John McPhee, in an interview with The Paris Review:

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.

First of all, McPhee is a fantastic writer – one of my new favorites. Inventive and engaging, with a great sense of the rhythm he talks about cultivating above. Many thanks to Zach for passing along Giving Good Weight.

I relate deeply to McPhee’s sentence-level obsession and perfectionism. In anything I attempt to write – and crucially, attempt to complete – I end up mired and sticky with the construction (and re-construction) of the sentence. Removing, re-jiggering, re-engineering. This includes longish-form short story writing and 150 word capsule record reviews. 

My ultimate failure is an inability to persevere beyond the sentence – McPhee’s “knitting.” I don’t know if it’s a bred late 20th century ADHD – a cop out, almost certainly – but the patience and long-term self-assurance needed to tame what would otherwise be a knotty fist of sentences into a coherent rhythm and structure escapes me. I get tired, I get scared, I get gone.

Perhaps unsurprisingly then, McPhee’s dedication to and ardor for this taming, makes me admire him that much more.