Writing with scissors

Over the last few years, one of my great pleasures has been reading the articles on writing that John McPhee has been contributing on an annual basis to The New Yorker. I’ve written here about my reactions to McPhee’s advice on using the dictionary, on “greening” or cutting a piece by an arbitrary length, on structure, on frames of reference. Now his full book on the subject is here, Draft No. 4, and it’s arriving in my life at an opportune time. I’m wrapping up a draft of my own book, with two months to go before deadline, and I have a daunting set of tasks ahead of me—responding to editorial comments, preparing the notes and bibliography, wrestling the whole thing down to size. McPhee’s reasonable voice is a balm at such times, although he never minimizes the difficulty of the process itself, which he calls “masochistic, mind-fracturing self-enslaved labor,” even as he speaks of the writer’s “animal sense of being hunted.” And when you read Sam Anderson’s wonderful profile on McPhee in this week’s issue of The New York Times Magazine, it’s like listening to an old soldier who has been in combat so many times that everything that he says carries the weight of long experience. (Reading it, I was reminded a little of the film editor Walter Murch, whom McPhee resembles in certain ways—they look sort of alike, they’re both obsessed with structure, and they both seem to know everything. I was curious to see whether anyone else had made this connection, so I did a search for their names together on Google. Of the first five results, three were links from this blog.)

Anderson’s article offers us the portrait of a man who, at eighty-six, has done a better job than just about anyone else of organizing his own brain: “Each of those years seems to be filed away inside of him, loaded with information, ready to access.” I would have been equally pleased to learn that McPhee was as privately untidy as his writing is intricately patterned, but it makes sense that his interest in problems of structure—to which he returns endlessly—would manifest itself in his life and conversation. He’s interested in structure in the same way that the rest of us are interested in the lives of our own children. I never tire of hearing how writers deal with structural issues, and I find passages like the following almost pornographically fascinating:

The process is hellacious. McPhee gathers every single scrap of reporting on a given project—every interview, description, stray thought and research tidbit—and types all of it into his computer. He studies that data and comes up with organizing categories: themes, set pieces, characters and so on. Each category is assigned a code. To find the structure of a piece, McPhee makes an index card for each of his codes, sets them on a large table and arranges and rearranges the cards until the sequence seems right. Then he works back through his mass of assembled data, labeling each piece with the relevant code. On the computer, a program called “Structur” arranges these scraps into organized batches, and McPhee then works sequentially, batch by batch, converting all of it into prose. (In the old days, McPhee would manually type out his notes, photocopy them, cut up everything with scissors, and sort it all into coded envelopes. His first computer, he says, was “a five-thousand-dollar pair of scissors.”)

Anderson writes: “[McPhee] is one of the world’s few remaining users of a program called Kedit, which he writes about, at great length, in Draft No. 4.” The phrase “at great length” excites me tremendously—I’m at a point in my life where I’d rather hear about a writer’s favorite software program than his or her inspirational  thoughts on creativity—and McPhee’s process doesn’t sound too far removed from the one that I’ve worked out for myself. As I read it, though, I found myself thinking in passing of what might be lost when you move from scissors to a computer. (Scissors appear in the toolboxes of many of the writers and artists I admire. In The Elements of Style, E.B. White advises: “Quite often the writer will discover, on examining the completed work, that there are serious flaws in the arrangement of the material, calling for transpositions. When this is the case, he can save himself much labor and time by using scissors on his manuscript, cutting it to pieces and fitting the pieces together in a better order.” In The Silent Clowns, Walter Kerr describes the narrative challenges of filmmaking in the early fifties and concludes: “The problem was solved, more or less, with a scissors.” And Paul Klee once wrote in his diary: “What I don’t like, I cut away with the scissors.”) But McPhee isn’t sentimental about the tools themselves. In Anderson’s profile, the New Yorker editor David Remnick, who took McPhee’s class at Princeton, recalls: “You were in the room with a craftsman of the art, rather than a scholar or critic—to the point where I remember him passing around the weird mechanical pencils he used to use.” Yet there’s no question in my mind that McPhee would drop that one brand of pencil if he found one that he thought was objectively better. As soon as he had Kedit, he got rid of the scissors. When you’re trying to rethink structure from the ground up, you don’t have much time for nostalgia.

And when McPhee explains the rationale behind his methods, you can hear the pragmatism of fifty years of hard experience:

If this sounds mechanical, its effect was absolutely the reverse. If the contents of the seventh folder were before me, the contents of twenty-nine other folders were out of sight. Every organizational aspect was behind me. The procedure eliminated nearly all distraction and concentrated only the material I had to deal with in a given day or week. It painted me into a corner, yes, but in doing so it freed me to write.

This amounts to an elaboration of what I’ve elsewhere called my favorite piece of writing advice, which David Mamet offers in Some Freaks:

As a writer, I’ve tried to train myself to go one achievable step at a time: to say, for example, “Today I don’t have to be particularly inventive, all I have to be is careful, and make up an outline of the actual physical things the character does in Act One.” And then, the following day to say, “Today I don’t have to be careful. I already have this careful, literal outline, and I all have to do is be a little bit inventive,” et cetera, et cetera.

Mamet might as well have come out of the same box as Walter Murch and McPhee, which implies that I have a definite type when it comes to looking for advice. And what they all have in common, besides the glasses and beard, is the air of having labored at a craft for decades, survived, and returned to tell the tale. Of the three, McPhee’s career may be the most enviable of all, if only because he spent it in Princeton, not Hollywood. It’s nice to be able to structure an essay. The tricky part is structuring a life.

The classicist and the randomizer

I haven’t read much by Anne Carson, but I think I’m in love with her. Sam Anderson’s recent profile of the acclaimed poet, best known for the hybrid novel Autobiography of Red, is one of the most interesting pieces I’ve read in the New York Times in months, and it’s largely because of Carson herself, who stands revealed as a prickly, intelligent, and uncompromising human being. I’d be predisposed to love her in any case, if only because she makes her living teaching ancient Greek and seems unusually attuned to the creative possibilities of randomness, both of which are subjects that are dear to my heart. But what’s really fascinating about Carson—and instructive for the rest of us—is that these two sides of her personality, the rigorous and the random, seem to arise from the same place. And reading this profile helped me understand, as if for the first time, why my own creative process has evolved to a point where it oscillates between these two extremes.

Let’s start with the Greek. Near the end of the profile, Carson and Anderson have the following exchange:

When I asked Carson what appealed to her so much as a teenager about Greek, she answered, “It just seemed to me the best language.” I asked her to elaborate. “It’s just intrinsic,” she said. “Just a different experience.” I asked her to describe the nature of that experience. “It’s just like what it is,” she said. “If it were like something else, you could do the other thing. It’s just like itself. I really can’t analogize.” This launched us into a five-minute circular conversation that felt like an allegory of the futility of all human language. “That’s as far as we can go with that,” she said.

Which doesn’t exactly clear up the subject. Yet  Carson’s words get as close as anything I’ve seen to what it means to learn ancient Greek. When you’re reading Plato or Homer with any degree of proficiency, you feel as if you’re seeing the world clearly for the first time, thanks largely to the fact that the process is so difficult: you really have no choice but to slow down and consider each word in relation to every other, until, as if by magic, a window opens, and you’re faced not with words but with tangible objects and ideas, expressed in language that manages to be compact, supple, and seamless all at once.

But there’s a problem with approaching poetry, or any other kind of creative writing, with the mentality of a classicist. Classics, at least initially, is about learning a complicated set of rules and exceptions, and there’s really no other way to approach it except through a kind of dignified drudgery: you’re memorizing endless conjugations and declensions and particles and the uses of the genitive absolute, and it takes about a year of hard labor before you can hope to read a page of text with any kind of fluency. There’s a reason why the field appeals to a certain kind of orderly personality—or to cast out those who lack that state of mind—and it tends to encourage further development along the same lines: Greek, like any super power, only amplifies tendencies that are already there. In my own case, years of studying Latin and Greek left me with good grammar and a habit of approaching literary problems as systematically as I could: breaking them down, looking for order, proceeding coldly and rationally. It’s an important part of what I do. But from a poetic or artistic perspective, it can be deadly.

Which is where the randomness comes in. A person, or an entire culture, founded on an ideal of rationality occasionally needs to tack sharply in the opposite direction, toward something like pure chance, in order to achieve a creative middle ground. It’s why the Greeks themselves were both the inventors of logic and users of lots and oracles, and Carson, the classicist and scholar, takes this to impressive extremes. The title of her new book, Red Doc >, is based on the default name the file was given by her word processor, and the form of the book itself was born of serendipity:

Most of the text runs like a racing stripe down the center of the page, with a couple of inches of empty space on either side. This form was also a result of an accident with the computer. Carson hit a wrong button, and it made the margins go crazy. She found this instantly liberating. The sentences, with one click, went from prosaic to strange, and finally Carson understood—after years of frustration—how her book was actually supposed to work.

And it’s hard not to read Carson’s embrace of chance as a classicist’s way of breaking through the patterns created by her own rationality. (Carson has also used randomization software to reorder the lines of the poem itself, which Nicholson Baker also tried with the chapters in his novel The Anthologist.) It would all be enough, as I’ve said before, to make me fall for her, if we weren’t both happily married. And her husband’s nickname, as it happens, is the Randomizer.