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The Artist’s Way in Daily Doses

January 17, 2018

I’m reading The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron. I started and abandoned it years ago after reading just the first section on Morning Pages, which is a daily practice of writing three longhand pages first thing in the morning. The point is basically to dump the contents of your brain on paper. They are a fundamental part of the creative journey that is The Artist’s Way. At the time, however, that first chapter was enough for me.

It took me a while to start, but now I’ve been doing Morning Pages for nearly two years, although I only do one page, not three. It’s a shame I didn’t stick with the book long enough back then to read about the other key practice: the weekly Artist Date (time alone to do something you enjoy, just for you, like visiting an art gallery, exploring an antique shop, or going to a concert). So many hours of quality time with my inner creative, forever lost!

The book is written as a 12-week course, with exercises and tasks every week, but I’m not using the book that way. (Not unlike how I love reading The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up but I’ve never actually tidied up in the way Marie Kondo prescribes.) The Artist’s Way is full of valuable ideas, insights, resources, quotations, and a not unhefty dose of spirituality. It’s a solid read in the genre of creativity and writing manuals even if you’re not interested in a course of “creative recovery” modelled on recovery from addiction.

What convinced me to pick up the book again was The Artist’s Way Every Day, which I borrowed at random from the library. I was looking for something else, noticed it, and thought I would give it a try. After enjoying A Year with Thomas Merton earlier in the year, I was up for another day-at-a-time kind of book.

But I’m not good at reading books a day at a time. You start this kind of book thinking you’ll read the day’s entry in bed at the end of the day as a tonic before falling immediately and blissfully to sleep, but it rarely turns out like that. Instead I binge several days’ worth at once and feel a little ill afterward.

When I manage to avoid such self-destructive behaviour, I use my lunch break to consume a handful of page-a-day snippets at a time. I can only read so many pages while waiting for food and/or eating it within my half hour break, so I often reach my capacity for page-a-day wisdom at just the moment I finish eating, which works out well for all involved.

Here are some of the passages that convinced me to give The Artist’s Way another chance. Just a taste, mind you, not enough to make you feel ill (I hope).

Obsessions with time and perfection

On accepting that you will spend a lot of time writing badly:

“We all have time to write. We have time to write the minute we are willing to write badly, to chase a dead end, to scribble a few words, to write for the hell of it instead of for the perfect and polished result. The obsession with time is really an obsession with perfection. We want enough time to write perfectly. We want to write with a net under ourselves, a net that says we are not foolish spending our time doing something that might not pay off.”

On making use of whatever time you have to write:

“One of the biggest myths around writing is that in order to do it we must have great swathes of uninterrupted time. Speaking for myself, I have never had such silken bolts of time. The myth that we must have ‘time’ — more time — in order to create is a myth that keeps us from using the time we do have. If we are forever yearning for ‘more,’ we are forever discounting what is offered.”

On avoiding perfectionism:

“Perfectionism is a refusal to let yourself move ahead. It is a loop — an obsessive, debilitating closed system that causes you to get stuck in the details of what you are writing or painting or making and to lose sight of the whole. Instead of creating freely and allowing errors to reveal themselves later as insights, we often get mired in getting the details right. We correct our originality into a uniformity that lacks passion and spontaneity. ‘Do not fear mistakes,’ Miles Davis told us. ‘There are none.’”

Working always

On not waiting for inspiration (this is something that comes up again and again and again):

“We often make the mistake of thinking that we ‘have’ to be the ‘right’ mood to write. The truth is, any mood can be used for writing. Any mood is a good writing mood. The trick is to simply enter whatever mood like a room and sit down and write from there.”

On the importance of consistency as the one thing we can control:

“As artists, we wish we could always work well, but we must settle for working always. The ‘always’ we can control. The ‘well’ we cannot control. For this reason, we do well to simply serve, to focus more on the process of doing our work than on the ‘product’ of work produced.”

On having compassion for our imperfections:

“Who says (besides our Inner Perfectionist, who is always doing sit-ups) that we have to feel calm and centered to write out a piece of music? Maybe we can feel and be a wreck and do it anyway. Maybe we can do it and do it wrong and fix it later. Maybe we do not have to be or perform perfectly. Maybe we are allowed to have a learning curve. Maybe part of what we need to learn is a little compassion.”

The bit about sit-ups was a rare moment when Julia Cameron made me laugh. Personally, my Inner Perfectionist does squats and lunges!

Honesty and attention

On the importance of telling the truth:

“Writing is about honesty. It is almost impossible to be honest and boring at the same time. Being honest may be many other things — risky, scary, difficult, frightening, embarrassing, and hard to do — but it is not boring. Whenever I am stuck in a piece of writing, I ask myself, ‘Am I failing to tell the truth? Is there something I am afraid to say?’ Telling the truth on the page, like telling the truth in a relationship, always takes you deeper.”

But telling the truth is hard:

“As artists, we are perpetually seeking to penetrate the veil of cultural prescriptions and arrive at personal truth. In order to do this, we need to be brave enough with — and open enough to — our own internal territory that our art can express it. In other words, we must be able to face down shame and choose self-disclosure. This takes courage.”

It takes hard work and attention:

“It takes an effort to be clear about things. It is easier and much sadder to be muddy, to never take the time to clarify our thoughts and connect our own perceptions. The act of paying attention is what brings us peace.”

The artist and her trainer

I love this idea of a writer having to be both artist and trainer:

“In order to succeed as an artist we must have two well-developed functions: our artist and its trainer. The trainer is steady and adult. It keeps its eye on the course and the long run. It coaxes, wheedles, begs, cajoles, and occasionally disciplines our artist which, childlike, proceeds in spurts and sometimes not at all. The trick is setting the jumps low enough that our artist can be lured into action. If I am writing nonfiction, I set my goal at a modest three pages. Almost anyone can write three pages of something and my artists knows that. If we set our jumps low enough, our artist can be lured into cooperation.”

This applies to many things in life, not just creating (like, oh, eating well, exercising, saving money, getting out of bed). You need to allow for two very different sides of yourself to exist simultaneously. You need more than one way to talk to yourself and think about the work you have done or need to do.

Forward motion

The important thing is to keep moving forward, keep working at it:

“Writing is the act of motion. Writing is the commitment to move forward, not to stew in our own juices, to become whatever it is that we are becoming. Writing is both the boat and the wind in the sails. Even on the days when the winds of inspiration seem slight, there is some forward motion, some progress made.”

More Interesting than Everyday Life: On the Writing Day (Part 2)

December 19, 2017

Last week I posted quotes from five authors on the details of their writing day. Today I bring you six more insights into the fascinating everyday life of the published author.

As of Friday I’m off work for the holidays, so it’s an ideal time to knuckle down for at least a couple of days of serious writing and editing. Unlike Alain de Botton, I don’t write at the office, so I’m looking forward to being at home for days on end. I’m not sure I’ll accumulate enough stop-start writing days to earn a flow day, to use Hilary Mantel’s nomenclature, but I’m going to try. I don’t plan to wait for the desire to write, as Patti Yumi Cottrell does, but I do count on floundering and blushing at least as much as Sebastian Barry might.

Galway

Hilary Mantel

On the start of her writing day:

“I get up in the dark like a medieval monk, commit unmediated scribble to a notebook, and go back to bed about six, hoping to sleep for another two hours and to wake slowly and in silence. Random noise, voices in other rooms, get me off to a savage, disorderly start, but if I am left in peace to reach for a pen, I feel through my fingertips what sort of day it is.”

On flow days:

“Days of easy flow generate thousands of words across half a dozen projects – and perhaps new projects. Flow is like a mad party – it goes on till all hours and somebody must clear up afterwards. Stop-start days are not always shorter, are self-conscious and anxiety-ridden, and later turn out to have been productive and useful. I judge in retrospect. On flow days, I have no idea what I’ve written till I read it back. It’s a life with shocks built in.”

Patti Yumi Cottrell

The author of Sorry to Disrupt the Peace in an interview at The Creative Independent, on not writing every day:

“I have to feel a desire to write. I don’t know if there’s ever an end goal in mind. But I just have to feel like I really want to do it. I have to feel borderline desperate. And then I want to write. That’s what motivates me. Going long periods without writing, where I’m just doing other things, helps create that feeling of wanting to write.”

On surprising yourself while you’re writing:

“It just feels like an ecstatic and magical thing. You didn’t realize something could happen and then you make that happen. It feels clarifying in a way, because it’s like something was there all along but you didn’t know it. And then you’re surprised by it. I think I’ve learned a lot about myself through writing.”

Deborah Levy

The author of the excellent novel Hot Milk writes in a shed she rents from a friend. She plans her routes, follow directions, but still gets lost:

“When I begin writing a novel, I usually know where I want to get to, I just don’t know how to get there. I plan a route and follow my directions. Sometimes this works well. Yet, it’s when I detour from the map and get lost that the writing starts to open its eyes. In case you think I like getting lost, I should tell you that I resist it with all my will. This is always a futile battle. Eventually I surrender to the unknown route, write for a few hours and take a look at the new view.”

On getting to the end:

“As far as I’m concerned, the writing life is mostly about stamina and the desire to give my complete attention to language. … To get to the finishing line requires the writing to become more interesting than everyday life. This is not as easy as it sounds, because I have never found everyday life boring.”

Sebastian Barry

On ideal writing days: “Those ideal days begin when I have managed to survive that awful waiting period with a novel when you are writing, but also crossing out crossly, beginning again, floundering, panicking, blushing in the privacy of your workroom.”

On getting down that first good line:

“But the gods maybe have pity at last on the poor author sequestered there, struggling with his book, and eventually a serviceable first line is rendered from the heavens. The whistle-tune, the birdsong of the book. The relief is immense, and that strange and uncharacteristic courage to proceed descends.”

Alain de Botton

On writing in an office environment:

“I act almost normally, from the outside, clicking away at the keyboard. Even though I may inside be tempted by all kinds of emotions, I handle myself with calm and reserve – which is not the limitation it may sound. It can be the greatest freedom, sometimes, to have to repress some of what you are. I sit quietly for hours. I’ll have a sandwich at the desk. I can’t sink into despair, scream or act all poetic: other people are watching. At the office, there’s a chance to edit yourself, thankfully. That’s why I go there.”

On the gap between who you are and the work you do:

“My writing ends up sounding quite different to the way I feel inside. That’s the point. It tries to understand, to be serene, to be competent. Perhaps this ability to have a gap between who you are and what your work is like doesn’t just hold true for art: it’s something all work offers. … Work gives us a chance to give our better natures a go.

“It’s great to make things tidy via work. The wider world will always be a mess. But around work, you can sometimes have a radically different kind of experience: you can get on top of a problem and finally resolve it. You can bring order to chaos for a bit.”

Elizabeth Strout

The author of Olive Kitteridge can write anywhere, but her favourite place to write is at home.

“These days I write first thing in the morning after having breakfast with my husband; my writing day starts as soon as he leaves the apartment, which is usually right after breakfast. Then I clear the table and sit down to work. I write mostly by hand, transcribing it on a computer when I can no longer read my writing, when I have made too many marks on the paper to be able to see the scene I am trying to write.”

On writing scenes separately and then piecing them together:

“I am a very messy worker – I push these scenes around our table. It is a big table, and over time I realise which scenes are connected. I have never written anything from beginning to end, not a story or a novel. I just collect different scenes, and the ones that aren’t any good to me, get slipped on to the floor and eventually into the wastebasket. (There are many of those.)”

And more

For much more minutiae on the lives of writers, I suggest Daily Rituals by Mason Currey, The Paris Review Interviews Volumes I and II, Writing Routines, and The Guardian’s “My writing day” series (which supplied quotes for some of this post). And in case you missed it, check out part one!

December 19, 2017

Spending It All, Every Single Day: Still Writing by Dani Shapiro

December 8, 2017

As a lover of books on the craft of writing, I’d had Dani Shapiro’s Still Writing on my to-read list for several years. It was her recent extraordinary memoir Hourglass: Time, Memory, Marriage that prompted me to read it finally this fall. Shapiro writes memoir and fiction, which makes Still Writing an excellent contrast and complement to John McPhee’s Draft No. 4.

It’s almost a memoir itself more than a book on craft and belongs in my mind with other writing classics like The Writing Life (adored it!), Bird by Bird (loved it!), A Writer’s Diary (loved it and heard about years ago via Dani Shapiro’s lovely blog), and Writing Down the Bones (have yet to read it). With McPhee’s book I needed to do some digging to find the advice most useful to me, but with Still Writing nearly every page was relevant to my writing life.

The book is composed of short chapters with titles like Muses, Beginning Again, Second Acts, and Reading Yourself, divided into three sections: Beginnings, Middles, Ends. The chapters are highly digestible and kind of addictive. But it’s worthwhile to take your time and not overindulge.

The insights into writing are infused with a sense of grace and salvation. A pervasive notion that writing can help you become the best person you can be. There is an urgency to be grateful for and make the most of the combination of gift and curse that writing can be. There is virtue in writing well and shame in not doing the best you can. This feels right for memoir especially, but is relevant to all forms of writing. Many writers (including myself) would benefit from an extra moment or two of self-reflection. In writing and in life.

As I mentioned, nearly every page of Still Writing speaks to me, so it is tough to choose which passages to share. I hope they’ll convince you to give the whole book a chance.

You don’t need to know where you’re going

On starting without quite knowing what to write: “I always think I should know more. That I need more information. That I should outline, perhaps. Or do some research. But really, I need to remind myself that this not-knowing is at the heart of the creative endeavour.”

And you can let the writing surprise you: “Paradoxically, the not-knowing is often what creates the energy, portent, and momentum in the piece of work itself. One of the truest pleasures for the writer alone in a room is when our characters surprise us by doing something unexpected.”

On being uncomfortable: “I’ve learned to be wary of those times when I think I know what I’m doing. I’ve discovered that my best work comes from the uncomfortable but fruitful feeling of not having a clue.”

Create something from nothing

On the blank page: “We writers spend our days making something out of nothing. There is the blank page (or screen) and then there is the fraught and magical process of putting words down on that page. There is no shape, no blueprint until one emerges from the page, as if through a mist. Is it a mirage? Is it real? We can’t know. And so we need a sense of structure around us.”

On discovering what you want to write about: “But when we stumble upon it, we know. We know because it shimmers. And if you are a writer, you will find that you won’t give up that shimmer for anything. You live for it. Like falling in love, moments that announce themselves as your subject are rare, and there’s a magic to them. Ignore them at your own peril.”

On the first draft: “The imagination has its own coherence. Our first draft will lead us. There’s always time for thinking and shaping and restructuring later, after we’ve allowed something previously hidden to emerge on the page.”

On being a beginner every day: “Wherever we are in our work, we have never been exactly here, today. Today, we need to relearn what it is that we do. We have to remind ourselves to be patient, gentle with our foibles, ruthless with our time, withstanding of our frustrations. We remember what it is that we need …. Whatever it takes to begin again.”

Don’t wait for inspiration

Getting started even when you’re feeling unprepared can be the difference between doing something (however bad) and nothing.

“If I waited to be in the mood to write, I’d barely have a chapbook of material to my name. Who would ever be in the mood to write? Do marathon runners get in the mood to run? Do teachers wake up with the urge to lecture? I don’t know, but I doubt it. My guess is that it’s the very act that is generative. The doing of the thing that makes possible the desire for it. … A writer sits in her writing space, setting aside the time to be alone with her work. Is she inspired doing it? Very possibly not. Is she distracted, bored, lonely, in need of stimulation? Oh, absolutely.”

But where does the motivation to sit down every day come from, especially on the days where it seems useless and pointless? From gratitude. “I try to remember that to sit down and write is a gift. That if I do not seize this day, it will be lost. I think of writers I admire who are no longer living. I’m aware that the simple fact of being here creates a kind of responsibility, even a moral one, to get to work.”

On blessings and catastrophes

The work of the writer is to pay attention and empathize:

“It’s the job of the writer to say, look at that. To point. To shine a light. But it isn’t that which is already bright and beckoning that needs our attention. We develop our sensitivity — to use John Berger’s phrase, our ‘ways of seeing’ — in order to bear witness to what is. Our tender hopes and dreams, our joy, frailty, grief, fear, longing, desire — every human being is a landscape. The empathic imagination glimpses the woman working the cash register at a convenience store, the man coming out of the bathroom at the truck stop, the mother chasing her toddler up and down the aisle of the airplane, and knows what it sees. Look at that. This human catastrophe, this accumulation of ordinary blessings, of unbearable losses.”

But how do you know if you’re doing it right? “Are we feeling with our minds? Thinking with our hearts? Making every empathic leap we can? Are we witnesses to the world around us? Are we climbing on the shoulders of those who paved the way for us? Are we using every last bit of ourselves, living these lives of ours, spending it, spending it all, every single day?”

Pain leads to the story

As a memoirist, Shapiro writes about the suffering and tragedies of her life. She quotes Anne Sexton: “pain engraves a deeper memory” and adds: “Pain carves details into us, yes. I would wager, though, that great joy does as well. Strong emotion, Virginia Woolf said, must leave its trace. Start writing, grow still and quiet, press toward that strong emotion and you will discover it anew. … These traces that live within us often lead us to our stories.”

Writing demands that we move toward that pain, again and again: “To write is to have an ongoing dialogue with your own pain. To scream to it, with it, from it. To know it — to know it cold. … To be alone in a room with yourself and the contents of your mind is, in effect, to go to that place, whether you intend to or not.”

The writer goes voluntarily to that place to seek the truth. Why? “Not because I’m a masochist. Not because I live in the past. But because my words are my pickax, and with them I chip away at the rough surface of whatever it is I still need to know.”

Creating a world and staying inside it

On the seclusion of writing: “One of the strangest aspects of a writing life is what I think of as going in and out of the cave. When we are in the middle of a piece of work, the cave is the only place we belong.”

The difficulty is sustaining the world you create and maintaining the seclusion needed to do so:

“A writer in the midst of a story needs to find a way to keep her head there. She can’t just pop out of the cave, have some fun, go dancing, and then pop back in. The work demands our full attention, our deepest concentration, our best selves. If we’re in the middle — in the boat we’re building — we cannot let ourselves be distracted by the bright and shiny. The bright and shiny is a mirage, an illusion. It is of no use to us.”

On the optimal state of flow as a writer: “To forget oneself — to lose oneself in the music, in the moment — that kind of absorption seems to be at the heart of every creative endeavor. It can be the deepest pleasure, though it doesn’t always feel like pleasure. Not exactly.”

She goes on to describe Mihaly Csikzentmihalyi’s definition of flow or “optimal experience”. Then: “We don’t always get to feel unadulterated joy when we are in the midst of an optimal experience. Think of it as joy deferred. The work itself can be challenging to the point of physical and psychic pain.” She quotes Dorothy Parker: “I hate writing. I love having written.” Feeling pleasure isn’t the point of writing. It’s tough but satisfying, better than pleasure.

The seed of something new

One of my favourite parts of Still Writing is where Shapiro describes staying with friends after a winter storm takes out the electricity in her home. She finds a spot in the home to write, away from everyone else, a room of her own. Although the point of the anecdote was the importance of a good writing space, it was a hint that opened up a larger story in my mind as I read. It was a seed that grew in my imagination. Or perhaps it was the water that sprouted the seed.

That is my favourite kind of writing, the kind that somehow contains something that combines with my mind in a sort of chemical reaction and sends me spinning off into my own world. It’s one of the reasons I read so much, what I’m always hoping for. The world of the book itself can be immersive, but what really makes a book extraordinary is when it allows me to create a new world of my very own. And in a book about writing, that feels like magic.

December 8, 2017

Drawing Boxes Around Words: Draft No. 4 by John McPhee

December 4, 2017

John McPhee has been a staff writer for The New Yorker since the 1960s. His work has been collected in dozens of books. Draft No. 4 is a collection of his essays on the craft of writing.

I’ve never read any of his other work, and although I hear good things about it, I don’t have plans to read any of his other writing. So the fact that I finished Draft No. 4 is a testament to my love of books about writing.

I read Draft No. 4 in two chunks. After the first chapter and a half, I stalled due to boredom with the in-depth examples McPhee gives from his own work on subjects that didn’t interest me. I stalled for so long that my library copy expired, so I had to wait for it to become available again. I did, to my own surprise, want to finish it. When it renewed, though, I again delayed picking it up until it was again nearly due. So I finished the remainder in a few days.

I rarely read books that way, but then I usually abandon books that bore me partway through the second chapter. The book is worth sticking with to the end, though, if you have patience or make no bones about skimming the boring bits.

John McPhee’s genre is creative nonfiction, which is to say he finds an idea that interests him, goes out into the world and spends time with people to research that idea, and then comes home with lots of notes and puts together a long article about it. This is the kind of writing he focuses on in Draft No. 4. It’s not the kind of writing I do.

There is a lot of value in this book for writers of nonfiction, especially regarding structure and the process of creating a piece of writing out of piles and piles of notes. Selfishly, however, I’m going to share the parts that were relevant to me.

Getting started

On first drafts: “Writing is selection. Just to start a piece of writing you have to choose one word and only one from more than a million in the language. Now keep going. What is your next word? Your next sentence, paragraph, section, chapter? … At base you have only one criterion: If something interests you, it goes in — if not, it stays out.”

From a letter to his daughter when she had difficulty getting started on a writing assignment:

“For me, the hardest part comes first, getting something — anything — out in front of me. Sometimes in a nervous frenzy I just fling words as if I were flinging mud at a wall. Blurt out, heave out, babble out something — anything — as a first draft. With that, you have achieved a sort of nucleus. Then, as you work it over and alter it, you begin to shape sentences that score higher with the ear and eye. Edit it again — top to bottom. The chances are that about now you’ll be seeing something that you are sort of eager for others to see. And all that takes time.”

Priming the pump

On writing by hand: “Another way to prime the pump is to write by hand. Keep a legal pad, or something like one, and when you are struck at any time — blocked to paralysis by an inability to set one word upon another — get away from the computer, lie down somewhere with pencil and pad, and think it over.”

On getting past writer’s block:

“What do you do? You write, ‘Dear Mother.’ And then you tell your mother about the block, the frustration, the ineptitude, the despair. You insist that you are not cut out to do this kind of work. You whine. You whimper. You outline your problem, and you mention that the bear has a fifty-five inch waist and a neck more than thirty inches around but could run nose-to-nose with Secretariat. You say the bear prefers to lie down and rest. The bear rests fourteen hours a day. And you go on like that as long as you can. And then you go back and delete the ‘Dear Mother’ and all the whimpering and whining, and just keep the bear.”

The insecure writer

On lacking confidence even after selling several pieces to The New Yorker: “You would think that by then I would have developed some confidence in writing a new story, but I hadn’t, and never would. To lack confidence at the outset seems rational to me. 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.”

On insecurity: “Writers come in two principal categories — those who are overtly insecure and those who are covertly insecure — and they can all use help.”

Competing with yourself

On the writer’s development: “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.”

On letting the reader do some of the work:

“The creative writer leaves white space between chapters or segments of chapters. The creative reader silently articulates the unwritten thought that is present in the white space. Let the reader have the experience. Leave judgment in the eye of the beholder. When you are deciding what to leave out, begin with the author. If you see yourself prancing around between subject and reader, get lost. Give elbow room to the creative reader.”

The fourth draft

“After reading the second draft aloud,” McPhee writes, “and going through the piece for the third time (removing the tin horns and radio static that I heard while reading), I enclose words and phrases in pencilled boxes for Draft No. 4. If I enjoy anything in this process it is Draft No. 4. I go searching for replacements for the words in the boxes. The final adjustments may be small-scale, but they are large to me, and I love addressing them.”

Which reminds me of a practice Annie Dillard taught in her creative writing classes, as described by Alexander Chee, with the focus on verbs:

“We counted the verbs on the page, circled them, tallied the count for each page to the side and averaged them. Can you increase the average number of verbs per page, she asked. … Have you used the right verbs? Is that the precise verb for that precise thing? Remember that adverbs are a sign that you’ve used the wrong verb. Verbs control when something is happening in the mind of the reader.”

John McPhee goes beyond the verb in a process that, were I to follow it, would probably never end:

“You draw a box not only around any word that does not seem quite right but also around words that fulfill their assignment but seem to present an opportunity. While the word inside the box may be perfectly O.K., there is likely to be an even better word for this situation, a word right smack on the button, and why don’t you try to find such a word? If none occurs, don’t linger; keep reading and drawing boxes, and later revisit them one by one.”

Dictionary, not thesaurus

We’ll finish with his excellent advice about using a dictionary instead of a thesaurus for draft no. 4. Searching for a synonym tends to result in complicated and uncommon words, whereas a dictionary, by giving the word’s meaning, will steer you in the direction of a stronger and more precise word. Better still, use a paper dictionary.

“Thesauruses are mere rest stops in the search for the mot juste,” McPhee writes. “Your destination is the dictionary.”

Additional reading

Wishing I Were John McPhee at Lithub. John McPhee, The Art of Nonfiction No. 3 at the Paris Review. Who Can Afford to Write Like John McPhee? The Mind of John McPhee.