I used to teach a class in creative nonfiction (a descendent of the “New Journalism” of the 1960s-1970s). If there is an American master of creative nonfiction, it would be John McPhee.

I could have just taken this long interview with McPhee from The Paris Review, chopped it into bits, and had most of a semester’s worth of lecture notes. It’s that good.

A few excerpts—here is McPhee on choosing what or whom to write about:

I certainly don’t go around looking for loners, but I guess I am interested in people who are expert at something, because they’re going to lead me into some field, teach it to me, and then in turn I’m going to tell others about it. The ideal situation is to be watching somebody do their thing, and they don’t give a damn about you because they’re so absorbed. They’re confident about what they’re doing, and they’re not at all consumed with self-consciousness.

I used to tell all my students, particularly those just starting out, to read their stuff aloud. (It’s amazing how many students cannot read aloud comfortably.) McPhee does it:

Certainly the aural part of writing is a big, big thing to me. I can’t stand a sentence until it sounds right, and I’ll go over it again and again. Once the sentence rolls along in a certain way, that’s sentence A. Sentence B may work out well, but then its effect on sentence A may spoil the rhythm of the two together. One of the long-term things about knitting a piece of writing together is making all this stuff fit.

I always read the second draft aloud, as a way of moving forward. I read primarily to my wife, Yolanda, and I also have a friend whom I read to. I read aloud so I can hear if it’s fitting together or not. It’s just as much a part of the composition as going out and buying a ream of paper.

And here is an excerpt from a section of the interview where he talks about how creative nonfiction pieces develop their own structure—and how that structure can be manipulated.

But what if you started telling the piece of writing further down the river, I wondered. That way, when you get to the end of the trip, you’re really only halfway through the story. What you do then is switch to the past tense, creating a flashback, and you back up and start your trip over again. By the time you get to that bear, that bear is at the perfect place for a climax. That’s what’s exciting about nonfiction writing. In this case it’s a simple flashback, but it also echoes all these cycles of the present and the past.

Read the whole interview here.