Thursday, January 06, 2011

Nongrapefruit Department

I very much enjoyed this interview with John McPhee in the Paris Review. More than a few striking observations about writing.

I haven't read any of McPhee's geology books yet, which he talks about at some length there; onto the Metro North reading list they go.

1 Comments:

Blogger nate said...

I like that a lot too. Well worth the read. I don't think I've been aware of any of his work before but the geology books are going onto my list too.

Besides the anecdotal stuff about working with his editors (I love his description of turning in a 60,000-word essay with only one "I" in it) and among other noteworthy stuff about his process, I like his saying that he failed at writing in the evening after a 9-to-5 job because, even though he never wrote much before 5, he needed the whole day of starting-to / putting-off writing to get him there. Maybe it resonates overly much with me because in my own extremely marginal attempts to write after work, or even blog, it's been so hard to get the ideas and energy together. Though the larger sense is that the difference between the writers and the nonwriters is that the writers just actually write.

1/07/2011 12:07 AM  

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