In his book on the writing process, Draft No. 4, and his series of articles on the writing process for New Yorker magazine, journalist and Princeton University writing teacher John McPhee describes: how he once lay on his back on a table for two weeks mentally composing an text before writing it; how he spent 18 months learning to be a journalist by writing short articles with comic headlines for Time Magazine’s ‘Miscellany’ section (example a story about a man who fell asleep riding a bicycle was called “Two Tired”); how he spent months writing 40,000 words on the subject of oranges, and then discarded 85% of it; and how he began to write 1,000 words on a new experimental aircraft and ended up publishing 55,000 over three months.
The point of these anecdotes is that writing, even for experts like McPhee is hard work, and the result is not always what was planned. In his article ‘Writing by Omission’ McPhee asks in particular how a writer can come refine, and shorten, his work to a powerful core. The answer is to be brutal: McPhee quotes the renaissance sculptor Michelangelo: “Every block of stone has a statue inside it, and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it,” to cut away the stone and find the beauty inside it. We do this because ‘Less is More’, as Ernest Hemingway observed, saying that “The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water.”
References – The Writing Life – McPhee’s articles on writing for the New Yorker
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