Berkes+KM

Katrin MacPhee English 2773 March 9th 2010 __Assignment about McPhee__ First of all, I read one of the articles that was on the more extensive list, not on the selected one. I had already done all the work for it before I realized I wasn’t to have chosen this particular article, so I decided to go ahead anyway. I hope this is all right. The piece I chose was actually a twenty two minute interview with McPhee done on   December 11th 1978 by Howard Berkes. It begins with a brief introduction about how McPhee is normally something of a recluse who chooses to live a very private life. The interview was portrayed as an opportunity to gain some rare insight into who John McPhee actually is. In   reality, the interview is more about McPhee’s writing methods than about his personal life. He speaks about several stages in the writing process, the first being how he finds ideas for pieces. McPhee describes travelling to a new place, becoming involved with the local people and finding out their stories. In essence, all of his stories are about describing people against their backgrounds, not about describing the subject behind them. It is this, says Berkes, that makes the 11.5 inch Collected Works of John McPhee readable-at heart, all his stories are about people. McPhee himself describes his work as “one sketch after another of people.” While developing a story, McPhee takes scrupulous notes. He writes down absolutely everything that could of use to him in writing his piece-from the exact wording of a sign to   the temperature of the river. He allows the pieces to develop organically-his completed 13 books (at this point in his career) all began as articles to be published in the New Yorker. McPhee states that ideas cannot be “extensively conceived” too early because you “don’t know what you’re getting yourself into.” Why limit yourself to a particular length, when you can allow the story to be as short or as long as it needs to be? When speaking of editing, McPhee says that his only “yardstick that makes sense” is his own interest. If he finds something interesting, he will include it in the piece. To try and write according to what he believes others want, or by trying to imagine what he ought to be writing about “would be suicide.” McPhee claims that actually writing can be the hardest part. He is an admitted perfectionist when it comes to selecting words. He never settles for anything but the right word- whether or not it is commonly used is irrelevant to him. He may take days to choose a particular word, leafing through his fifteen dictionaries until he lands on one that is absolutely perfect. Constructing a sentence can be just as difficult. McPhee does not believe in writing a mediocre sentence and then doctoring it up. Rather, he waits for inspiration, in the form of a perfect phrase, to strike. He admits to feeling quite a lot of pressure as a writer-he compares his job to being a performer who gets stage fright. He knows that he has a body of readers, who he feels are, in   some ways, better suited to judge his work than he is to write it. He sometimes feel s that they condition what he does as a writer, and that critics are often difficult to deal with. However, he    does have some neat techniques for tackling the writers block this stress can create. The interview begins with him setting a scene: he is writing a letter to his mother about what an awful time he is having with a particular piece or paragraph. He allows himself to begin describing the problem in more and more detail until he is actually writing. After getting into his flow, he returns and cuts back on the fluff about how anxious he is. Not bad advice.