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:
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.