Draft No. 4: On the Writing Process by John McPhee

During his tenure as a staff writer for Time and the New Yorker, John McPhee has also produced 33 books. The writing courses he's taught at Princeton have been both generator and source of plangent observations about how to tackle the problems all writers share. This collection of essays highlights frustrations, insights and techniques.

For writer's block, there's the Dear Mother technique, in which you share your feelings of ineptitude and despair in a letter to Mom, insisting that "you are not cut out for this type of work." After whining and whimpering, you mention that "the bear has a fifty-five-inch waist and a neck more than thirty inches around, but could run nose-to-nose with Secretariat." You go on like that "as long as you can." And then you go back and delete the salutation, the whining, the whimpering, "and just keep the bear."

The racehorse Secretariat brings us to a topic covered in the essay called Frames of Reference. Do your readers understand what you are referring to? This thorny question involves locale, culture, history, demographics. And it's changing all the time. Although students of Brookline high school in Massachusetts recognized Woody Allen, Muhammad Ali, and Winston Churchill, only a quarter of them had heard of Waterloo Bridge, Norman Rockwell or Truman Capote. Only one was aware of Laurence Olivier, and none had heard of Calabria, Churchill Downs, Bob Woodward or Samuel Johnson. Makes you feel old.

Also in the title essay, McPhee posits a "four-to-one ratio in in writing time," and explains the "psychological differences from phase to phase." Once the dreaded first draft has been laid down,  problems with the writing "become less threatening, more interesting." But first you must "blurt out, heave out, babble out something--anything as a first draft." No matter how incompetent you feel -- and "To feel such doubt is a part of the picture, important and inescapable." The box technique for editing is fascinating; I intend to try it when I reach that pinnacle of achievement, Draft 4 -- that is, if I ever finish blurting out the first draft of the novel I'm working on now.

The same essay contains some fascinating and arcane stories about how editing is done at The New Yorker. That includes tales of the first copy editor, Eleanor Gould, whose sage editorial advice was memorialized by inventing the verb to Gould. The copy editors who have come after her have "lived in her shadow" and "lengthened it."

Other tidbits offered involve the usage of further (degree) versus farther (distance), the silent 's' apostrophe, and demonyms -- Haligonian, Liverpudlian and Minneapolitan are on his A list. "The Chicago Manual of Style is a "quixotic attempt at one-style-fits-all for every house in America--newspapers, magazines, book publishers, blogishers." John McPhee's book is not merely a learning experience, it's a delightful read.