Four of my favorite passages from Draft No. 4: On the Writing Process by John McPhee:
The approach to structure in factual writing is like returning from a grocery store with materials you intend to cook for dinner. You set them out on the kitchen counter, and what’s there is what you deal with, and all you deal with. If something is red and globular, you don’t call it a tomato if it’s a bell pepper.
Another mantra, which I still write in chalk on the blackboard, is “A Thousand Details Add Up to One Impression.” It’s actually a quote from Cary Grant. Its implication is that few (if any) details are individually essential, while the details collectively are absolutely essential.
So much good writing is rooted in real, personally-filtered human experience.
“How can you afford to use so much time and go into so many things in such detail with just one writer when this whole enterprise is yours to keep together?” He said, “It takes as long as it takes.” As a writing teacher, I have repeated that statement to two generations of students. If they are writers, they will never forget it.
That part is hard.
No one will ever write in just the way that you do, or in just the way that anyone else does. Because of this fact, there is no real competition between writers. What appears to be competition is actually nothing more than jealousy and gossip. Writing is a matter strictly of developing oneself. You compete only with yourself. You develop yourself by writing. An editor’s goal is to help writers make the most of the patterns that are unique about them.
You develop yourself by writing.
My son asked me last night about writing in the era of ChatGPT. In short, I told him yes, I think it really still matters.