Draft No. 4: On the Writing Process by John McPhee

Abstract

Reviewed by: Draft No. 4: On the Writing Process by John McPhee Kevin M. Lerner Draft No. 4: On the Writing Process. John McPhee. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2017. 192 pp. $25.00 hardback. For as long as I have been teaching creative nonfiction or narrative writing or magazine writing or longform journalism or whatever that genre is called these days, I have been singing the praises of John McPhee to my students. His prose isn't flashy like Tom Wolfe's. He isn't trapped in his own radical subjectivity like Hunter S. Thompson. He is thorough, patient, precise, and to my tastes, utterly enthralling. But sometimes he is a hard sell for the students. "Yes, it's a whole book about oranges," I'll say. Or: "Right, shad. The fish. It's about a fish. But it's about more than a fish." McPhee takes unsexy subjects, couches them in plain but compelling prose, and somehow spins 90,000-word books out of them. Now, with his collection Draft No. 4, McPhee turns his reportorial eye on himself, revealing a few things about his process. But he does it in a typical John McPhee way—which is to say that some writers (and here I mean, especially, students) will hang on every seemingly digressive anecdote, and some will exhale frustratedly through clenched teeth and drop your course when you assign it to them. I assigned this book as a sort of textbook for a course called Magazine Writing. I paired the first chapter with Sam Anderson's excellent profile of McPhee from The New York Times Magazine and McPhee's own structural tour de force, "The Search for Marvin Gardens." In a class of 18, I have now created two or three McPhee acolytes, and one sworn McPhee hater. This book is not a textbook. It is a collection of eight essays of varying length on topics related to writing long nonfiction works. Two chapters are about structure. One discusses the relationship between writers and their editors and publishers. One covers getting people to talk to you. One is about frame of reference—knowing how much your readers will know, and how much to explain. One talks about working with The New Yorker's vaunted fact-checking department. The title essay makes the argument that you have to write the thing four times before it's ready to go. And he ends on an essay about knowing which pieces to leave out of your work. The book is easy enough to work into a syllabus because of that, but students who need a real guidebook for how to write a magazine piece will want to look elsewhere. McPhee doesn't tell anyone how to write, despite having taught a nonfiction writing class at Princeton for decades. You can't really get much from the inscrutable diagrams he includes of the structures of some of his pieces—even if you read the pieces side by side with Draft No. 4. One of them spirals like an upside-down snail shell, from an inner point marked "Turtle" past a hash mark labeled "Stream Channelization" outward to a line that slithers past "Rattlesnake, Muskrat, etc." This is all in service of saying that when you are structuring a piece through the use of flashbacks, you have to watch your verb tenses, but that if you're careful, the reader will follow you. McPhee also spends a surprisingly large bit of one chapter detailing a defunct database and word-processing system that he uses in composing his works. He admits that, realistically, no one else would ever want to write a story that way. Even if they did, they would have to find someone who could rig up a system to work on. No one will do it. Certainly not my students. But that's not the point. The point is, as McPhee well knows, all serious writers have idiosyncrasies. We can coach writers. We can offer tips and advice. But for the truly elite writers, the ones who will someday eclipse their teachers in skill, there's not one way to get the work done. "What counts is a finished piece," he...