- Famous Writing Routines
- Posts
- 📝 John McPhee’s Writing Routine
📝 John McPhee’s Writing Routine
“It doesn’t matter that something you’ve done before worked out well. Your last piece is never going to write your next one for you.”
Famous Writing Routines
March 10, 2024
Welcome to Famous Writing Routines, where we explore the daily habits, writing process, and work routines of some of the most renowned authors throughout history.
John McPhee is an American writer, who is widely considered as one of the pioneers of creative nonfiction, and a four-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in the category General Nonfiction.
Time is the thing that has always favored me. My pieces take a long time and I’m around the subject a lot. Then they get used to me and we’re kind of working on it together. And that’s the nature of it. I’m awestruck by the skill of daily journalists who go out and come back and get this whole thing done in a day.
When it comes to writing careers, you’d be hard pressed to find one as revered and storied as John McPhee. A staff writer for The New Yorker since 1963, McPhee is widely regarded as a pioneer of creative nonfiction and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for his 1998 geology book, Annals of the Former World.
McPhee has built a career out of writing about obscure topics and drawing the interesting out of the mundane. His writings have covered eclectic subjects the farming of oranges, the New Jersey Pine Barrens, birch-bark canoes, and the headmaster of Deerfield Academy, to name a few.
In addition to his writing, McPhee also teaches a writing course at Princeton University. He’s held the role of Ferris Professor of Journalism since 1974, and many of his students have gone on to acclaimed writing careers of their own, including David Remnick, editor-in-chief of The New Yorker; Richard Stengel, former managing editor of Time magazine, Tim Ferriss, author of The 4-Hour Workweek and The 4-Hour Body.
Even at the age of 89, McPhee has no plans to retire from writing or teaching, though he revealed that he never does both at the same time. “When I teach in the spring semester, I let the writer lie fallow. I’ve never written anything during the spring semester,” he wrote. “Then I go back to writing with fresh vigor and I’m writing through summer, fall and January.” McPhee believes that taking time out of his writing to teach actually gives him energy to publish more work, and says the two activities have a “symbiotic” relationship.
***
đź“š Become a premium member for just $50 USD/year to read the rest of this routine and explore the daily habits that shaped the works of Ernest Hemingway, Maya Angelou, Joseph Heller, Haruki Murakami, Richard Powers, Ian Fleming, David Grann, Neil Gaiman, Kazuo Ishiguro, Gillian Flynn, George Pelecanos, and many more. đź“š