Draft No. 4: On the Writing Process
Written by John McPhee
Narrated by John McPhee
4/5
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About this audiobook
Draft No. 4 is a master class on the writer’s craft. In a series of playful, expertly wrought essays, John McPhee shares insights he has gathered over his career and has refined while teaching at Princeton University, where he has nurtured some of the most esteemed writers of recent decades. McPhee offers definitive guidance in the decisions regarding arrangement, diction, and tone that shape nonfiction pieces, and he presents extracts from his work, subjecting them to wry scrutiny. In one essay, he considers the delicate art of getting sources to tell you what they might not otherwise reveal. In another, he discusses how to use flashback to place a bear encounter in a travel narrative, while observing that “readers are not supposed to notice the structure. It is meant to be about as visible as someone’s bones.” The result is a vivid depiction of the writing process, from reporting to drafting to revising—and revising, and revising.
Draft No. 4 is enriched by multiple diagrams and by personal anecdotes and charming reflections on the life of a writer. McPhee describes his enduring relationships with The New Yorker and Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and recalls his early years at Time magazine. Throughout, Draft No. 4 is enlivened by his keen sense of writing as a way of being in the world.
John McPhee
John McPhee was born in Princeton, New Jersey, and was educated at Princeton University and Cambridge University. His writing career began at Time magazine and led to his long association with The New Yorker, where he has been a staff writer since 1965. Also in 1965, he published his first book, A Sense of Where You Are, with Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and in the years since, he has written over 30 books, including Oranges (1967), Coming into the Country (1977), The Control of Nature (1989), The Founding Fish (2002), Uncommon Carriers (2007), and Silk Parachute (2011). Encounters with the Archdruid (1972) and The Curve of Binding Energy (1974) were nominated for National Book Awards in the category of science. McPhee received the Award in Literature from the Academy of Arts and Letters in 1977. In 1999, he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Annals of the Former World. He lives in Princeton, New Jersey.
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Reviews for Draft No. 4
91 ratings10 reviews
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Incredible and insightful both as a road map to writing but also as an entertaining discussion on the authors own works.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5When you see a movie this good you'll want to see the director's cut to see the outtakes.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5John McPhee, always a great writer, gives us a how to write book hidden in a memoir.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Not a book on how to write but a book about John McPhee's writing and teaching career, I loved his chapter on revision. He writes four drafts for everything he writes, the first takes the longest the fourth goes much quicker that's how the book got it's title. Another interesting essay in the book is about copy checking, if that was done consistently today across the internet maybe we wouldn't have fake news. I loved the fact checking part about the Japanese bomb balloons that shut down the reactor used to create the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5McPhee sure knows how to compose a sentence. His advice and stories about writing are as entertaining as they are insightful.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5I admire John McPhee and was eager to take in his thoughts on the writing process. Many of the ruminations here ring true, for sure, but overall I experienced this book as an insider's guide to writing for the New Yorker.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Always a delight to read McPhee. From my initial exposure to his writing, I assumed he was a geologist, but actually a nonfiction writer that makes it all interesting. In this series of previously published essays he discusses what a nonfiction writer considers while writing, the unseen structure, what to leave out. He acknowledges those who have assisted him in his craft and highlights areas of difficulty. "Creative nonfiction is not making something up but making the most of what you have.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5This is a perfectly fine book that, while containing some interesting bits and pieces, doesn’t really rise above the status of anything more than just okayThe purpose of the book is to tell about McPhee’s writing process. It is pulled together from essays that appeared in The New Yorker and hangs on the idea that McPhee is sharing his writing process. Yes, it does that, including some of the approaches he uses in his college writing courses. But, insights to be gleaned from these descriptions are few and far between.In reality, the book is a mix of writing tips, stories about working for The New Yorker, and significant excerpts from McPhee’s writing. In other words, it is a mish-mash of ideas and concepts, tied together under the guise of being about writing. In the process, it does not accomplish any of the things it seems to want to accomplish.It’s not that I didn’t glean a couple of good ideas about writing. And some of the stories were interesting. But, even within each of the essays, the theme seemed to wander to the point where, occasionally, I couldn’t really tell the point that was meant to be made.Compare this to Stephen King’s On Writing. (Probably an unfair comparison, but I’ll go there anyway.) King told the story of his life and how it led him to be a writer. Then he provided a wealth of information on being a writer. The two gelled into an excellent book. This book…not so excellent. It is not a waste of time. As I noted, I did get a few valuable pieces of information. But neither is it a grab it, devour it, and live to be greater investment.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5John McPhee is a master at his craft, which is what people call creative non-fiction. McPhee was creative about his non-fiction writing much before the phrase came into vogue. McPhee’s body of work is respected as well as enjoyed, a pretty rare feat for non-fiction writers, as the nature of non-fiction is imbued with the ethos of “Just the facts”. What makes McPhee stand out is the depth of his exploration as well as the breadth of his curiosity on his topic at hand.This book is a compendium of eight essays that he had written for The New Yorker magazine. They are all essays on writing, along with a good bit of storytelling, McPhee storytelling. They can be read as standalone essays or they can be read sequentially. I read it sequentially.The structure of each essay is peculiarly McPhees, and as he explains how he comes to his structures I was suitably blown away by the amount of planning and the depth of preparation he does with his writing. It is akin to the plotting of a complex novel, each move is plotted and planned to give maximum effect to the reader. Of course, as he is describing the pains that he resorts to in order to create this structure and order, he gives us a glimpse into the his mind and how it is capable of such excellence. This is not to say that this book is devoid of humor and fascination. McPhee has been at this for a long time and he tells his New Yorker stories with great relish. He talks about his interactions with gigantic New Yorker characters, like William Shawn, Robert Bingham, and Robert Gottlieb. He speaks of people he’d interviewed: Richard Burton, Elizabeth taylor, Jackie Gleason, and others. But those stories, while exciting and beguiling since they were about people we had known about, pales in comparison with his stories about McPhee’s people, geologists, ichthyologists, naturalists, people who are quietly good at what they do and they do so with a strong sense of purpose, people who are not ostentatious but are exceptional in their execution. The fact that he uses them as examples of how he writes speaks volumes about the people and subjects that are the most interesting to him, and in turn to us.This is by no means a how to book for writing acolytes. This is a memoir of sorts, of a great writer as he speaks of his craft, and of his passion. He does lay out some well-worn paths that he had taken towards building his work habits but it is so uniquely his that it just serves as a point of discussion and inspiration for the rest of us. The most salient part is that he does so in his own inimitable style.The bonus that came with this reading experience is the discovery of the meaning of the word sprezzatura. In many ways, McPhee showed thrown the book that even though it may seem like he undertakes his life’s work with great sprezzatura, the actual work is never done that way.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5You might imagine that, as someone who writes all day, and therefore thinks about writing most of the day, I might not want to spend my off hours thinking about writing more. But you'd be wrong. I really like reading books on craft, especially if they're crafty themselves, and this absolutely qualifies. I love McPhee's writing, no matter how arcane his subjects are—he manages to be both playful and precise, with the one dependent on the other. It makes me happy as both a reader and a writer, and I love how he talks about it here, addressing both of those aspects and a few other things besides. I actually picked up a few tips along the way, too, which is always a welcome side effect of reading writers on writing.Full disclosure: McPhee came and talked to my sixth-grade class about essay writing, which I'm pretty sure I hadn't known was an actual thing until he said so, but I fell in love with the idea, as he presented it, right away. And here I am 53 years later still in love with it, so I guess I can blame him for all this thinking about writing in the first place.