John McPhee: “The Art of Nonfiction”
In response to a recent post about the importance of prep-writing, GITS reader Daniel MacDonald gave me this heads-up via email:
Scott,
John McPhee has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1963 and he’s a hero of mine. Maybe the only one. The attached interview in The Paris Review is one of the longest he’s done (McPhee is notoriously shy) but also gives huge insight into his writing process, which is deeply detailed. It’s all about the prep work. BTW, my 8-year-old son’s middle name is McPhee, and there’s no family relation. Enjoy.
P.S. He’s right about getting the lead first, something I always did in my journalism days. Once you get the lead, the rest flows…
McPhee has won the Pulitzer Prize and is considered to be a pioneer of “narrative nonfiction.” Two of my favorite McPhee books are Coming into the Country (1977) and Assembling California (1993).
Daniel pulled these excerpts from the interview re prep-writing:
MCPHEE
First thing I do is transcribe my notes. This is not an altogether mindless process. You’re copying your notes, and you get ideas. You get ideas for structure. You get ideas for wording, phraseologies. As I’m typing, if something crosses my mind I flip it in there. When I’m done, certain ideas have accrued and have been added to it, like iron filings drawn to a magnet.
And so now you’ve got piles of stuff on the table, unlike a fiction writer. A fiction writer doesn’t have this at all. A fiction writer is feeling her way, feeling her way — it’s much more of a trial-and-error, exploratory thing. With nonfiction, you’ve got your material, and what you’re trying to do is tell it as a story in a way that doesn’t violate fact, but at the same time is structured and presented in a way that makes it interesting to read.
I always say to my classes that it’s analogous to cooking a dinner. You go to the store and you buy a lot of things. You bring them home and you put them on the kitchen counter, and that’s what you’re going to make your dinner out of. If you’ve got a red pepper over here — it’s not a tomato. You’ve got to deal with what you’ve got. You don’t have an ideal collection of material every time out.
INTERVIEWER
What happens next?
MCPHEE
You write a lead. You sit down and think, Where do I want this piece to begin? What makes sense? It can’t be meretricious. It’s got to deliver on what you promise. It should shine like a flashlight down through the piece. So you write a beginning. Then you go back to your notes and start looking for an overall structure. It’s three times as easy if you’ve got that lead.
Once I’ve written the lead, I read the notes and then I read them again. I read them until they’re coming out my ears. Ideas occur, but what I’m doing, basically, is looking for logical ways in which to subdivide the material. I’m looking for things that fit together, things that relate. For each of these components, I create a code — it’s like an airport code. If a topic is upstate New York, I’ll write UNY or something in the margin. When I get done, the mass of notes has some tiny code beside each note. And I write each code on an index card.
INTERVIEWER
How many components go into a piece like Encounters with the Archdruid?
MCPHEE
The whole book had thirty-six components. What I ended up with was thirty-six three-by-five cards, each with a code word. Some of these things are absolutely dictated by the story of the journey down the Colorado River. But the choices are interesting where it’s not dictated, like the facts of David Brower’s life.
I knew where I was going to start, but I didn’t know the body of the thing. I went into a seminar room here at the university, and I laid the thirty-six cards out on the table. I just looked and looked at them. After a while I was looking at two cards: Upset Rapid, which is a big-time rapid in the Colorado River, and Alpinist. In Upset Rapid, Brower doesn’t ride the rapid. Why doesn’t he ride the rapid? His answer to Floyd Dominy is, “Because I’m chicken.” That’s a pretty strong scene. What next? Well, there are more than seventy peaks in the Sierra Nevada that were first ascended by David Brower, hanging by his fingernails on some cliff. “Because I’m chicken”? This juxtaposition is just loaded with irony, and by putting the Alpinist right after Upset Rapid, in the white space between those two sections there’s a hell of a lot of stuff that I don’t have to say. It’s told by the structure. It’s all crackling along between those two things. So I put those two cards side by side. Now there are thirty-four other parts there on the table.
I don’t know how many times I’ve read or heard writers who use 3x5 inch index cards. I have for over 20 years. What’s the magic of those little dudes?
For more of the interview, go here.
And for more on John McPhee, go here.
HT to Daniel MacDonald for the link. Here’s to that son of yours — hope he becomes a great writer!
Comment Archive