Just downloaded the latest New Yorker on my Kindle and read this treasure of an article by John McPhee.* Over his long lifetime of professional writing, he has developed a great strategy for producing essays that hold together, give loads of information, even of a technical nature, and keep the reader's interest from beginning to end.
This piece explains and illustrates his way of working through the example it sets. In it he covers many topics--composition classes, older computer and PC technologies, interesting places and colorful characters-- but so well structured that every word, phrase and sentence seems to fall into its proper place.
Mostly, except for several intense years in college, I have been able to write without much regard to deadlines or publication. Once a few years ago I did have to write against a deadline, having forgotten a promise to do an essay about teaching in the prison where I worked then. Panicked, I wrote down anything I could think of, printed it, got out the scissors and cut the paragraphs up and re-assembled them. This took ten tedious hours and yielded 2,000 words in reasonably coherent order which I mailed off the next day. Not very much fun, but it saved the situation. McPhee uses refined and sophisticated versions of this technique for longer pieces. He is a bear for structure, too, which paradoxically gives him all kinds of freedom, because he can experiment and explore while maintaining coherence. Not all structures are the same, but once the structure is set he adheres to it.
His approach to writing a travel piece should be of particular interest to people who want to turn such journeys into interesting prose. He notes that chronological order is the most obvious, natural way of recounting such experiences, but he suggests other modes of organization, like introducing an unusual character or incident or a theme, such as the possible boredom inherent in writing about driving across America as a passenger in a chemical tanker, as he did, and what a fascinating experience it turned out to be. I'm thinking how I might take my Peruvian adventures and devise a framework for a longer piece. Not all that easy.
Something that struck me was that he said his first writing teacher made the class write, write, write. That's the key. These days, teachers know this. My five year old granddaughter is already writing compositions and stories, and she is by no means unusual. Her sister was the same way about writing, and so are all her little friends. It's just natural to them. We were discouraged from writing, told that it had to be correct and we had better not say anything stupid or otherwise out of line and that the writing should be neat and the spelling perfect. No wonder it took us a lot of time to discover our real abilities.
You don't have to be some kind of genius to write. Just write. Then start getting into it for real!
*Available in full online only to New Yorker subscribers.
Sound interesting, wish I could read it.
Your description of cutting up your essay into various parts and rearranging it all is just what I did with many of my university essays, except they were all hand written! What a chore rewriting and rewriting! How much easier it is with today's technology.
Posted by: marja-leena | January 09, 2013 at 06:32 PM
I firmly believe that it's important to just write. People were always amazed at how much my first graders could write. They could because we wrote everyday. I told them that writing is a power that could be as strong as Superman's, but it would only get stronger if they practiced and refined their power. They wrote thank you letters to show appreciation to people who did things for our class. They wrote letters to lift the spirits of people who needed their spirits uplifted. They wrote letters to the president to tell them what they thought. I was always so proud of what they could accomplish in a year.
Posted by: Musings | January 09, 2013 at 10:51 PM
And check out Doonesbury this week. Jeff Redfern can live in his parents' basement on the condition that he write each morning for three solid hours, but he's been sleeping in.
Posted by: Brandon | January 09, 2013 at 11:21 PM
And NOT writing must be like Kryptonite. You lose your Superman writing power. One good thing about blogging is that I write a lot.
Posted by: Henry Hank Chapin | January 10, 2013 at 11:26 AM
I'm a big fan of McPhee's having been turned onto him when a co-worker, in 1980, recommended Coming into the Country.
Posted by: Cop Car | January 11, 2013 at 10:15 AM
Cop Car: I downloaded a sample to look at. It's about Alaska,where I hope to go some day. Wonder what the changes are from when he wrote it in 1980 to today.
Posted by: Hattie | January 11, 2013 at 10:39 AM
Kay: Missed your comment. But yes, and your students were lucky to have you.
Posted by: Hattie | January 11, 2013 at 01:49 PM