Draft No. 4 by John McPhee

I read Draft No. 4 by John McPhee.

On chronology versus theme

After ten years of it at Time and The New Yorker, I felt both rutted and frustrated by always knuckling under to the sweep of chronology, and I longed for a thematically dominated structure. (24)

A couple months ago, I read Alia Hanna Habib quoting Andrea Elliott quoting Benjamin Weiser about the importance of keeping a master timeline when working on a story. Ordering a story is tricky because of circular dependencies, and chronology is one way to deal with that. Although I’m still trying to swim against the current with a thematically organized narrative in my first draft of dot com et al. In any case:

A piece of writing has to start somewhere, go somewhere, and sit down when it gets there. You do that by building what you hope is an unarguable structure. Beginning, middle, end. Aristotle, Page 1. (34)

Contrast this with fragmented books, more or less disparate collections of related stories. Does a good book need a smooth through-line? One narrative structure? Or can it be fragmented? Are fragmented books less interesting?

I’m starting to eat some humble pie about structure and the McPhee method versus what I’ve been doing so far. I think it’s well and good to write when I’m in flow, when I find something interesting while learning it, but that sort of writing might be better suited for publication in a blog or an email newsletter. For the book itself, I think McPhee—I mean, obviously—is right. You gather all the material, and the structure, the story arc, reveals itself.

On end user programming

Howard thought the computer should be adapted to the individual and not the other way around. One size fits one. The programs he wrote for me were molded like clay to my requirements—an appealing approach to anything called an editor. (37)

McPhee had pretty amazing personal software, like a program to detect overuse of words. His friend Howard in the Computer Science department at Princeton programmed it all just for him. It’s a good case for co-locating with people in different disciplines (“cross-polination,” as I often hear it referred to).

This is an invitation or an excuse to create my own custom software for book writing. There are at least a couple custom tools I want but haven’t built yet, partially because it feels like a luxury to spend my time budget on code and not prose.

On Gates and Jobs stealing from Engelbart

Steve Jobs would object, in 1983, to what he characterized as Bill Gates’s theft of Apple’s mouse-driven Graphical User Interface...Jobs shouted at Gates, “You’re ripping us off! I trusted you, and now you’re stealing from us.” But Bill Gates just stood there coolly, looking Steve directly in the eye before starting to speak in his squeaky voice. “Well, Steve, I think there’s more than one way of looking at it. I think it’s more like we both have this rich neighbor named Xerox and I broke into his house to steal the TV set and found out that you had already stolen it.” (41-42)

I enjoyed stumbling upon this vignette of early computing lore in a book filled with writing lore. McPhee also references Tracy Kidder’s The Soul of a New Machine, which I have been recommended on several occasions but still haven’t read. The recommendation travels a bit farther when coming from someone outside the discipline.

On a good lead

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. If the whole piece is not to be a long one, you may plunge right on and out the other side and have a finished draft before you know it; but if the piece is to have some combination of substance, complexity, and structural juxtaposition that pays dividends, you might begin with that acceptable and workable lead and then be able to sit back with the lead in hand and think about where you are going and how you plan to get there. Writing a successful lead, in other words, can illuminate the structure problem for you and cause you to see the piece hole—to see a 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. (49)

Like the notes on chronological structure, this is useful and timely advice for me to mull. Yugoslavia could be my lead because it reveals the fragility of the Internet, how it’s not forever even though domains and DNS is as close as it gets to forever on the Internet. I don’t know yet.

A lead should not be cheap, flashy, meretricious, blaring...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. (50)

In other words, don’t mislead.

On title control

Editors of every ilk seemed 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. When I was young, this turned my skin pink and caused horripilation...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. Editors’ habit of replacing an author’s title with one of their own is like a photo of a tourist’s head on the cardboard body of Mao Zedong. (72-73)

This is how I feel (as a young writer with pink skin). Me, an unexperienced and likely naive writer who’s never even worked with an editor. But many of the blog posts I’ve written in this digital garden started with a title. In other words, I only wrote the thing because I liked the title and it knocked around in my head long enough until I decided to write the thing. It happened just last week with a piece I wrote for the Val Town blog, “Code is inert. Val Town makes it ert.” Actually, the book’s working title itself came from the title of a throwaway blog post that I hadn’t given a second thought to.

So to hear this from McPhee is validating and therefore probably not what I needed to hear. I ought to hear the editors’ and publishers’ viewpoint on the other side of the argument, because there are quite probably many Good Reasons an author should not choose a title (or cover, for that matter).

On interviewing

He has interesting things to say about interview strategy and gamesmanship, like not writing notes in your notepad deliberately so that your interviewee spills more (92). Interviewing is one thing that I’ll just say I am bad at right now. But I’m not discouraged, because it’s the kind of thing that seems straightforward enough to get better at by doing it more. It’s an attractive pursuit in that way. Getting better at writing by writing more might be similar, but I don’t think it’s always as obvious at the time when your writing is plain bad.

On bad first drafts

First drafts are slow and develop clumsily because every sentence affects not only those before it but also those that follow. The first draft of my book on California geology took two gloomy years; the second, third, and fourth drafts took about six months altogether. That four-to-one ratio in writing time—first draft versus the other drafts combined—has for me been consistent in projects of any length, even if the first draft takes only a few days or weeks. There are psychological differences from phase to phase, and the first is the phase of the pit and the pendulum. After that, it seems as if a different person is taking over. Dread largely disappears. Problems become less threatening, more interesting. Experience is more helpful, as if an amateur is being replaced by a professional. Days go by quickly, and not a few could be called pleasant, I’ll admit. (158-159)

Writing first drafts is funny because while I write them, present me will think at least some of it is good, and then future me will have to kill present me’s darlings. But in most cases, future me is right. And once you kill the first or second darling, you sort of get rolling and it feels productive to massacre. (I’m not a fan of dark metaphors, and I kind of hate that one, but it’s a natural extension of “killing your darlings.”)

The way to do a piece of writing is three or four times over, never once. For me, the hardest part comes first, getting something—anything—out in front of me. Sometimes in a nervous frenzy, I just fling words as if I were flinging mud at a wall. Blurt out, heave out, babble out something—anything—as a first draft. With that, you have achieved a sort of nucleus. Then, as you work it over and alter it, you begin to shape sentences that score higher with the ear and eye. Edit it again, top to bottom. The chances are that about now you’ll be seeing something that you are sort of eager for others to see. And all that takes time. What I have left out is the interstitial time. You finish that first awful blurting, and then you put the thing aside. You get in your car and drive home. On the way, your mind is still knitting at the words. You think of a better way to say something, a good phrase to correct a certain problem. Without the drafted version—if it did not exist—you obviously would not be thinking of things that would improve it. In short, you may be actually writing only two or three hours a day, but your mind, in one way or another, is working on it twenty-four hours a day—yes, while you sleep—but only if some sort of draft or earlier version already exists. Until it exists, writing has not really begun. (159-160)

I find that even the first drafts I like are usually bad in some way I can’t see yet. With structural holes or logical gaps, like an Escher painting, or with turns of phrase that are one turn too cute.

On developing style

[McPhee’s daughter Jenny, also a writer] said, “My style is always that of what I am reading at the time—or overwhelmingly self-conscious and strained.” I said, “How unfortunate that would be if you were fifty-four. At twenty-three, it is not only natural; it is important. The developing writer reacts to excellence as it is discovered—wherever and whenever—and of course does some imitating unavoidably in the process of drawing from the admired fabric things to make one’s own. Rapidly, the components of imitation fade. What remains is a new element in your own voice, which is not in any way an imitation. Your manner as a writer takes form in this way, a fragment at a time. A style that lacks strain and self-consciousness is what you seem to aspire to, or you wouldn’t be bringing the matter up. Therefore, your goal is in the right place. So practice taking shots at it. A relaxed, unself-conscious style is not something that one person is born with and another not.” (161)

On writing as selection

Writing is selection. Just to start a piece of writing, you have to choose one word and only one for 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. That’s a crude way to assess things, but it’s all you’ve got. Forget market research. Never market-research your writing. Write on subjects in which you have enough interest on your own to see you through all the stops, starts, hesitations, and other impediments along the way. Ideally, a piece of writing should grow to whatever length is sustained by its selected material—that much and no more. (180)

I like the premise of following what interests you most, but I also think it might be silly to completely ignore the market, e.g., when constructing a book proposal. I even think of finding whitespace in the market as an interesting creative process in itself.

McPhee also talks about writing as selection when interviewing and note-taking in the field (quoted below, and more on page 182).

The interviews with Jackie Gleason were not recorded. With my basic technology—a pencil and a lined four-by-six notebook—I could keep up. He spoke at a clear and thoughtful pace. Besides, like most people, he was not invariably interesting. Writing is selection. When you are making notes, you are forever selecting. I left out more than I put down. (97-98)

On McPhee

I quite like John McPhee’s writing. I definitely like his style and voice, and his subject matter I also like, but more in the wishful liking sort of way. His densely factual, participatory outdoor longform pieces and books appeal to me on the cover, but I first heard of him about nine months ago and haven’t actually completed any of those (the only other book of his I’ve read in full is Tabula Rasa, which is very thematically and structurally similar to this one). So it’s fair to question how drawn I actually am to that genre, or whether they appeal to like spending extended time outdoors appeals to me—I seem to love it when I do it, but it’s been nearly a year since I’ve slept in the woods or even spent the better part of a day there. The outdoorsman facet of my identity is either dormant or hanging on by the thread of nostalgia from formative summer camp seasons.

Fun fact (because The New Yorker loves facts): David Remnick took John McPhee’s writing seminar in college.

Everything but the words

Published by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux as with his thirty-something other books. If I had to read only one imprint, I think it’d be FSG.

A nice, coarse paper for the hardcover jacket with a typewriter font well suited (or jacketed, if you will) to the subject matter. 192 pages with no backmatter to speak of. No acknowledgements, I suppose because the book itself is full of them. $25.00USD, as marked on the flap. Excluding the jacket, the book uses just one color and one typeface, a down-the-middle serif (I don’t know my serifs well enough to say which). Actually that’s not quite true—there are a handful of diagrams set in a sans serif.