He has been a staff writer at one magazine since 1965, and before he writes a word of a piece he draws the shape of it on a sheet of paper. John McPhee is here for that drawing.
He was born in Princeton in 1931 and has spent most of his life within a few miles of it. He spent seven years at Time, then went to The New Yorker in 1965 with a profile of a college basketball player and never left. The books came out of the magazine pieces, about oranges, about the Pine Barrens, about a tennis match, about a conservationist taken into the wild with three men who wanted to use it, about Alaska, and, over twenty years, about the geology of the continent along one highway, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1999. Since 1975 he has taught one seminar at Princeton, called Creative Non-Fiction, to nearly 450 students by 2017, and in the private conferences that are the core of the course he and the student go through the paper, in his words, “a comma at a time.”
What he does before he writes is the part that matters here. He gathers everything. Months in the field, notebooks, then every note typed and coded. And then, before a sentence, the structure. He draws it. Sometimes it is a shape on the page. Sometimes it is letters: the conservationist and his three adversaries became A, B and C over D, three encounters and the one man in all of them. His rule is not that structure decorates a piece. It is that structure is the reason a reader stays. “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 the reader is not supposed to see it. “Readers are not supposed to notice the structure. It is meant to be about as visible as someone’s bones.”
Here is the tension he names, and it is the tension in every case file you will ever open. “The narrative wants to move from point to point through time, while topics that have arisen now and again across someone’s life cry out to be collected.” A wreck happened in an order. The proof of it wants to be gathered by theme: what the company knew, what the driver did, what the body took, what it cost. Chronology and theme pull against each other, and the writer decides, for each piece, which one wins where. He is not against the timeline. “There’s nothing wrong with a chronological structure. On tablets in Babylonia, most pieces were written that way, and nearly all pieces are written that way now.” He is against letting the timeline decide by default. The Redline entry on the buried lede says the same thing in the language of a fact section: theme first, sequence second, order is argument. McPhee got there first, and drew it.
The rest of his rules are a trial lawyer’s rules with the names changed. “A piece of writing has to start somewhere, go somewhere, and sit down when it gets there.” That is an opening statement. “Writing is selection.” That is the case: the facts you leave out are the ones that would have let the jury change the subject, and the entries on the adverb and the second and a half are selection applied one word at a time. On interviewing, which he calls elicitation: “Don’t rely on memory. Don’t even imagine that you will be able to remember verbatim in the evening what people said during the day.” That is the deposition transcript, and it is the same principle the Spanish side of this Docket keeps under the dicho papelito habla: memory changes, records persist. And on the posture that gets people to talk: “I’m shy, and I get into people’s worlds and I don’t know anything.” The witness who is allowed to be the expert tells you everything. The lawyer who already knows gets one-word answers.
One more of his ideas is the reason this Docket looks the way it does. His book on a tennis match is two profiles at once, and he explains why: “One plus one should add up to more than two.” Put two lives on one page and something appears in the space between them that neither life shows alone. That is why Campoamor and Kent share an entry here, and why Houston and Murray point at each other. It is also the whole method of this section: the connections are the product.
Why he is here. Because the order is the argument, and the people who understand that are rare in any trade. Charles Hamilton Houston picked the order of the cases so that each one made the next inevitable. Ruth Bader Ginsburg built a staircase and refused to skip a stair. McPhee draws the shape of the piece before he writes it, so that the reader arrives where the writer wanted without ever seeing the rails. A trial is built the same way: which witness goes first, which exhibit the jury sees before it hears anyone explain it, where the mechanism paragraph sits in the demand, what the last word before the jury leaves the room is. None of that is visible to the people in the box, and all of it is why they believe you by the end.
So before you write the demand, the motion, the opening, draw it. One sheet. Where it starts, where it goes, where it sits down, and which fact the reader must have in hand before the next one can land. Then write to the drawing and cut, by his standard for a good edit: “The idea is to remove words in such a manner that no one would notice that anything has been removed.” Out structure them. The jury will think it was their idea.
John Angus McPhee (born 1931), Princeton, New Jersey; Princeton University, A.B. 1953, and a year at Magdalene College, Cambridge; associate editor at Time, 1957 to 1964; staff writer at The New Yorker since 1965; author of more than thirty books, among them A Sense of Where You Are (1965), Oranges (1967), Levels of the Game (1969), Encounters with the Archdruid (1971), Coming into the Country (1977), Annals of the Former World (1998, Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction, 1999), and Draft No. 4: On the Writing Process (2017), which collects his essays on structure, elicitation, omission and revision, including the one first published in The New Yorker in January 2013; Ferris Professor of Journalism in Residence at Princeton, where he has taught Creative Non-Fiction since 1975. The quotations are from Draft No. 4 (see the Nieman Storyboard review) and from Princeton University’s 2017 conversation with him; biography from Encyclopaedia Britannica. General information, not legal advice.
