what i'm reading

Draft No. 4

John McPhee

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5 quotes

language-arts

Chapter 2

  • Developing a structure is seldom that simple. Almost always there is considerable tension between chronology and theme, and chronology traditionally wins. The narrative wants to move from point to point through time, while topics that have arisen now and again across someone's life cry out to be collected. They want to draw themselves together in a single body, in the way that salt does underground. But chronology usually dominates.
  • What impresses someone most of all about the Arctic world are its cycles. Meteorological cycles, biological cycles. Pendular swings in the populations of salmon, sheefish, caribou, lynx, snowshoe hare. Cycles unaffected by people. The wilderness operating in its own way. Seasonal cycles, annual cycles, cycles of five, ten, fifty, a hundred years. Cycles of the present and the past.
  • A piece of writing has to start somewhere, go somewhere, and sit down when it gets there. You do that by building what you hope is an unarguable structure. Beginning, middle, end. Aristotle, Page 1.
  • O.K. then, what is a lead? For one thing, the lead is the hardest part of a story to write. And it is not impossible to write a very bad one. Here is an egregiously bad one from an article on chronic sleeplessness. It began: "Insomnia is the triumph of mind over mattress." Why is that bad? It's not bad at all if you want to be a slapstick comedian—if humor, at that stratum, is your purpose. If you are serious about the subject, you might seem to be indicating at the outset that you don't have confidence in your material so you are trying to make up for it by waxing cute.
  • Another mantra, which I still write in chalk on the blackboard, is "A Thousand Details Add Up to One Impression." It's actually a quote from Cary Grant. Its implication is that few (if any) details are individually essential, while the details collectively are absolutely essential.