Draft No. 4

Author: John McPhee

• To a bulletin board I had long since pinned a sheet of paper on which I had written, in large block letters, ABC/D. The letters represented the structure of a piece of writing, and when I put them on the wall I had no idea what the theme would be or who might be A or B or C, let alone the denominator D. They would be real people, certainly, and they would meet in real places, but everything else was initially abstract.

• In 1846, in Graham’s Magazine, Edgar Allan Poe published an essay called “The Philosophy of Composition,” in which he described the stages of thought through which he had conceived of and eventually written his poem “The Raven.”

• Writers like Mark Singer and Brock Brower have said that you know you’ve done enough peripheral interviewing when you meet yourself coming the other way.

• Called “Levels of the Game,” the double profile worked out, and my aspirations went into a vaulting mode. If two made sense, why not four people in one complex piece of writing? That was when I put the block letters on the bulletin board. A, B, and C would be separate from one another, and each would interact with D, yes, but who were these people?

• As I have noted in (among other places) the introduction to a book of excerpts called Outcroppings, a general question about any choice of subject is, Why choose that one over all other concurrent possibilities?

• 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.

• The environmental movement was in its early stages in the nineteen-sixties, and I decided that it would be the subject of ABC/D, pitting an environmentalist against three natural enemies. Easier said than arranged.

• So, at risk of getting into an exponential pathology, I began to think of a sequence of six profiles in which a seventh party would appear in a minor way in the first, appear again in greater dimension in the second, grow further in the third, and further in the fourth, fifth, and sixth, always in subordinate ratio to the principal figure in each piece until becoming the central figure in a seventh and final profile.

• Readers are not shy with suggestions, and the suggestions are often good but also closer to the passions of the reader than to this writer’s.

• The piece would ultimately consist of some five thousand sentences, but for those two weeks I couldn’t write even one.

• Mrs. McKee made us do three pieces of writing a week. Not every single week. Some weeks had Thanksgiving in them. But we wrote three pieces a week most weeks for three years.

• Then, as I do now, I settled on an ending before going back to the beginning.

• Your last piece is never going to write your next one for you.

• A compelling structure in nonfiction can have an attracting effect analogous to a story line in fiction.”

• To some extent, the structure of a composition dictates itself, and to some extent it does not. Where you have a free hand, you can make interesting choices—for

• Developing a structure is seldom that simple. Almost always there is considerable tension between chronology and theme, and chronology traditionally wins.

• A piece of writing about a single person could be presented as any number of discrete portraits, each distinct from the others and thematic in character, leaving the chronology of the subject’s life to look after itself.

• Other pieces from that era were variously chronological, none more so than this one, where the clock runs left to right in both the main time line and the set pieces hanging from it:

• Written in 1968 and called “A Forager,” it was a profile of the wild-food expert Euell Gibbons, told against the background of a canoe-and-backpacking journey on the Susquehanna River and the Appalachian Trail.

• As a nonfiction writer, you could not change the facts of the chronology, but with verb tenses and other forms of clear guidance to the reader you were free to do a flashback if you thought one made sense in presenting the story.

• One dividend of this structure is that the grizzly encounter occurs about three-fifths of the way along, a natural place for a high moment in any dramatic structure.

• Readers are not supposed to notice the structure. It is meant to be about as visible as someone’s bones.

• And I hope this structure illustrates what I take to be a basic criterion for all structures: they should not be imposed upon the material. They should arise from within it.

• A structure is not a cookie cutter. Certain Baroque poets, among others, wrote shaped verse, in which lines were composed so that the typography resembled the topic—blossoms, birds, butterflies.

• Often, after you have reviewed your notes many times and thought through your material, it is difficult to frame much of a structure until you write a lead.

• You wade around in your notes, getting nowhere. You don’t see a pattern. You don’t know what to do. So stop everything. Stop looking at the notes. Hunt through your mind for a good beginning. Then write it. Write a lead.

• Writing a successful lead, in other words, can illuminate the structure problem for you and cause you to see the piece whole—to see it conceptually, in various parts, to which you then assign your materials. You find your lead, you build your structure, you are now free to write.

• I would go so far as to suggest that you should always write your lead (redoing it and polishing it until you are satisfied that it will serve) before you go at the big pile of raw material and sort it into a structure.

• Here is an egregiously bad one from an article on chronic sleeplessness. It began: “Insomnia is the triumph of mind over mattress.” Why is that bad? It’s not bad at all if you want to be a slapstick comedian—if humor, at that stratum, is your purpose. If you are serious about the subject, you might seem to be indicating at the outset that you don’t have confidence in your material so you are trying to make up for it by waxing cute.

• A lead should not be cheap, flashy, meretricious, blaring. After a tremendous fanfare of verbal trumpets, a mouse comes out of a hole blinking.

• Blind leads—wherein you withhold the name of the person you are writing about and reveal it after a paragraph or two—range from slightly cheap to very cheap.

• A blind lead is like a magician pulling a rabbit out of a hat, but the ears were sticking up from the get-go.

• All leads—of every variety—should be sound. They should never promise what does not follow.

• All leads—of every variety—should be sound. They should never promise what does not follow. You read an exciting action lead about a car chase up a narrow street. Then the article turns out to be a financial analysis of debt structures in private universities.

• The lead—like the title—should be a flashlight that shines down into the story.

• A lead is a promise. It promises that the piece of writing is going to be like this. If it is not going to be so, don’t use the lead.

• Another way to prime the pump is to write by hand.

• This endless yo-yo was not exactly a journey in the Amundsen sense. There was no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end.

• Another mantra, which I still write in chalk on the blackboard, is “A Thousand Details Add Up to One Impression.”

• Another mantra, which I still write in chalk on the blackboard, is “A Thousand Details Add Up to One Impression.” It’s actually a quote from Cary Grant. Its implication is that few (if any) details are individually essential, while the details collectively are absolutely essential.

• William Shawn once told me that my pieces were a little strange because they seemed to have three or four endings.

• If you have come to your planned ending and it doesn’t seem to be working, run your eye up the page and the page before that. You may see that your best ending is somewhere in there, that you were finished before you thought you were.

• If he thought a euphemism was possible, Shawn would ask for one.

• Fuck, fucker, fuckest; fuckest, fucker, fuck. In all my days, I had found that four-letter word—with its silent “c” and its quartzite “k”—more shocking than a thunderclap.

• My first piece was in 1963, but it was generically a memoir, and short, a “casual” in the magazine’s terminology, processed by the fiction department although it was fact. The piece that changed my existence came two years later, and was a seventeen-thousand-word profile of Bill Bradley, who was a student at Princeton.

• Editors of every ilk seem to think that titles are their prerogative—that they can buy a piece, cut the title off the top, and lay on one of their own.

• The title is an integral part of a piece of writing, and one of the most important parts, and ought not to be written by anyone but the writer of what follows the title.

• The name of the subject shall not be the title, for example, even if the subject is oranges, as was the case in the second long piece I handed in to him, my first as a staff writer. I called it “Oranges.” That was the topic. What else did anyone need to know? Mr. Shawn took “Oranges” off the top and set up a proof called “Golden Lamps in a Green Night.”

• If you were male, he called you Mister. “Hello, Mr. Singer. How are you? Is this a convenient time to talk?” He was never more familiar than that. The formality seemed practical to me. It’s easier to get rid of someone you call Mister.

• In discussing a long fact piece, Mr. Shawn would say, often enough, “How do you know?” and “How would you know?” and “How can you possibly know that?” He was saying clearly enough that any nonfiction writer ought always to hold those questions in the forefront of the mind.

• In a ruminative, digressive way, he once remarked that he thought young writers were “taking longer to find out what kinds of writers they are,” and he could think of no explanation.

• If you are telling yourself you’re a poet, write poems. Write a lot of poems. If fewer than one work out, throw them all away; you’re not a poet. Maybe you’re a novelist. You won’t know until you have written several novels.

• I have long thought that Ben Jonson summarized the process when he said, “Though a man be more prone and able for one kind of writing than another, yet he must exercise all.”

• After all those one-on-one sessions discussing back-door plays and the role of the left-handed comma in the architectonics of basketball—while The New Yorker magazine hurtled toward its deadlines—I finally said in wonderment, “How can you afford to use so much time and go into so many things in such detail with just one writer when this whole enterprise is yours to keep together?”

• After all those one-on-one sessions discussing back-door plays and the role of the left-handed comma in the architectonics of basketball—while The New Yorker magazine hurtled toward its deadlines—I finally said in wonderment, “How can you afford to use so much time and go into so many things in such detail with just one writer when this whole enterprise is yours to keep together?” He said, “It takes as long as it takes.”

• Shawn also recognized that no two writers are the same, like snowflakes and fingerprints. 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. An editor’s goal is to help writers make the most of the patterns that are unique about them.

• There are people who superimpose their own patterns on the work of writers and seem to think it is their role to force things in the direction they would have gone in if they had been doing the writing. Such people are called editors, and are not editors but rewriters.

• An editor can contribute a lot to your thoughts but the piece is yours—and ought to be yours—if it is under your name.

• Editors have come along who use terms like “nut graph”—as in “What this piece needs is a good nut graph”—meaning a paragraph close to the beginning that encapsulates the subject and why you are writing about it.

• Editors have come along who use terms like “nut graph”—as in “What this piece needs is a good nut graph”—meaning a paragraph close to the beginning that encapsulates the subject and why you are writing about it. That sort of structural formalism is a part of the rote methodology that governs the thought of people who don’t have better ideas.

• Editors are counselors and can do a good deal more for writers in the first-draft stage than at the end of the publishing process.

• Writers come in two principal categories—those who are overtly insecure and those who are covertly insecure—and they can all use help. The help is spoken and informal, and includes insight, encouragement, and reassurance with regard to a current project.

• If you have an editor like that, you are, among other things, lucky; and, through time, the longer the two of you are talking, the more helpful the conversation will be.

• In the way that a documentary-film crew can, by its very presence, alter a scene it is filming, a voice recorder can affect the milieu of an interview. Some interviewees will shift their gaze and talk to the recorder rather than to you. Moreover, you may find yourself not listening to the answer to a question you have asked.

• Whatever you do, don’t rely on memory. Don’t even imagine that you will be able to remember verbatim in the evening what people said during the day.

• While the interview continues, the notebook may serve other purposes, surpassing the talents of a voice recorder. As you scribble away, the interviewee is, of course, watching you. Now, unaccountably, you slow down, and even stop writing, while the interviewee goes on talking. The interviewee becomes nervous, tries harder, and spills out the secrets of a secret life, or maybe just a clearer and more quotable version of what was said before.

• Conversely, if the interviewee is saying nothing of interest, you can pretend to be writing, just to keep the enterprise moving forward.

• If doing nothing can produce a useful reaction, so can the appearance of being dumb.

• If doing nothing can produce a useful reaction, so can the appearance of being dumb. You can develop a distinct advantage by waxing slow of wit. Evidently, you need help. Who is there to help you but the person who is answering your questions?

• If you are listening to speech and at the same time envisioning it in print, you can ask your question again, and again, until the repeated reply will be clear in print. Who is going to care if you seem dumber than a cardboard box? Reporters call that creative bumbling.

• Fuerbringer did not have a name like that because he was Caspar Milquetoast. He had a deceptively soft voice and a ready smile, but nothing made him flinch.

• Writing is selection. When you are making notes you are forever selecting.

• Before, during, and after an interview, or a series of interviews, do as much reading as the situation impels you to do. In the course of writing, you really find out what you don’t know, and you read in an attempt to get it right.

• It is journalistic custom—essentially a rule—that you don’t show a manuscript to the subject. In many situations, ego is too likely to spoil the transaction, not to mention a subject’s attempts to massage the text. But science, for me, is the exception that probes the rule.

• Robert Hargraves read about the maar-diatreme volcano and said I had it half right. A couple of days later, I returned to him with a fresh version, which he said was three-quarters right. A few days after that, I asked him to look again. This time, he said, “I don’t see anything wrong here.” I felt as if he had awarded me a Ph.D., the “D,” perhaps, for the synonym for subpar intelligence.

• Some people are so balanced, self-possessed, and confident that they couldn’t care less what some ragmaker says about them, but they are in a minority among people who put their lives in your hands.

• Once captured, words have to be dealt with. You have to trim them and straighten them to make them transliterate from the fuzziness of speech to the clarity of print.

• And while we are on this subject, please let me indulge in a parenthetical peeve, which has to do with the way in which pronouns can infect sentences that contain interior quotes—the pronouns apparently changing horses in midstream. To give just one random example: “He arrived at the pier, where he learned that ‘my ship had come in.’” Whose ship? The author’s ship?

• In complex situations, quotation, fairly handled, can help keep judgment in the eye of the beholder, and that is a deeper mission for a writer than crafting a sermon from a single point of view.

• Is it wrong to alter a fact in order to improve the rhythm of your prose? I know so, and so do you. If you do that, you are by definition not writing nonfiction.

• For most of the cover stories I worked on in the early nineteen-sixties at Time, other people did all or most of the reporting, and I did the writing. This ecumenical format, known as group journalism, was created by Henry Luce, whose most formative years were spent in the China Inland Mission School in Chefoo.

• The last thing I would ever suggest to young writers is that they consciously try to write for the ages. Oh, yik, disgusting. Nobody should ever be trying that. We should just be hoping that our pieces aren’t obsolete before the editor sees them.

• Don’t assume that everyone on earth has seen every movie you have seen. In the archives of ersatz references, that one is among the fattest folders.

• 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.

• The columnist Frank Bruni, writing in The New York Times in 2014, said, “If you … want to feel much, much older, teach a college course. I’m doing that now … and hardly a class goes by when I don’t make an allusion that prompts my students to stare at me as if I just dropped in from the Paleozoic era.… I once brought up Vanessa Redgrave. Blank stares. Greta Garbo. Ditto. We were a few minutes into a discussion of an essay that repeatedly invoked Proust’s madeleine when I realized that almost none of the students understood what the madeleine signified or, for that matter, who this Proust fellow was.”

• Frank wrote that he was wondering if all of us are losing what he felicitously called our “collective vocabulary.” He asked, “Are common points of reference dwindling? Has the personal niche supplanted the public square?”