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My boss earned his Ph.D. at Princeton, so the Princeton Alumni Weekly is delivered to the office. I usually don’t give it more than a parting glance, but this week’s features a short conversation with Pulitzer Prize-winning author John McPhee on the craft of writing. I’ve never read any of his work, as far as I can remember, but he has some interesting things to say:

How difficult is it to teach writing?
I have often drawn an analogy to when I was a Princeton student. In the summertime I taught swimming to kids at a camp in Vermont. They knew how to swim. I was trying to help them get through the water with more efficiency, more smoothness, speed. That’s what I do here. These kids can write — I’m not teaching them how to write….

What do you think makes a good writer?
Perseverance. You have to stay with it. Writers are compulsive and fairly driven people, and that’s what gets them through all the heavy, difficult time of getting a piece of writing in motion and keeping it in motion. You have to have some kind of overriding drive that pushes you through that, or you’d have given it up long since, because a piece of writing takes forever.

What’s your writing process now?
The big thing is doing it routinely, six days a week. It doesn’t mean you’re writing all day. It means you’re writing for a tiny fragment of the day, after you’ve paced around and tried to get going and couldn’t do anything. Finally, you panic because you’re afraid you’re not getting anything done. And something happens — you get 500 words or 200 words. And the next day you go through the same process so that there are these little pieces of 200 words here and 150 there. But you multiply that by 365, and you’ve got something.

This last part gets to the heart of something I was trying to write about here. Writing is basically just putting one word in front of the other. The more you do it, the more words you’ll have.

A short but interesting article from this Sunday’s New York Times (registration required) about the depiction of God in both American and British cinema:

But that was 1965. By 1972, Peter O’Toole was portraying the Absolute Unknowable Righteous Eternal Lord of Hosts, King of Kings and 14th Earl of Gurney in “The Ruling Class.” The Monty Python crew — Michael Palin, John Cleese and the others — inserted God into all their films. At first, Terry Gilliam, who did the animations, sketched Him as a hipster, wearing dark glasses. But then he settled on the more resonant image of Dr. William Gilbert (Leviathan) Grace, the obese turn-of-the-century Gloucestershire cricketer, whose photograph is dominated by a beard you could lose wickets in. The Pythons’ cartoon God, Mr. Palin said, “saved us a little money. Very expensive, real God.”

Frankly, however, I’m much less concerned with the upcoming Bruce Almighty‘s depiction of the almighty than with whether or not it’s funny. The fact that Steve Oedekerk is one of the credited screenwriters fills me with no small amount of dread. As Keith Phipps says in his review of Oedekerk’s desperately awful Kung Pow!: Enter The Fist, “…remember that name, and remember to avoid it.”

It’s also interesting (well, to me anyway) to note that the other Terry Gilliam God mentioned in the article, Time Bandits‘ Ralph Richardson, was also from Gloucestershire. You’d think they’d have seen a sharp rise in spiritual pilgrimages over there because of it, but you would of course be wrong.

In the past four days, I have received nearly two hundred search referrals for “bill o’reilly hubcap” or some variation of the same. Which is a little unnerving — there’s usually only one or two searches per item, and very few of them repeat — and it’s more than a little surprising, since I don’t think I’ve ever actually discussed Bill O’Reilly’s comment here or anywhere else. So, if that’s why you’re here, I apologize; this is probably the only time I will ever directly comment on this, and all I’m going to say is this:

I don’t know if what Bill O’Reilly said that night — suggesting that young black men were out in the parking lot stealing hubcaps — was intended to be racist. He has since claimed that his joke was meant in the spirit of that evening’s 1950s-themed dinner. That’s altogether possible, and I won’t debate the point. There are other recent comments (like Rick Santorum’s and Barbara Cubin’s) that are probably worthy of closer scrutiny and more widespread derision. These, after all, come from elected officials, not just some pompous windbag who, in the great Orwellian tradition that’s currently sweeping America, calls his dog-and-pony show of shouting down guests and unsubstantiated lies a “no-spin zone”. There are plenty of other reasons to dislike Bill O’Reilly, believe me.

And that’s all I’ve got to say about that.