Status Updates From Draft No. 4: On the Writing...

"Editors have come along who use terms like "nut graph".... That sort of structural formalism is part of the rote methodology that governs the thought of people who don't have better ideas".

Get their asses, John.

Pg 163 -171 for grammar and word usage

“You will never land smoothly on borrowed vividness. If you say someone looks like Tom Cruise - and you let it go at that - you are asking tom cruise to do your writing for you. Your description will fail when your reader doesn’t know who tom cruise is.” Page 120.

Pg 77. “Id have managed what turned out to be eight thousand words of a Shawn-wise beginning before I had to start over and eat that weasel.”

The concept that writing, being a writer, prolongs the experience. The three parts of the experience. The anticipation, the actual event, and the reminiscing. As McPhee shows, writing keeps events in the present tense.

Page 72 about how the editors think they own the title. “The title is an integral part of a piece of writing and one of the most important parts and ought to not be written by anyone but the writer of what follows the title.”