I very often return to the essays of John McPhee in my writing classes. This semester we’ve read his long essay about oranges and now, with our reading this week, two of his recent craft essays from The New Yorker (listed here in the category “The Writing Life”). Our reading from this week contains one of the most inspirational writing lessons I’ve ever encountered:

For nonfiction projects, ideas are everywhere. They just go by in a ceaseless stream. Since you may take a month, or ten months, or several years to turn one idea into a piece of writing, what governs the choice? I once made a list of all the pieces I had written in maybe twenty or thirty years, and then put a check mark beside each one whose subject related to things I had been interested in before I went to college. I checked off more than ninety per cent.

What these lines allow me to emphasize in the classroom is that, in the two decades since I went to college, I haven’t had to reinvent myself or begin a new life in order to achieve what I want to with my writing. My actual life and my interests and my tastes stretch way into the past, and so, so many of the ideas I’ll try to write about in my life are already contained within me, and have been since I was a kid. I’ll take a different tack next time I write about tennis, or grief, or race, or music, or imprisonment, but my interest in any of these topics goes way back—to a time even before I was the age my students are now. College may give us new ways to think about our lives and interests—and it will introduce us to worlds we’ve never known—but our real lives don’t begin when we leave college. We’re well into those real lives when we sit in our first class. Writing is one way to realize this. So’s reading, of course.

Photo credit: Nancy Crampton/Associated Press