Draft No. 4: On the Writing Process

by John McPhee

Then, as I do now, I settled on an ending before going back to the beginning.

Your last piece is never going to write your next one for you.

The title is an integral part of a piece of writing, and one of the most important parts, and ought not to be written by anyone but the writer of what follows the title. Editors’ habit of replacing an author’s title with one of their own is like a photo of a tourist’s head on the cardboard body of Mao Zedong.

The students were always well prepared to interview him, but one question was enough. “Could you tell us about Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn?” someone said. And Roger said, “Eighteen years ago, when I first started having serious intercourse with the big A…” and he was off and running for three hours of free association.

Writing is selection. When you are making notes you are forever selecting. I left out more than I put down.

You are nowhere, and that’s where you’ve been getting. What do you do? You write, ‘Dear Mother.’ And then you tell your mother about the block, the frustration, the ineptitude, the despair. You insist that you are not cut out to do this kind of work. You whine. You whimper. You outline your problem, and you mention that the bear has a fifty-five-inch waist and a neck more than thirty inches around but could run nose-to-nose with Secretariat. You say the bear prefers to lie down and rest. The bear rests fourteen hours a day. And you go on like that as long as you can. And then you go back and delete the ‘Dear Mother’ and all the whimpering and whining, and just keep the bear.”