8 Lessons in Writing by John McPhee in “Draft №4: On the Writing Process”
The legendary Princeton professor tells stories that teach and delight.
John McPhee’s book, “Draft №4: On the Writing Process” is a priceless collection of essays by this legendary Princeton writing professor.
McPhee is a Pulitzer Prize-winning author and the teacher of many successful writers and editors, including the editor of The New Yorker and managing editors of Time magazine as well as Tim Ferris, writer and entrepreneur.
McPhee’s slim 192-page book covers the writing process in eight chapters. Each chapter can be read independently. In eight days, enough to make a world, you will have covered the entire writing process, and much more, according to John McPhee.
This is not another dry writing text. He illustrates each step with delightful stories of his own adventures and how he came to write about those adventures, interspersed with comments about writing.
The stories vastly overshadow the writing lessons. But the writing lessons are impossible to miss and the point of the book.
1. Progression
This first chapter starts at the beginning with how to start a piece of writing. He describes starting with an abstract structure, asserting that’s no way to start. To begin, he says, “You begin with a subject, gather materials, and work your way to structure from there. You piled up volumes of notes and then figure out what you are doing to do with them, not the other way around.”
His writing is lean, not cluttered with academic jargon, despite his Princeton chops, and filled with colorful anecdotes of how he took X subject and turned it into a fruitful piece of writing.
2. Structure
If anything, this chapter on structure is the bones of the book. McPhee describes writing about the Pine Barrens of southern New Jersey. He says, “I had done all the research I was going to do — had interviewed woodlanders, fire watchers, forest rangers, botanists, cranberry growers, blueberry pickers, keepers of a general store. . . . I had assembled enough material to fill a silo, and now I had no idea what to do with it.” He lays flat on his back on a picnic table staring at the sky trying to figure it out.
He tells the story of his high school English teacher who made the class write three times per week according to an outline. He hammers his Princeton writing students with the idea of structure. He says, “structure in factual writing is like returning from a grocery store with material you intend to cook for dinner You set them out on the kitchen counter, and what’s there is what you deal with, and all you deal with. If something is red and globular, you don’t call it a tomato if it’s a bell pepper. To some extent, the structure of a composition dictates itself, and to some extent it does not.”
With more anecdotes, he gets into the nitty gritty of structure. He says, “Developing a structure is seldom that simple. Almost always there is considerable tension between chronology and theme, and chronology traditionally wins.”
With a series of illustrations about various structures he has used in his writing, he declares the most important point quite clearly: “Readers are not supposed to notice the structure. It is meant to be about as visible as someone’s bones.” Structures, he continues, “should not be imposed upon the material. They should arise from within it.”
This is the longest and most involved chapter of the book and arguably the most insightful of all.
3. Editors & Publishers
McPhee’s discussion of editors and publishers begins with how to get the word “motherfucker” into The New Yorker. His comments about editors (white collar) are downright hilarious with their buttoned-up reactions to writers (blue collar). But he mostly describes who writers are in their dealings with editors.
He says that Mr. Shawn, the editor of The New Yorker, “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.”
Further on, he says, “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.”
As a writer, I value those who help me with writing projects. As an editor and teacher, I always try to encourage writers in their pursuit of a story and in their development as writers.
4. Elicitation
This section could be entitled the lost art of the interview. McPhee is a journalism professor, and interviews are still a prominent part of the journalism field. He says, “Whatever you do, don’t rely on memory. . . . Display your notebook as if it were a fishing license. While the interview continues, the notebook may serve other purposes, surpassing the talents of a voice recorder.” He does suggest using a tape recorder as well.
But what to do with the raw interview? McPhee says, “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. Speech and print are not the same. . . . Please understand: You trim and straighten — take the ‘um’s, ‘uh’s, and ‘uh but um’s out, the false starts –but you do not make it up.”
5. Frame of Reference
McPhee tells stories of the use of two words in writing: “Sprezzatura” and “tetragrammatonic.” Any writer who uses words like that is at fault. He puts it this way: “we have come upon a topic of the first importance in the making of a piece of writing: its frame of reference, the things and people you choose to allude to in order to advance its comprehensibility.”
His advice: “If you look for allusions and images that have some durability, your choices will stabilize your piece of writing. Don’t assume that everyone on earth has seen every movie you have seen.”
The texture of the writer’s cloth is made from allusiveness and reference. It’s up to you, dear reader-writer, to decide whether to cloak your reader in a winter’s blanket or a sheer beach cover up.
6. Checkpoints
One of the hidden wonders of the traditional publishing world is fact-checking. Someone or some department is in charge of checking the facts in magazine and newspaper articles. He cites a former editor at The New Yorker, Sara Lippincott, who said, “Each word in the piece that has even a shred of fact clinging to it is scrutinized, and, if passed, given the checker’s imprimatur, which consists of a tiny pencil tick.”
Fact-checkers will go beyond the call of duty, beyond the internet and libraries to call and find the one person on this great globe who has the answer to a question that will determine the factual content of a writer’s point. Without verification, the point is all but certain to be stricken from the story.
7. Draft №4
One would think if a writer gets to Draft №4, that the work is going along swimmingly. But McPhee starts this chapter with one word: “Block.”
In my own teachings, I dispense with writer’s block: Write or Do Not Write: There is no block.
Far be it for me to disagree with John McPhee. But he humorously approaches writer’s block in this chapter: “For six, seven, ten hours no words have been forthcoming. You are blocked, frustrated, in despair. You are nowhere, and that’s where you’ve been getting. What do you do? You write, ‘Dear Mother.’ And then you tell your mother about the block, the frustration, the ineptitude, the despair. You insist that you are not cut out to do this kind of work. You whine. You whimper.”
A writer’s work would not get done if we all experienced inescapable writer’s block. But projects get finished, one way or another.
McPhee says, “It is toward the end of the second draft, if I’m lucky, when the feeling comes over me that I have something I want to show to other people, something that seems to be working and is not going to go away.”
This implies, of course, that he’s written a complete draft still not knowing if his writing will ever get to a reader. This, and the title of the chapter and book, implies, of course, that his writing goes through several drafts, at least four drafts.
This is a far different kind of writing than the immediacy of blog posts.
The chapter “Draft №4” is really about editing. He says, “I enclose words and phrases in pencilled boxes for Draft №4. If I enjoy anything in this process it is Draft №4. I go searching for replacements for the words in the boxes. The final adjustments may be small-scale, but they are large to me, and I love addressing them. The could call this the copy-editing phase if real copy editors were not out there in the future prepared to examine the piece.”
This is where professor McPhee becomes “legendary” professor: “You draw a box not only around any word that does not seem quite right but also around words that fulfill their assignment but seem to present an opportunity. While the word inside the box may be perfectly O.K., there is likely to be an even better word for this situation, a word right smack on the button, and why don’t you try to find such a word? If none occurs, don’t linger; keep reading and drawing boxes, and later revisit them one by one.”
In short, a writer must find not just a good word, not an O.K. word, not even a great word. The writer must find the best word.
And then we head to the dictionary and the dangerous thesaurus. His stories to illustrate finding the perfect word are the rarest gems in the entire book.
8. Omission
Writing is as much about what you leave out as what you put in. McPhee says, “Writing is selection. Just to start a piece of writing you have to choose one word and only one fro more than a million in the language. Now keep going. What is your next word? Your next sentence, paragraph, section, chapter? Your next ball of fact. You select what goes in and you decide what stays out. At base you have only one criterion: If something interests you, it goes in — if not, it stays out.”
I am reminded of the film, Wonder Boys, based on a Michael Chabon novel, in the which Michael Douglas’ character, Grady Tripp, is writing, has been writing a novel for years, a 2,611 page manuscript. Hannah, his student who has a crush on him and gives astute commentary of fellow student’s writing, reads his manuscript and comments “Your book is really beautiful, I mean, amazingly beautiful, it’s… it’s at times… it’s… very detailed. You know, with the genealogies of everyone’s horses, and the dental records, and so on. And… I could be wrong, but it sort of reads in places like you didn’t make any choices. At all.”
Writing is selection, McPhee says. What you leave in, what you leave out.
Lee G. Hornbrook taught college English for 25 years and is the editor of The Writing Prof. Subscribe via email. Sign up for his 5-day free course on The Writing Process.