DRAFT NO. 4: ON THE WRITING LIFE - JOHN MCPHEE

I have no idea why I picked this up. I don’t write for the New Yorker and I’m not looking to hone my ability to write compellingly about geology (which, admittedly, McPhee is the best at) yet I grabbed it impulsively and read it quickly. I suppose that is certainly a testament to McPhee ability as a writer to take something that seems very dull (like how he structures his long non-fiction essays) and turns it into something you fly through. Actually, McPhee is so good at writing, on a sentence-by-sentence, word-choice level, that the idea that he could teach you how to write like him is laughable. On that front the book is a failure. However, there is lots of interesting stuff in it. His chapter on structure is the best in the book and it lays out his truly insane system of envisioning his essays or books at charts or graphs (like a clock that starts at 9 or a spiral) which he literally draws out then fills in the passages. He also mentions how he used to use scissors and tape to edit sections of his work. I’ve only known computers to write so perhaps this is really normal but I found it fascinating. On the computer front, he also mentions that he a computer programer approached him in 1982 about creating a word processor to McPhee’s specifications. Apparently this programer was an early personal computer innovator and worked under the wonderful but mistaken assumption that the personal computers of the future would be bespoke. But either way, McPhee got a program he helped design in 1982 and has used nothing else. Also, there’s lots of inside baseball stuff about the New Yorker, which, because I’m insufferable, I loved. For instance, if McPhee doesn’t know something trivial (like how many gallons of beer a factory produces) he’ll just make something up and trust the fact-checking department to figure it out. Also, the double dots over non-diphthong double vowels, like coöperate, are called diaereses. 65 essays.