Draft
No. 4: On the Writing Process
John
McPhee (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2017)
John
McPhee's New Yorker pieces are always interesting, even when
his subjects might sound unpromising. He's far more interested in
geology than I am, as well as the natural world in general. Who else
could have got a whole book out of oranges? But in Draft No. 4,
he comes to a topic I'm deeply interested in: how does he do it?
McPhee has been teaching the writing of narrative non-fiction at
Princeton for many years. In these essays, which have themselves
appeared in the New Yorker, he both shares his own idiosyncratic
processes and lays out some broadly applicable principles.
Some
of what is peculiar to McPhee has to do with the tools he's had
access to. He started with typewritten slips of paper laid out on a
table and grouped by topic. When he switched to using a computer, he
found a piece of data-manipulation software that he's now effectively
the last user of; he has the inventor's phone number. The essay on
structure presents some rather abstruse diagrams that McPhee used to
wrangle various stories into shape, including a couple of tours de
force where he devised the structure before he even knew what the
subject was. This is not recommended for amateurs.
But
there's plenty of useful advice, which acknowledges that, while we
can't all be John McPhee, neither can he be us. On taking notes: "Use
a voice recorder but maybe not as a first choice–more like a relief
pitcher. Whatever you do, don't rely on memory." In fact, it may
be to your advantage that someone you're interviewing is aware of it:
"Display your notebook as if it were a fishing license."
When your subject is aware of you as an audience, "You can
develop a distinct advantage by waxing slow of wit....If you don't
seem to get something, the subject will probably help you get it."
When
you've done your research, you're going to need a starting point.
It's not a time to be too cute: "A lead is good not because it
dances, fires cannons, or whistles like a train but because it is
absolute to what follows." A sound lead points the way through
your structure. What kind of structure? "A piece of writing has
to start somewhere, go somewhere, and sit down when it gets there."
What to include? "It's an utterly subjective situation. I
include what interests me and exclude what doesn't interest me. That
may be a crude tool but it's the only one I have."
This
is all a lot of work, and unquestionably daunting. "To lack
confidence at the outset seems rational to me. It doesn't matter that
something you've done before worked out well. Your last piece is
never going to write your next one for you." The point of doing
(at least) four drafts is that the first draft may be a mess, but it
can only be improved if it exists. If you're lucky, you're not
completely alone. "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." Lucky for us, both The New Yorker
and Farrar Straus and Giroux still employ editors, and long may they
reign.
And here's the peroration, with which I couldn't agree more: "When
am I done? I just know. I'm lucky that way. What I know is that I
can't do any better; someone else might do better, but that's all I
can do; so I call it done."
Email edition, August 3, 2018
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