NotitiesDraft No. 4
John McPhee
This draft discusses the process of writing, emphasizing the importance of gathering material, structuring it effectively, and the necessity of a strong lead. It highlights that writing is a selection process, where confidence and experimentation play crucial roles in developing a unique voice. The author shares insights on overcoming writer's block and the value of revision in crafting compelling narratives.
You begin with a subject, gather material, and work your way to structure from there. You pile up volumes of notes and then figure out what you are going to do with them, not the other way around. (Location 39)
letting the match itself contain and structure the story. (Location 67)
Why choose that one over all other concurrent possibilities? (Location 77)
Ideas are where you find them, (Location 134)
new pieces can shoot up from other pieces, pursuing connections that run through the ground like rhizomes. (Location 137)
If I was blocked by fear, I was also stymied by inexperience. (Location 210)
Despite the approaching deadline I spent half the night slowly sorting, making little stacks of thematically or chronologically associated notes, and arranging them in an order that seemed to hang well from that lead sentence: “The citizen has certain misgivings.” Then, as I do now, I settled on an ending before going back to the beginning. In this instance, I let the comedian himself have the last word: “‘My considered opinion of Nixon versus Kennedy is that neither can win.’” (Location 228)
You would think that by then I would have developed some confidence in writing a new story, but I hadn’t, and never would. (Location 234)
Your last piece is never going to write your next one for you. (Location 235)
To some extent, the structure of a composition dictates itself, and to some extent it does not. (Location 247)
Readers are not supposed to notice the structure. (Location 402)
they should not be imposed upon the material. They should arise from within it. (Location 403)
The note-typing could take many weeks, but it collected everything in one legible place, and it ran all the raw material in some concentration through the mind. (Location 411)
If the contents of the seventh folder were before me, the contents of twenty-nine other folders were out of sight. (Location 419)
It is difficult to frame much of a structure until you write a lead. (Location 582)
Hunt through your mind for a good beginning. Then write it. Write a lead. (Location 584)
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. (Location 586)
I would go so far as to suggest that you should always write your lead (redoing it and polishing it until you are satisfied that it will serve) before you go at the big pile of raw material and sort it into a structure. (Location 591)
For one thing, the lead is the hardest part of a story to write. (Location 593)
If you are serious about the subject, you might seem to be indicating at the outset that you don’t have confidence in your material so you are trying to make up for it by waxing cute. (Location 595)
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. (Location 607)
integral beginning that sets a scene and implies the dimensions of the story. (Location 610)
Another way to prime the pump is to write by hand. (Location 612)
Go on scribbling as long as the words develop. Then get up and copy what you have written into your computer file. (Location 616)
“A Thousand Details Add Up to One Impression.” (Location 682)
All the detailed preparations resulted not in a mass of confusing statistics and plans, but in the opposite, paring away the extraneous, reducing and refining until all that was left was what was needed for that game against that team. (Location 702)
Ending pieces is difficult, and usable endings are difficult to come by. It’s nice when they just appear in appropriate places and times. (Location 732)
I always know where I intend to end before I have much begun to write. (Location 734)
Young writers find out what kinds of writers they are by experiment. (Location 959)
It is so easy to misjudge yourself and get stuck in the wrong genre. You avoid that, early on, by writing in every genre. (Location 961)
If you are telling yourself you’re a poet, write poems. Write a lot of poems. If fewer than one work out, throw them all away; you’re not a poet. Maybe you’re a novelist. You won’t know until you have written several novels. (Location 962)
Tags: roze
“Though a man be more prone and able for one kind of writing than another, yet he must exercise all.” (Location 973)
“It takes as long as it takes.” (Location 1000)
Writing is a matter strictly of developing oneself. You compete only with yourself. (Location 1004)
You develop yourself by writing. (Location 1005)
Tags: roze
My advice is, never stop battling for the survival of your own unique stamp. (Location 1010)
Editors are counselors and can do a good deal more for writers in the first-draft stage (Location 1027)
Writers come in two principal categories—those who are overtly insecure and those who are covertly insecure—and they can all use help. (Location 1028)
a voice recorder can affect the milieu of an interview. (Location 1116)
Use a voice recorder, but maybe not as a first choice—more like a relief pitcher. (Location 1117)
Whatever you do, don’t rely on memory. (Location 1118)
As you scribble away, the interviewee is, of course, watching you. Now, unaccountably, you slow down, and even stop writing, while the interviewee goes on talking. The interviewee becomes nervous, tries harder, and spills out the secrets of a secret life, or maybe just a clearer and more quotable version of what was said before. Conversely, if the interviewee is saying nothing of interest, you can pretend to be writing, just to keep the enterprise moving forward. (Location 1122)
You can develop a distinct advantage by waxing slow of wit. (Location 1126)
If you don’t seem to get something, the subject will probably help you get it. (Location 1128)
Writing is selection. (Location 1200)
When you are making notes you are forever selecting. I left out more than I put down. (Location 1201)
I think you should do enough preparation to be polite. (Location 1202)
do as much reading as the situation impels you to do. (Location 1203)
Nonetheless, you get it wrong, (Location 1205)
the writer has responsibility to be fair to the subject, who trustingly and perhaps unwittingly delivers words and story into the writer’s control. (Location 1217)
Once captured, words have to be dealt with. (Location 1234)
Writing has to be fun at least once in a pale blue moon. (Location 1448)
The last thing I would ever suggest to young writers is that they consciously try to write for the ages. (Location 1476)
If you look for allusions and images that have some durability, your choices will stabilize your piece of writing. (Location 1478)
You will never land smoothly on borrowed vividness. (Location 1487)
Frames of reference are grossly abused by writers and broadcasters of the punch-line school. (Location 1527)
I beg you to keep it as it is for that one reader.” (Location 1585)
“Dear Joel: You are writing, say, about a grizzly bear. No words are forthcoming. For six, seven, ten hours no words have been forthcoming. You are blocked, frustrated, in despair. You are nowhere, and that’s where you’ve been getting. What do you do? You write, ‘Dear Mother.’ And then you tell your mother about the block, the frustration, the ineptitude, the despair. You insist that you are not cut out to do this kind of work. You whine. You whimper. You outline your problem, and 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 say the bear prefers to lie down and rest. The bear rests fourteen hours a day. And you go on like that as long as you can. And then you go back and delete the ‘Dear Mother’ and all the whimpering and whining, and just keep the bear.” (Location 1953)
If you lack confidence in setting one word after another and sense that you are stuck in a place from which you will never be set free, if you feel sure that you will never make it and were not cut out to do this, if your prose seems stillborn and you completely lack confidence, you must be a writer. (Location 1960)
First drafts are slow and develop clumsily because every sentence affects not only those before it but also those that follow. (Location 1970)
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. (Location 1972)
The way to do a piece of writing is three or four times over, never once. (Location 1979)
the hardest part comes first, getting something—anything—out in front of me. (Location 1980)
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. (Location 1986)
the essence of the process is revision. (Location 1989)
practice taking shots at it. (Location 2012)
Then I went back to my own writing, my own inability to get going until five in the afternoon, my animal sense of being hunted, my resemblance to the sand of Gibraltar. (Location 2015)
After reading the second draft aloud, and going through the piece for the third time (removing the tin horns and radio static that I heard while reading), I enclose words and phrases in pencilled boxes for Draft No. 4. (Location 2019)
I go searching for replacements for the words in the boxes. (Location 2021)
You draw a box not only around any word that does not seem quite right but also around words that fulfill their assignment but seem to present an opportunity. (Location 2025)
thesauruses are useful things, but they don’t talk about the words they list. They are also dangerous. They can lead you to choose a polysyllabic and fuzzy word when a simple and clear one is better. (Location 2043)
The value of a thesaurus is in the assistance it can give you in finding the best possible word for the mission that the word is supposed to fulfill. (Location 2045)
Your destination is the dictionary. (Location 2047)
if you are introducing something, introduce it. Don’t get artistic with the definite article. (Location 2118)
achieve an intent in the clearest possible way. (Location 2125)
Words are too easy to play on. (Location 2216)
Writing is selection. Just to start a piece of writing you have to choose one word and only one from more than a million in the language. (Location 2257)
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. (Location 2259)
Ideally, a piece of writing should grow to whatever length is sustained by its selected material—that much and no more. (Location 2261)
I jot down everything that strikes me as having any potentiality whatever to be useful in the future composition, and since I am learning on the job and don’t know what the piece will be like, I scoop up, say, ten times as much stuff as I’ll ultimately use. (Location 2285)
“Anything you know you can eliminate and it only strengthens your iceberg.” (Location 2305)
To cause a reader to see in her mind’s eye an entire autumnal landscape, for example, a writer needs to deliver only a few words and images—such as corn shocks, pheasants, and an early frost. The creative writer leaves white space between chapters or segments of chapters. (Location 2313)
Creative nonfiction is not making something up but making the most of what you have. (Location 2324)
greening was a craft in itself—studying your completed and approved product, your “finished” piece, to see what could be left out. (Location 2338)
The idea is to remove words in such a manner that no one would notice that anything has been removed. (Location 2344)
To prepare a profile of an individual, the reporting endeavor looks something like this: 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. (Location 51)
For something like three weeks, I kept thinking about that combination and its possibilities, and then decided to attempt a double portrait, letting the match itself contain and structure the story. (Location 66)
Why choose that one over all other concurrent possibilities? Why does someone whose interest is to write about real people and real places choose certain people, certain places? For nonfiction projects, ideas are everywhere. They just go by in a ceaseless stream. Since you may take a month, or ten months, or several years to turn one idea into a piece of writing, what governs the choice? (Location 77)
Out the back door and under the big ash was a picnic table. At the end of summer, 1966, I lay down on it for nearly two weeks, staring up into branches and leaves, fighting fear and panic, because I had no idea where or how to begin a piece of writing for The New Yorker. (Location 202)
Note: Wat een opening van edn hoofdstuk!
(Location 204)
Note: Simpel + complex
I had assembled enough material to fill a silo, and now I had no idea what to do with it. The piece would ultimately consist of some five thousand sentences, but for those two weeks I couldn’t write even one. If I was blocked by fear, I was also stymied by inexperience. (Location 208)
The idea was to build some form of blueprint before working it out in sentences and paragraphs. (Location 224)
You would think that by then I would have developed some confidence in writing a new story, but I hadn’t, and never would. To lack confidence at the outset seems rational to me. It doesn’t matter that something you’ve done before worked out well. Your last piece is never going to write your next one for you. (Location 234)
After what turned out to be about thirty thousand words, the rest could take care of itself. Obvious as it had not seemed, this organizing principle gave me a sense of a nearly complete structure, and I got off the table. (Location 240)
“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.” (Location 243)
After putting the two cards together, and then constructing around them the rest of the book, all I had to do was write it, and that took more than a year. (Location 294)
We are dealing with a journey in a certain piece of time, and the piece of time can be something more than just a string of numbers. Possibly we can bend it and bring it upon itself, possibly find a structure—a structure that makes sense and is not just clever—that looks like this: (Location 340)
There’s no throat clearing. You are right in the middle of things, and you choose the present tense for its immediacy. (Location 345)
Readers are not supposed to notice the structure. It is meant to be about as visible as someone’s bones. And I hope this structure illustrates what I take to be a basic criterion for all structures: they should not be imposed upon the material. They should arise from within it. (Location 402)
Each of those structures, from the nineteen-sixties and nineteen-seventies, was worked out after copying with a typewriter all notes from notebooks and transcribing the contents of microcassettes. I used an Underwood 5, which had once been a state-of-the-art office typewriter but by 1970 had been outclassed by the I.B.M. Selectric. With the cassettes, I used a Sanyo TRC5200 Memo-Scriber, which was activated with foot pedals, like a sewing machine or a pump organ. The note-typing could take many weeks, but it collected everything in one legible place, and it ran all the raw material in some concentration through the mind. The notes from one to the next frequently had little in common. They jumped from topic to topic, and only in places were sequentially narrative. So I always rolled the platen and left blank space after each item to accommodate the scissors that were fundamental to my advanced methodology. After reading and rereading the typed notes and then developing the structure and then coding the notes accordingly in the margins and then photocopying the whole of it, I would go at the copied set with the scissors, cutting each sheet into slivers of varying size. If the structure had, say, thirty parts, the slivers would end up in thirty piles that would be put into thirty manila folders. (Location 408)
If the contents of the seventh folder were before me, the contents of twenty-nine other folders were out of sight. Every organizational aspect was behind me. The procedure eliminated nearly all distraction and concentrated just the material I had to deal with in a given day or week. It painted me into a corner, yes, but in doing so it freed me to write. (Location 419)
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. (Location 582)
I have often heard writers say that if you have written your lead you have in a sense written half of your story. (Location 597)
All leads—of every variety—should be sound. They should never promise what does not follow. (Location 606)
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. Some leads are much longer than others. I am not talking just about first sentences. I am talking about an integral beginning that sets a scene and implies the dimensions of the story. That might be a few words, a few hundred words. And it might be two thousand words, setting the scene for a story fifty times as long. A lead is good not because it dances, fires cannons, or whistles like a train but because it is absolute to what follows. (Location 607)
Another way to prime the pump is to write by hand. Keep a legal pad, or something like one, and when you are stuck dead at any time—blocked to paralysis by an inability to set one word upon another—get away from the computer, lie down somewhere with pencil and pad, and think it over. This can do wonders at any point in a piece and is especially helpful when you have written nothing at all. Sooner or later something comes to you. Without getting up, you roll over and scribble on the pad. Go on scribbling as long as the words develop. Then get up and copy what you have written into your computer file. (Location 612)
Another mantra, which I still write in chalk on the blackboard, is “A Thousand Details Add Up to One Impression.” It’s actually a quote from Cary Grant. Its implication is that few (if any) details are individually essential, while the details collectively are absolutely essential. (Location 682)
When I am making notes, I throw in a whole lot of things indiscriminately, much more than I’ll ever use, but even so I am selecting. Later, in the writing itself, things get down to the narrowed choices. It’s an utterly subjective situation. I include what interests me and exclude what doesn’t interest me. (Location 686)
People often ask how I know when I’m done—not just when I’ve come to the end, but in all the drafts and revisions and substitutions of one word for another how do I know there is no more to do? When am I done? I just know. I’m lucky that way. What I know is that I can’t do any better; someone else might do better, but that’s all I can do; so I call it done. (Location 739)
Robert Gottlieb replaced William Shawn as the editor of The New Yorker in 1987. If eccentricity was a criterion for the job, Bob was qualified. (Location 743)
Note: Fijne intro
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. (Location 876)
Shawn was the hub of a bicycle wheel and his writers were the spokes. He kept them separate, stiffened, discrete—connected to him but not to one another. (Location 891)
Note: Mooi gebruik metafoor
In discussing a long fact piece, Mr. Shawn would say, often enough, “How do you know?” and “How would you know?” and “How can you possibly know that?” He was saying clearly enough that any nonfiction writer ought always to hold those questions in the forefront of the mind. (Location 953)
Editors are counselors and can do a good deal more for writers in the first-draft stage than at the end of the publishing process. Writers come in two principal categories—those who are overtly insecure and those who are covertly insecure—and they can all use help. The help is spoken and informal, and includes insight, encouragement, and reassurance with regard to a current project. If you have an editor like that, you are, among other things, lucky; and, through time, the longer the two of you are talking, the more helpful the conversation will be. (Location 1027)
If doing nothing can produce a useful reaction, so can the appearance of being dumb. You can develop a distinct advantage by waxing slow of wit. (Location 1125)
If you are listening to speech and at the same time envisioning it in print, you can ask your question again, and again, until the repeated reply will be clear in print. Who is going to care if you seem dumber than a cardboard box? Reporters call that creative bumbling. (Location 1128)
Note: Creative mumbling
Writing is selection. When you are making notes you are forever selecting. I left out more than I put down. (Location 1200)
Students have always asked what I do to prepare for interviews. Candidly, not much. At minimum, though, I think you should do enough preparation to be polite. You would not have wanted to ask Stephen Harper what he did for a living. Before, during, and after an interview, or a series of interviews, do as much reading as the situation impels you to do. In the course of writing, you really find out what you don’t know, and you read in an attempt to get it right. Nonetheless, you get it wrong, especially if you are an innumerate English major and you are writing about science. (Location 1201)
Plenty of people who are willing to talk are not at the same time sensing what the effect of the eventual piece will be. The presence of the open notebook, and the formality of being advised about what is going to happen and where, is not enough. (Location 1213)
Of all the dimensions of the interview relationship, the most significant, for me, has been time. (Location 1219)
I have no technique for asking questions. I just stay there and fade away as I watch people do what they do. (Location 1223)
Once captured, words have to be dealt with. You have to trim them and straighten them to make them transliterate from the fuzziness of speech to the clarity of print. Speech and print are not the same, and a slavish presentation of recorded speech may not be as representative of a speaker as dialogue that has been trimmed and straightened. (Location 1234)
It is possible in managing a quote—not to say manipulating a quote—to present something that is both verbatim and false. (Location 1268)
“Quotations allow the reader to form his or her own conclusions, and to assess the conclusions of the author, instead of relying entirely upon the author’s characterization of her subject.” Hear, hear. 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. (Location 1276)
Indirect discourse is an excellent way to say what someone said and avoid the matter of verbatim quoting altogether. (Location 1279)
Is it wrong to alter a fact in order to improve the rhythm of your prose? I know so, and so do you. If you do that, you are by definition not writing nonfiction. (Location 1286)