would improve it. In short, you may be actually writing only two or three hours a day, but your mind, in one way or another, is working on it twenty-four hours a day—yes, while you sleep—but only if some sort of draft or earlier version already exists.
In another letter to Jenny,
Dear Jenny: What am I working on? How is it going? Since you asked, at this point I have no confidence in this piece of writing. It tries a number of things I probably shouldn’t be trying. It tries to use the present tense for the immediacy that the present tense develops, but without allowing any verb tense to become befouled in a double orientation of time. It tells its story inside out. Like the ship I’m writing about, it may have a crack in its hull. And I’ve barely started. After four months and nine days of staring into this monitor for what has probably amounted in aggregate to something closely approaching a thousand hours, that’s enough. I’m going fishing.”
Fiction
Art is where you find it. Good writing is where you find it. Fiction, in my view, is much harder to do than fact, because the fiction writer moves forward by trial and error, while the fact writer is working with a certain body of collected material, and can set up a structure beforehand.
“Fiction must stick to facts, and the truer the facts the better the fiction—so we are told.” Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own.
Editing
An editing tip he uses himself and taught his students at Stanford,
You draw a box not only around any word that does not seem quite right but also around words that fulfill their assignment but seem to present an opportunity.
While the word inside the box may be perfectly O.K., there is likely to be an even better word for this situation, a word right smack on the button, and why don’t you try to find such a word? If none occurs, don’t linger; keep reading and drawing boxes, and later revisit them one by one. If there’s a box around “sensitive” because it seems pretentious in the context, try “susceptible.” Why “susceptible”? Because you looked up “sensitive” in the dictionary and it said “highly susceptible.” With dictionaries, I spend a great deal more time looking up words I know than words I have never heard of—at least ninety-nine to one. The dictionary definitions of words you are trying to replace are far more likely to help you out than a scattershot wad from a thesaurus.
On knowing when he is done,
When am I done? I just know. I’m lucky that way. What I know is that I can’t do any better; someone else might do better, but that’s all I can do; so I call it done.
William Shawn, McPhee’s Editor at The New Yorker when asked how he has so much time to work with each writer on the smallest details,
“It takes as long as it takes.”
McPhee’s advice on maintaining your voice when working with editors,
There are people who superimpose their own patterns on the work of writers and seem to think it is their role to force things in the direction they would have gone in if they had been doing the writing. Such people are called editors, and are not editors but rewriters.
My advice is, never stop battling for the survival of your own unique stamp. An editor can contribute a lot to your thoughts but the piece is yours—and ought to be yours—if it is under your name.
And then on how invaluable editors can be,
Editors are counselors and can do a good deal more for writers in the first-draft stage than at the end of the publishing process.
The help is spoken and informal, and includes insight, encouragement, and reassurance with regard to a current project.
Confidence and Imposter Syndrome
If you lack confidence in setting one word after another and sense that you are stuck in a place from which you will never be set free, if you feel sure that you will never make it and were not cut out to do this, if your prose seems stillborn and you completely lack confidence, you must be a writer.
And unless you can identify what is not succeeding—unless you can see those dark clunky spots that are giving you such a low opinion of your prose as it develops—how are you going to be able to tone it up and make it work?
This is encouraging because this is the same reframe I used when returning to fiction writing after giving it up. If I see the problems I can work on fixing them.
Notes on Technology
Howard thought the computer should be adapted to the individual and not the other way around. One size fits one.
Howard was a computer programmer who helped McPhee customize the software he used.
Hat Tip to Austin Kleon