41–50 of 56 posts
Basically: Don't crystallize too early, have a primordial soup of notes that you coagulate/congeal bit by bit. Take little iterative steps on local slices, don't try to construct the final product from the get-go. This method came quite naturally to me during my writing-based personal projects since I have no deadline or anything and am literally just collecting thousands of little A6/A7 notes that I capture as they…
Don't miss the discussion of McPhee's text editor. I would love to get more details about that. Catnip for this crowd.
The interesting part is not so much that it’s KEDIT (not that surprising, when these things get mentioned it’s kedit, one of the other xedit editors, xywrite, or wordstar) but that he had someone write note management macros for it with what sounds like a really idiosyncratic workflow.
> McPhee usually had one person at the center of each piece, so he would aim to spend a lot of time with that person … stay at their cottage for a season Even back when every household received a morning paper I cannot fathom how a single article could command such a high pay.
Things were different back in the day.
McPhee was recommended as someone whose writing "makes boring things interesting". I did enjoy The Curve of Binding Energy (nuclear science) and to some extent Coming out of the Country (Alaska). Both of those featured interesting vignettes and colorful characters which propelled along the narrative. However, I then turned to his magnum opus on geology, Annals of the Former World . That was a long slog which, althoug…
I own every book McPhee published and have read each one at least twice. He is, without question, the finest writer of non-fiction I know. Annals, as you may know, was originally published as 4 separate volumes, each covering a particular US region. Assembling California is my absolute favorite McPhee work. I have a layman’s interest in geology and plate tectonics that I developed specifically because of this book.
In every chapter there is a passage like this:
If you could pull up an acre of abyssal plain anywhere in the world -- lift into view a complete column of the ocean floor, from the accumulated sediments at the top to mantle rock at the base -- you would find the sheeted dikes about halfway down. In contrast to the rock columns you find all over the continents -- giddy with time gaps among lithologies of miscellaneous origin and age -- this totem assemblage from the oceans tells a generally consistent story. At its low end is peridotite, the rock of the mantle, tectonically altered in several ways on departure from the spreading center. Above the mantle rock lie the cooled remains of the great magma chamber that released flowing red rock into the spreading center. The chamber, in cooling, tends to form strata, as developing crystals settle within it like snow -- olivine, plagioclase, pyroxene snow -- but above these cumulate bands it becomes essentially a massive gabbro shading upward into plagiogranite as the magmatic juices chemically differentiate themselves in ways that relate to temperature. Just above the granites are the sheeted dikes of diabase, which keep filling the rift between the diverging plates. Above the sheeted dikes, where the fluid rock actually entered the sea, the suddenly chilled extrusions are piled high, like logs outside a sawmill. Because these extrusions have convex ends that bulge smoothly and resemble pillows, they are known in geology as pillow lavas. Above the pillows are the various sediments that have drifted downward through the deep sea -- umbers, ochres, cherts, chalk. Unlike the rest of the crust-and-mantle package, the sediments may hint at the surrounding world.
...
This guy basically writes in a way that transforms the book I am holding in front of my face, physically into a rock. Like some kind of magic trick. He clearly had so much fun writing this, it's amazing and very fun... if rocks tickle you even a little bit this book is worth reading.
This would be a good overview of the method: https://billyoppenheimer.com/notecard-system/
He is an essayist and he wrote essays. Avoiding the word “essay” in favor of others is fine but it’s striking in a conversation about John McPhee, of all people.
“Fact pieces.” Ick.
> McPhee usually had one person at the center of each piece, so he would aim to spend a lot of time with that person … stay at their cottage for a season Even back when every household received a morning paper I cannot fathom how a single article could command such a high pay.
Roger Zelazny, the science-fiction author, relates a story of how he wrote one story that fulfilled the briefs of three anthologies/magazines, sold it three times, and it was enough to pay for a cruise. Things were different back in the day.
> I should say that in those nightly encounters I rarely go straight from notes to full sentences. I bridge the gap with a kind of pseudowriting. In effect it’s an outline that takes the form of paragraphs, mixed in with the raw notes. I write good full sentences, broken half-sentences, non-sentences that also include todos in them. Back when i wrote a lot, i often did something like this. I used a program called Act…
Sounds a bit like Gingko, which I used to really love: https://gingkowriter.com/
As usual, there's an Obsidian plugin nowadays trying to mimic (some of?) it: https://github.com/ycnmhd/obsidian-lineage
Basically: Don't crystallize too early, have a primordial soup of notes that you coagulate/congeal bit by bit. Take little iterative steps on local slices, don't try to construct the final product from the get-go. This method came quite naturally to me during my writing-based personal projects since I have no deadline or anything and am literally just collecting thousands of little A6/A7 notes that I capture as they…
...and use Emacs. Very important.
And yeah, regarding writing (fiction and non-fiction) there's Emacs Writing Studio which people praise and I haven't personally used: https://github.com/pprevos/emacs-writing-studio
There's also some packages like Olivetti or Writeroom-mode for just a "Zen mode" writing experience.
I suspect a large contingent here will really hate this suggestion but here it goes: The McPhee method sounds like a great framework for making writing prompts. That is, prompts for LLMs to write things. >in stage one he accumulates notes; in stage two he selects them; in stage three he structures them; and in stage four he writes. By the time he is crafting sentences the structure of the piece as a whole, and of eac…
OP describes this ^ long arduous process and then notes: > Your writing can only be as good as your taste. That is, using an LLM to help with "collecting these fragments and structuring them" might be okay--should the writer still be able to deeply immerse--but the "stitching them together and choosing the vocab and grammar" of a faux writer LLM is likely to leave a bad taste in the mind of some readers (e.g. those H…
I do agree that the LLM style vs. the authors style is off-putting. I have used LLMs to help me write things and I do not like how its not "my" voice. I see no reason it couldnt use my voice given some of my writing samples. In any case, I've found it very easy to revise it in my own words. This is part of the "revise" stage mentioned in the process. In addition, this step is barely necessary for some things, such as technical writing.