BOOK REVIEW: Draft No. 4: One the Writing Process by John McPhee

Ebook – 210 pages, audiobook – 6 hrs and 49 mins per Amazon

(don’t know which one you want to use, I did both)

When I started reading this book, I had no idea who John McPhee was. The title drew me in—Draft No. 4—implying the author just might know something about writing and how many drafts it might take to make something readable to the public. I wasn’t wrong there.

To understand what McPhee writes and why, I had to look him up. According to Wikipedia, McPhee is considered one of the pioneers of creative nonfiction. He is a four-time finalist for the Pulitzer, winning it the fourth time. He received the George Polk Career Award, an American journalism award that many describe as the only journalism award that means anything, in 2008 for his “indelible mark on American journalism during his nearly half-century career” as announced by the Long Island University. Even the Washington Post labeled McPhee as “the best journalist in America.” In fact, McPhee has earned so many writing awards, I’m not mentioning them all here, just look them up.

McPhee has been the Ferris Professor of Journalism at Princeton since 1974 who began his career at Time magazine, then went to The New Yorker. He’s written thirty-one books that includes much of his material for the Times and The New Yorker. He’s not like the Hunter Thompson “new journalism” of the 60s. My son loved Thompson, but his writing didn’t work for me.

McPhee is more literary and in my mind, much more convoluted in his thinking, how he writes, and in his reporting. Not convoluted as in confusing but convoluted as in not only methodical but using a long process as well as different processes for a particular story.

That got me interested in him as a writer because I’ve realized that I have different processes and not quite different styles, but a different approach to different pieces, though perhaps to the average reader they all look the same. To me, they are different. So his ability to adjust his process and result to what the piece needed really intrigued me. So I began my foray into John McPhee, who still lives, by the way.

One student remembered his comments on his feeble (per the author) attempts to write nonfiction. Mcphee commented, “This could be said with several pebbles removed from the mouth.” I thought that was hilarious. And, “Listen to the character’s name thudding like horseshoes. Vary it. Use pronouns here and there.” Which is definitely something I must always keep in mind. I tend to throw the character’s name in constantly instead of “he” or “she” and keep moving.

Other comments were things like “I wish you would listen more critically to the rhythms and sound of the prose.” I am a stickler for that in my own writing, though I don’t always achieve it. I mean, after reading your own work several times, it all sounds like pure literary drudgery. By then, I can’t tell and metaphor from purple prose. But I absolutely adore well-written prose, lyrical yet quietly, not loudly professing “look how literary I am!” and moving the story along in its own way like a stream that gurgles along and shows you its beauty without being anything other than a stream of water flowing along.

“This is lame cleverness” McPhee told one student. I think I do a lot of that too. If only I were clever.

While reading this book, I learned about the decisions he made in how he wrote certain pieces. He encountered problems. He made decisions. While reading this book I learned more about structure, set pieces, and transitions. And about caring for the story, or in his case, his articles.

I learned that McPhee loves language. I love language, as well as languages, yet I’m stubbornly slow on actually learning a new language. It’s the time thing I think. I keep thinking, “Oh, I should be writing something.” McPhee’s love of language is, as one eventually successful student said in Lithub.com, “It’s fundamental to the geological writing, where McPhee takes a palpable pleasure in terminology: gabbros, plagiogranites, pillow basalts.” McPhee also uses words like Haligonian which is a person from Halifax. I had to look that one up. Even McPhee’s titles were works of literal art—“Imminent Ptomaine,” “Zealous Island,” “Phi Beta Football.”

McPhee once told a former student, “Confidence never wrote a book, though, and in excess has killed unborn libraries.” And I thought, well, there goes my confidence! I wondered how many unborn libraries my own fiction novel would never get into.

There’s so much I could write about John McPhee. So much I learned reading that one book, so far. I’ll be reading many more of his.

In fact, there is an article in The New Yorker for June 22, 2025, by John Mcphee! I was so excited to see that. As if I actually knew the man personally, now I hunt for his books and articles. There are so many gems and nuggets about writing even in his nonfiction articles about many other topics, and he’s written about a lot of areas—a truck driver, fishermen and fishing as in They’re in the River about the American shad, piney woods, Oranges about what else, oranges and orange pickers, and orange packers, and orange barons, and orange botanists, about Alaska and Alaskans in Coming into the Country, and one he started writing about in the book I read—Encounters with the Archdruid: Narrative About a Conservationist and Three of His Natural Enemies—where (in Draft No. 4) he starts talking about how he decides to lay out a story.

I think he used the snowflake method long before there was a name for it. He said he wasn’t sure how to handle this story about four very different men in three different wildernesses: a coastal island, a Western mountain range, and the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon. Now those geographic areas are all gorgeous, yet you’d think different topics and at least three different articles.

But no, McPhee didn’t write short and sweet, I don’t think ever. He spoke (and I read) about how he put the different areas on index cards and the different people (men) on index cards and then what he knew about each one on cards and he thought at first he had just a megla-mash (my word) of “stuff” without connection.

Yet he sensed a connection. He knew there were threads of connections that linked all together in some way. He could write the article chronologically, how he met the people and/or the land, or… He just wasn’t sure at first exactly how this story should unfold.

He realized that there was a link he kept returning to. The “archdruid” character. Each man had vastly different opinions on the ecology of their region. The book, and McPhee, presents to the reader the “nuances of the value revolution” in today’s climate-conscious society. Even though the book was written in 1980, it’s still as valuable and insightful as ever.

Even in the book, and on the audiobook, which I bounced back and forth on depending on what I was doing at the time, he gave visuals of his process. For instance, he begins the book with:

A B C

——

     D

Which succinctly presents visually how he organized his index cards into the story he was writing. And, by the very interesting way, he had this on a sheet of paper on his bulletin board long before he ever had an article to use with it. He said he didn’t know why or how it would be used, but somehow, in some way, he innately knew, this would be an article and how he’d write it.

He admits that’s not a normal way to write–anything. In 1846, Edgar Allan Poe published an essay called “The Philosophy of Composition” in Graham’s Magazine. Poe described the stages of thought in which he conceived of and eventually wrote his poem “The Raven.”

Poe had no idea what the poem would be. It began in the abstract. He wanted something somber, sad, mournful, and “saturated with melancholia.” That certainly defines what became the poem. He wanted something repetitive and have a one-word refrain.

Now, let me stop here and say, OMG. What was he thinking? Again, approaching a thing—article, story, poem—from what the author expected the end result to be having absolutely no idea of the middle, the meat of the thing, the actual material that had to be written. I do good to get an idea to paper and make it go from beginning to end.

Perhaps that’s more of a thing we might do for a contest with a theme or restrictions, or an anthology and so on. I think I’m not there yet.

So, using those limits, those restrictions, Poe selected the long ‘o’ and then asked as McPhee put it “…what combining consonant, producibly doleful and lugubrious?” I rarely asked what’s lugubrious, but okay. Poe selected the ‘r’ as the consonant. Then he brainstormed words with both ‘o’ and ‘r’—lore, core, door, Lenore, nevermore—and he said that the word nevermore was the first word that crossed his mind.

Then McPhee returns to how he was looking at his articles in general. He said he didn’t want to get into a rut, ergo the ABC/D layout. He said the article usually lays out like an ‘X’ in the middle then a set of little ‘o’s around it. He puts it in a graphic in the book and I suddenly say Hero’s Journey! And I do think his layout for his articles are quite similar to the journey a character takes, the main character, the protagonist, in most fiction (especially genre) stories.

McPhee said, “The X is the person you are principally going to talk to, spend time with, observe, and write about. The O’s represent peripheral interviews with people who can shed light on the life and career of X—her friends, or his mother, old teachers, teammates, colleagues, employees, enemies, anybody at all, the more the better. Cumulatively, the O’s provide triangulation—a way of checking facts one against another, and of eliminating apocrypha.”

And I’m thinking, right on. I must remember this. This is an innate and essential story telling method. It’s how humans think. How they read stories. And should be how we tell stories, in most cases. There are always those outliers, very different methods of storytelling that can be amazing, and yet, for now, I’ll stick to this methodology.

McPhee goes on to making the diagram of this new piece he wants to write yet has no material for, yet, something much more complicated. He talks about the resonance among the different “sides” to the diagram. That can also be done in the big Hero’s Journey circle. He talks about “meeting yourself coming” in the end. Doesn’t the hero come full circle?

Amazing. What I like the most about McPhee and his writing, even though he writes nonfiction, is that he follows his gut. He has recognized, though he doesn’t really come out and state this, that if it’s in his mind in a particular way, then it must be something that will, and can, be used even if the actual material is much later than the idea. Cosmic, right?

What made an impression on me was that McPhee didn’t select the most obvious method to write the article. He took his time. He’s a huge proponent on time in writing, letting the story (or article) dictate the style and story. And I agree. Deadlines do suck but sometimes are necessary. McPhee moved the index cards around like puzzle pieces until he found the right fit for the story. I do that as well with my story, each chapter heading merely a tiny summary of the chapter or scene.

McPhee spoke about quotation marks and what’s in them. I thought, what? Dialogue obviously. Yes, but more.

He says George Plimpton once quoted Truman Capote’s claim that he trained himself to recall dialogue with such accuracy, he didn’t need a notebook or recorder. Well, that certainly isn’t me at all, I’m thinking as I read that.

In 1991, James Atlas was an editor at The New York Times Magazine and wrote an article about quotation marks and what’s inside them. He asked, “How much is quoter, and how much quote?”

I considered how that might work in fiction writing. How much is inside the quotes and now much is presented in narration? On the surface, it seems obvious. But if we look deeper, we see there’s a huge importance in what and how we write dialogue.

McPhee said, “Once captured, words have to be dealt with.” He talks about trimming them and straightening them. He says speech and print are not the same. And that’s the truth. What we might speak a thing one way, but that in no way means we should write it that way, even in dialogue. He recalls writing an article about Henri Viallancourt whom travelled through the North Maine Woods in homemade bark canoes, would use the word “bummer” constantly. McPhee said he weeded two-thirds of the bummers out and still; his readers commented on the overuse of the word. Guess we do our best and can’t please everyone.

McPhee goes on to talk about his “parenthetical peeve” – pronouns – and how they “infect sentences that contain interior quotes—the pronouns apparently changing horses midstream.” He gives an example: “He arrived at the pier, where he learned that ‘my ship had come in.’” And McPhee asks whose ship? The author’s ship? That is one of my weak spots as well, unwittingly swapping pronouns as I write the first draft (well, and perhaps beyond), so full into my story I don’t even see it. As McPhee said, don’t do it.

McPhee even went so far to quote Justice Anthony M. Kennedy on quoted dialogue. Justice Kennedy said he understood that dialogue in many cases must be amended to eliminate grammatical and syntactical “infelicities.” Sara Lippincott of The New Yorker called them “the dusting of quotes.” Apparently there was a discussion in a libel case before the Supreme Court in 1991 over just such a thing.

McPhee concluded, “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.”

In his chapter on structure, McPhee said it took him nearly two weeks of lying on a picnic table staring up into branches and leaves before he could figure out how to start this one particular article for The New Yorker and immediately I’m thinking, that’s so me! I suppose it’s every writer everywhere in the universe. Time. It takes time for the good things. Well, it takes time for everything, but especially, I think, for those really good things, those things close to our soul that we simply much do and yet, while we are staring at the branches, we probably have no idea. It must percolate up from our psyche, or subconscious, or wherever these darn ideas come from.

McPhee teaches that “You can build a strong, sound, and artful structure. You can build a structure in such a way that it causes people to want to keep turning pages. A compelling structure in nonfiction can have an attracting effect analogous to a story line in fiction.” And I say that structure is everything at the beginning and at the end, regardless of the type of story, nonfiction or fiction, we are all human and must process it with the same type of brain.

He also says sometimes the structure of a composition dictates itself, and sometimes it doesn’t. Much like as we write in genres, I’m thinking here, we must use those genre tropes and elements to feed our readers what they desire and therefore, use that structure to arrange our stories. A romance must have a romance or relationship of some kind both at the beginning and at the end. What happens in between is up to the story. A science fiction must have its science fiction elements at the beginning and at the end, and in some way, should come full circle along with it’s protagonist. I try to relay that information when I’m teaching classes about genre tropes and how to use them to best effect, but often, writers gloss over these details, and I think it’s to the story’s detriment that they do. Much like David Farland stated many times, stories should resonate in many layers.

I feel I’m doting on structure, but one more quote of his and I’ll move on: “Developing a structure is seldom that simple. Almost always there is considerable tension between chronology and theme, and chronology traditionally wins.”

Don’t’ we usually write a story from beginning to end? The protagonist is in his native element, but with the first incident, must be shoved, often unwittingly, out of his or her comfort zone and voila! The journey begins. But we don’t have to always write a story that way. Perhaps once I become a better writer, more skilled and experienced, I can create a story that is more nuanced than A to B to C to end. We’ll see. (Something in me longs to do it.)

McPhee shows off his various layouts for structure and the stories that essentially required them. I’ve printed them out to remind myself there’s more than A, B, C. McPhee talks about often the story isn’t revealed until you actually write a lead, sometimes the lead sentence can allow the story to unfold and lay itself out for you.

In fiction, the lead might equate to the introductional first scene. Usually, we set the scene with some worldbuilding, we introduce the main character, the protagonist, and we show the character in his/her usual modus operandi. La tee da, the character is living a life. McPhee says, “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.”

And in the first scene, the author makes a promise to the reader that this might be the character’s norm, but not for long. And we hope not cause the norm is in fact, usually, boring. Well, not always boring for the reader. The character can have a fascinating or gruesome life, but, that’s what has to change.

He talks about “an integral beginning that sets a scene and implies the dimensions of the story.” The beginning is integral to the entire story. It’s so very important, many authors ignore it just to get to the end. “A lead is good not because it dances, fires cannons, or whistles like a train but because it is absolute to what follows.”

McPhee talks about “priming the pump.” If writing the lead doesn’t spark the muse, try writing by hand, he says. Anytime a writer is blocked, dead in the water, needing some new ideas or way to tell a story, write by hand. Keep a legal pad or some other thing to write on (I added the some other thing, because I often use my iPad and pen to jot things down just to give me a different medium.)

He says get away from the computer. McPhee used a typewriter for generations and was lucky enough to meet a guy at Princeton programming their big mainframe who wrote him a program that worked like a personalized word processor, much more powerful than what was available at the time, but definitely, a one of a kind. PCs were just on the horizon and only the really rich, or really stupid but fanatic like me, would buy a personal computer.

(My first computer was a free TRS-80 my then husband brought home from Tandy Electronics where he worked as a computer technician. I was home just after birthing my second child, Wendi, and was bored to tears. I read voraciously during that time. I’m not a big TV person, especially in those days of maybe four channels and daytime TV? Gawdawful. So, I learned how to program in BASIC using a cassette tape drive. How quaint! But my first bought computer (I built my second one, an AIM-65) was the Apple II and it cost me over $3,000! And was what now would have cost a few dollars if that because of course, computers are so much more powerful.)

Apparently, author Anne Tyler writes with a fountain pen (I love fountain pens!). She says it feels like she’s “knitting a novel” with her Parker 75 fountain pen with a nib marked 62 (which they no longer make apparently) and unlined white paper. She rewrites each draft in longhand as well.

Then he talks about weaving the story. He says Evan S. Connell (author of The Patriot, Mr. Bridge, Mrs. Bridge, Son of the Morning Star, and much more, see “In Praise of Evan S. Connell” in The New York Times) could weave a story like no other. “He’d briefly mention something, amplify it slightly fifteen pages later, and add to it twenty pages after that, gradually teasing up enough curiosity to call for a full-scale set piece.”

When McPhee wrote Cornell asking for a more detailed biography of Gall from Son of the Morning Star, Cornell asks what computer? His technology hadn’t progressed beyond his portable Olivetti. Guess he didn’t get much of a list nor very quickly if he did. And this was at the end of the twentieth century. (Man after my own heart. Only, I use a keyboard that makes the typewriter clacking sounds so I can pretend I’m typing “the old-fashioned way” that I love and yet, not lose my giant first drafts.)

Even students of McPhee reverted to typewriters after taking his class. Well, not all, but he says many did and found the experience more personalized and freeing.

On a blackboard, when he was teaching at Princeton, he would write, “A Thousand Details Add Up to One Impression.” A quote he got from Cary Grant, actually. He discusses what to keep and what to leave out. He says writing is selection. This is like writing the first draft. Throwing in everything and the kitchen sink and then, the editing process. What to keep? What to toss? (I’m at the step now.)

He calls “interests,” the bits that are interesting to the story, as “subdivisions of appeal.” Remember David Farland talking about “appeal elements?” McPhee says look for the undercurrent, and not the least, the “sheer sound of the words that bring forth the detail.”

I realize now, I simply, in my own way, cannot cover everything McPhee revealed to me in this book / audiobook. I’d listen to the audiobook for a while, usually at night, in bed, with hubby snoring beside me. The next day, I had to read what he wrote, the very same words he spoke to me the previous night. I highlighted lines upon lines of typed words so I’d remember. And there’s way too much to cover in a mere Camp book review (not mere as in unnecessary, but as in I could write a book myself about it!)

He talks about how language developed over time, and how the magazines he worked for dealt with it. Like the word “fuck” for instance. Some editors disallowed the word completely. Some allowed it maybe once, in some very strong sentences, but no more, even if the subject cursed constantly.

I highlighted, on my rereads, a lot of words I’d learned like froe, bireme, horripilation, and nonagenarian. Because, Mcphee is in his 90s now, and according to one of his students, is still going strong. He doesn’t teach anymore but often converses with former students and interviewees and interviewers. I am concerned that, in today’s gawdawful (my opinion) journalism classes, because who in the hell is teaching these people nowadays, which is what I think when I’m reading or listening to news and articles, that journalism, good, solid journalism, is going the way of the dodo, as we say. They often don’t know the difference between “less” and “fewer.” Just simple things that in my days in school, I’d have been admonished for big time (probably why I remember some things).

McPhee is an icon of journalism and, as far as I’m concerned and I’m not even a journalist, an icon for all journalists and writers. He should be studied. Have his own semester of focus. Some readers wow about Hunter S. Thompson. He was different and cool, and all that. But he was nowhere near as talented and wise as John Angus McPhee.

In a New York Times Magazine article titled “The Mind of John McPhee,” author Sam Anderson writes, “Mcphee has built a career on such small detonations of knowledge. His mind is pure curiosity…”

I hope, someday, someone, somewhere says Pat Hauldren is a mind of pure curiosity. What an honor that would be.