Draft No. 4 Hardcover – 13 Oct. 2017

Very disappointing collection of reprints, most of which I had read before. I was hoping for a more sustained discussion of the craft of creative non-fiction (of which McPhee is an absolute master), but this was rather bitty "hints and tips", mostly too specific to McPhee's own style to be really useful, and bits of autobiography (which were fine, but I'd read them before).

It has certainly motivated me to work harder.Gather a lot more relevant information to do even a small piece of factual writing.It amazed and inspired me to read how much time and effort great magazines like Time and The New Yorker invest in checking the facts before a piece is allowed to be published.

Tell and show - McPhee's experience on display on every page. Just the Burton and Eisenhower anecdotes are worth the entry fee.

outstanding review of a successful lifetime's work at writing non-fiction. Well worth a careful read

What to say and what not to say? (That will make more sense if you read this book.) A very readable insight into a lifetime of writing.

I have read many of John McPhee's previously published books and consider him to be among the finest writers of non-fiction. You can thus understand my excitement when warning about and then reading his latest, Draft No. 4. It was not what I expected, Rather than a narrative of linear explanation with lists of dos and don'ts , it is multi-dimensional as is the writing process itself. Every human life is a process, best viewed as a journey of personal growth. McPhee shares much of his.Of special interest to me is what McPhee has to say about the importance of structure. He observes, "Readers are not supposed to notice the structure. It is meant to be 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 on the material. They should arise from within it."Yes, a writer needs the skills and perspective of an architect but there are other stages of the process that must first be completed. The initial question to be addressed is "What will I write about?," then others: "What interests me?," "What information do I need?," and "How and where can can I obtain it?""Actually, the essence of the process is revision." This book no doubt is the result of rigorous and at time frustrating drafts, as do all other works of art. Consider this observation McPhee shares, expressed by Michelangelo: "I'm just taking away what doesn't belong there."Since my childhood, books have been "magic carpets" that have transported to me to people, places, and events throughout human history. To the plains of Troy, for example, and to Christmas in Charles Dickens' London. I have also followed Alice down a rabbit hole, wished I had a seat belt when riding along with Mr. Toad, and wept when Charlotte died.That's why another of the several other dozen passages that caught my eye:"I once made a list of all the pieces I had written in maybe twenty or thirty years, and then put a check mark beside each one whose subject related to things I had been interested in before I went to college. I had checked more than ninety percent."Curious, I made a list of what has been of greatest interest to me during the years since childhood and I have been able to think of only a few that cannot be traced back to the years before I enrolled in college. That said, my memory is not what it once was so John McPhee's 90% probably applies to me, also.This book really is about the writing process...and just about everything else worth caring about.

I cannot review this as it was a gift for someone else

For the first 38% of the book (I read on a Kindle) I was blessing my lucky stars that I didn't go to Princeton and have McPhee as a tutor - until...suddenly I became totally involved. I think I'll have to read it again.

I love McPhee's writing and you always learn something.

Excellent

A scollery type hand book

As a High School student in Casper, Wyoming, 65 years ago, I had to write some essays which included drawing up a formal outline first and then letting the outline direct the writing process. I never could do that. I had to write first and then write the outline last. I got John McPhee's book "Draft No. 4. WOW, he talks about how to organize your work. His method is far superior to any that I have seen. This is the advice from the best writer and is what I should have been doing all along. The whole book is aimed at making writing easy and fun. The book is superb, but has ONE MAJOR FLAW. This book is 65 years too late.Don't tell McPhee this, but I am writing a SPEECH using his writing book as guidance. It makes the creative process fun.

This is a superbly written guide to writing creative non-fiction. It is also an entertaining memoir of McPhee's writing life, especially for The New Yorker magazine. Their are eight chapters, each formerly published in The New Yorker, on topics like Structure, Frame of Reference, and Omission, Many of these contain useful technical advice about writing creative non-fiction. All eight chapters contain interesting, and often humorous, personal anecdotes and observations. He even offers a little encouragement to writers trying to write.The book is 192 pages long and I wish it had been twice as long just so that I could have lingered in McPhee's enjoyable company. Fortunately he has published many other books that I will start re-reading now. Highly Recommended!

If you want to learn about a subject and how to master it, why not learn from someone at the top of their profession? John McPhee is a professor of journalism at Princeton, writes for The New Yorker and has published thirty books. As a guide to the writing process I found Draft No. 4 to be insightful, illuminating (without being pedantic) and helpful. McPhee’s writes with humility and humor without getting up on a high horse. I have written two non-fiction books and am looking to write more and his book has motivated me to pursue my projects with more vigor. I thought as a new writer that I was in a minority being overcome with self-doubt. McPhee explains that (in his view) real writers are those that doubt themselves and are often discouraged and in a state of despair. He points out that if you lack confidence and struggle with writing that you must be a real writer, and conversely if you describe yourself as someone who “loves to write,” that you are probably delusional. I’m not sure if he intended this to be humorous or not but I found it to ring true, (although I both love to write and struggle.)The subtitle of the book reflects the contents more accurately, “On the Writing Process,” although Draft No. 4 is catchier and refers to his suggested ratio of writing to editing, that is, his advice to get something down on paper and then keep editing. He states that he has a finished product after his fourth draft, although I normally do quite a few more revisions. In spots the book has a little bit of an inside baseball feel, although delightfully so if you love the written word, as he gives insights into what makes The New Yorker such an esteemed publication and the neverending tussle between a writer and copy editor.For me, the lasting parts of the book are the truisms that he identifies: even though you may write for only 2-3 hours a day, your mind is working 24 hours a day: while you are sleeping, driving, and puttering around your subconscious mind is looking for words or phrases to help your prose. Also, how he highlights or brackets words that aren’t exactly right and then goes back during editing and searches for more perfect words and for clarity. As he says, “. . . there is elegance in the less ambiguous way.” Draft No. 4 takes its place on my bookshelf next to my dictionary, Strunk & White, the Chicago Manual of Style and a thesaurus.Writing is a solitary and often lonely process and McPhee lets you know that you’ve got company. His book feels borderline illicit, like he is taking some of the mystery out of the writing process and he (thankfully) lets you in on some of the secrets. I wish it were longer than 192 pages, I could have devoured more.

Shortly after I started my first editorial job (as opposed to writing only), my boss gave me a copy of Blundell's _The Art and Craft of Feature Writing_. (I'm still grateful, Peter.) Ever since, Blundell's book has been on my short list of most-useful books for writers because of its practicality and encouragement. As Blundell pointed out, a good feature writer can make ANY subject interesting -- even, say, oranges, about which (Blundell pointed out) John McPhee wrote an entire book.Now, Blundell's #1 spot on my writer's bookshelf has been replaced by McPhee's own book about the writing process. (Though really, get both.)McPhee is a brilliant writer -- as evidenced by his ability to keep a reader's attention all the way through a 60,000-word New Yorker article, and to make those readers keep turning pages on any number of non-fiction books. He also is a superb instructor. The book covers such topics as structure, progression (in what order you present events), dealing with editors, elicitation (such as how to take notes while the source is staring at you; "display your notebook as if it were a fishing license," he suggests), frames of reference, and fact checking. Nobody taught me these things; I had to learn all of them from experience. Now you don't have to.Oh my, that sounds like a college course (and I guess it is, since McPhee has a long professorship at Princeton). But this is fun, engaging, full of "oh wow that's a good idea" practicalities.I wish I had a buck for every time I said, "McPhee captured that idea so much better than I ever could." Case in point: "The lead -- like the title -- should be a flashlight that shines down into the story. A lead is a promise." Or the advice that, when you can't find the end of a piece, look back upstream. "Run your eye up the page and the page before that. You may see that your best ending is somewhere in there, that you were finished before you thought you were." (As an editor with nearly 20 years of experience, now, I call affirm that some authors keep writing well after they're done. Fortunately they have me and my red pen.)McPhee has plenty of praise for the editors who guided him and anecdotes that made me smile. Shawn breaking in new writers, "but not exactly like a horse, more like a baseball mitt." The idea that "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." The copy editor and fact checker in the urgency of an issue closing including McPhee's article about geology, leading to him commenting, "so many rocks were flying around in my head that I would have believed Sara if she had told me that limestone is the pit of a fruit." I said aloud to the book: I want to be the kind of editor who is worthy of this kind of admiration and appreciation. (I have a long way to go.)Can you tell I love this book? I really do.

John McPhee has been writing, and teaching writing, for decades. He ranks among the most capable and experienced writers in the world and richly deserves all the accolades heaped upon him. He also, in my experience, ranks among those rare and cherished correspondents who squeaks when squoken to: write to him, rationally, and this busy man answers, kindly.His new book, the most recent of more than thirty, is a primer on writing well, based significantly on the writing course he has been teaching at Princeton for many years. It includes scores of fascinating and insightful anecdotes based on his brave globe-trotting work in writing his signature long nonfiction, comprising articles (some for Time, mostly for The New Yorker) that were turned into books because of their length. He divides the work into logical sections and only his treatment of editing and final assembly, in this era of modern word processing, strikes a discordant note: 1980s technology has been far transcended in speed, cost and convenience.He delves deeply into the thorny fact-checking issue and here he scores brilliantly. The New Yorker devotes intense effort in this vital area. But McPhee fails the reader in one significant area of publication, which he claims undertakes scrupulous fact checking: The Atlantic. I can be quite specific. The Atlantic published a scathing review by the late Christopher Hitchens of Lord Jenkins’ biography of Winston Churchill. Hitchens, not always encumbered by facts, claimed, among other things, that Germany had no intention of invading England in the late 1930s and early 1940s. In fact (“fact checking”) Hitler had created and funded Operation Sea Lion for just this purpose, and photoreconnaissance by British PRU (Photo Reconnaissance Unit) Spitfires showed more than 1,500 invasion vessels in the ports of Northern France. The Atlantic, advised of this gross factual error, did not deign even to reply, though the facts were available in scores of reliable places. You want to believe them today?The polished elegance of McPhee’s prose results from meticulous attention to detail, down to the simplest individual word usage. Just the process of reading this book will give any writer the true sense of verbal mastery, clarity of expression and the essential need to examine every word we write. McPhee is the eternal master and we are all his students.

My expectation for this book, was to learn unique tips for the craft of writing from a prolific well-known writer. Instead it is a book on how he approaches a topic to write, how he connected his researched points to come up with a finished piece, and the people he met along the way. It was like getting into his head which is fine, but it wasn't what I had anticipated.

I've read John McPhee since coming to Nashville in 1985. He doesn't do fiction, and that's fine with me. But he does write very creatively and with lots of humor. I wait patiently for each new piece to show up, most often in The New Yorker. This Draft No. 4: On the Writing Process is like turning on the light and making the pathway clear. I love the book. I always fear the next one will be his last one. If this is true THIS is the book to treasure along with the other 25 he has inscribed for me. You are the BEST, Mr. McPhee!

My guess is that this book may be the closest we'll ever come to its author's own memoir. For those awestruck by John McPhee's talent in nonfiction, that is a delight. I don't mean to suggest that "Draft No. 4" is an autobiography. It is not. Neither, however, is it exactly what its subtitle suggests: a guide to writing nonfiction—despite the fact that the author addresses that subject with much common sense and insight, gleaned from decades of investigative reporting. The best analogy I can summon for this book's subject and approach is one that McPhee published in 1982: "The Survival of the Bark Canoe." Like that lovely volume, "Draft No. 4" introduces you to an unassuming yet colorful professional, describes some of his adventures in his native habitat, and tells you a lot you never knew about the arduous yet satisfying art of making something durable. In 1982 the subject was Henri Vaillancourt of Greenville, New Hampshire; his craft, building a birch-bark canoe from scratch, then navigating rivers in the Maine woods. In 2017 the subject is John McPhee of Princeton, New Jersey; his craft, writing durable essays while negotiating the tumults of "Time" and especially "The New Yorker," ca. 1960–2000. Here McPhee does what he has resolutely avoided in virtually all his other publications to date: he writes about himself as a writer and passes on some of what he has learned.The chapters I was most eager to dive into, on "Progression" and "Structure," left me dazed. McPhee is a master carpenter. I couldn't wait to listen to him explain his craft. What may come across vividly in his classroom lectures seemed to me flat and—for a writer so clear—surprisingly confused. Accompanying his comments are diagrams that, at least on a first and even second inspection, I couldn't make heads or tails of. One, on p. 58, seems to depict maneuvers of a Canadian football team with backfield in motion.The remaining chapters are great fun: "Editors & Publisher" (although I wonder if a William Shawn or Roger Straus so indulgent exists in today's world), "Elicitation" of a subject's life and work (an anecdotal hodgepodge whose primary takeaways are to "record faithfully" and "be persistent"); "Frame of Reference" (a reminder of the ephemerality of many cultural touchstones); "Checkpoints" (the unending quest for accuracy—but, again, who other than "New Yorker" staff writers have access to to such relentless fact-checkers?); "Draft No. 4" (the terror and satisfaction attending the hard work of drafting); and "Omission" (the art of paring prose, fostering a more creative reader).Every book by McPhee contains polished gems. His use of metaphor, a subject he never discusses, is marvelous: the tiers of a fisherman's tackle-box become an organ's keyboards; opened laptops are steaming clamshells; a certain publisher's words wear spats. But do not mistake this for a simple how-to manual. It's the difference between attending classroom lectures on what makes automobiles run and raising the hood, dismantling the parts, examining their functions, then reassembling everything. If I really want to understand how McPhee moves a story forward, I should do the hard work of turning to a chapter of any of his books, diagram it, analyze its components, then put it all back together.Finally, only John McPhee writes like John McPhee. Observe a master at work. Then find your own voice and have at it.

John McPhee's writing is in a category by itself. He invented a style, an approach, a discipline which none can duplicate and this book explains why: the man is a disciplined,undaunted force of rich reporting. The reader sees behind what she has read out front. You imagine the great catalogue of 3 X 5 cards and the research/ relationships they represent. Most interesting to me was where he allowed himself to follow a vein, a quirky direction, a phrase that was unexpected and personal: the story would not have taken this direction in other hands. How did he find and borrow in to certain characters whom no one else would find? For me, McPhee's latest pieces in the New Yorker have been a bit ponderous and permissive, an old man's going on. This is not a How To for most writers. It is a How To for how to be John McPhee and do what he has done. But if you intend to write long, serious, heavily researched and richly detailed explorations, there is no other Master than McPhee and consequently this book.

Admirers of John McPhee -- that is, admirers of great writing and reporting -- will love "Draft No. 4." McPhee takes you deep inside his technique. Yes, writing is a craft, not some form of genius. It requires relentless hard work."Draft No. 4" is especially strong on how McPhee structures his pieces. At times, it can get random. Should he focus on one character? Two? Three? More? Once he makes that decision, the real work begins -- finding the subjects that fit the framework. This might sound backward, and in a way it is. But McPhee has a lifetime project to understand the craft and structure of narrative.More than anything else, McPhee is a great reporter. He dugs deep into his subjects. He pouts himself at the edge of every story, where he can observe people and their characters and encounters. Even the most mundane events can be fodder for understanding the story.

John McPhee is an amazing writer, and I was disappointed by this book. His style is there but not so sharp as 'other of his work I've read. for content, I guess i was expecting more guidance on writing. Quickly, I realized his approach is more to show by example rather than by prescription. And the examples are from John McPhee's own experience as a writer, so the book is as much autobiographical as anything, and more than a bit of patting himself on the back. I might try a second read of this book, and I will definitely continue to read his work because I enjoy it so much.