Draft No 4

John McPhee is probably the most revered journalistic writer of our time, and I love many of his books. This one, however, while it has some good advice and suggestions for writers, ended up bothering me.

The sections on editing, fact-checking and cutting are great. Especially the stories of “greening”, a term I’d never heard before which refers to cutting lines for length even after the final edits have been made. Much as it sometimes bruises the ego, the right answer is almost always to cut more from whatever you’ve written. In this sense I think print might always produce better writing than screens will because hard limits mean more cutting.

McPhee spends a lot of time thinking about the structure of a piece, something I rarely consider, consciously anyway. I’m still digesting this notion of his, not sure if it’s helpful or not. It does explain some of the slightly gimmicky things he does from time to time, like some of the borderline kitchy endings he enjoys.

McPhee loves language and is so good at making you care about every word, sweat every sentence. He also gets into the difficulty of writing. I love the image of him with note cards spread on a table, lying on his back, staring up at the sky for weeks, unable to start writing a piece. It don’t think it’s in this book, but I read somewhere a story about him tying himself to his chair with the belt of his bathrobe to force himself to finish a piece. I could actually use that right now. There are two piece I should be doing rather than this one, which is part of what makes doing this so delicious.

I’d recommend this book to anyone who writes. The only thing that bothers me about this book is that the good advice and helpful anecdotes are surrounded with stories that read like a name-dropping insider’s guide to writing for the New Yorker in its heydey. Admittedly, they’re interesting, entertaining and, hey, if you were there, lived it and now you’re in your 80s and still writing (if you’re a writer and you’re not dead, you’re still writing, or wishing you were dead), I guess you can get away with it.