Draft No. 4 On the Writing Process- John McPhee

I have always envied the prose and eloquence of The New Yorker. Every piece comes with carefully crafted sentences by writers who are masters at the craft, with commas and periods scrutinized by editors who don’t leave anything to chance lest they come to life and scorn at you for your stumbles. Clearly I am on shaky ground and the words don’t flow with the confidence of a litterateur as I write about writing. In Draft No. 4 On the Writing Process, John McPhee, an instructor at Princeton University shares from his experience as staff writer at the New Yorker and a stint at the Times.

His compilation of eight essays which first appeared in The New Yorker is highly recommended for journalists, columnists and budding writers. There’s so much one can learn from McPhee as he narrates with anecdotes on the writing process and how it is done at magazines of stature and command. Draft No. 4 is no style manual or a practical writing guide but nevertheless it offers us insights on generating ideas, creating form and structure, interviewing styles, writing celebrity profiles, fact checking and how it is done with the thoroughness required of an article appearing in The New Yorker. 

 John McPhee cites an example of a subject matter expert who sued a writer and the magazine for altering a quote attributed to him. The (US) Supreme Court rebuffed the expert ruling that alteration of a verbatim quotation is incorrect wherein it changes the truth but writers and reporters retain the right to clean-up the quotation for grammatical and syntactical infelicities. 

In his essay- Checkpoints, originally published in 2009, long before the birth of the current stream of fact-checkers, truth-seekers and information verifiers, John McPhee elucidates how it was done  before the dawn of  the internet and the Online Oxford English Dictionary. In his words- ” With a drawn sword, the fact-checker stands at the near end of this bridge”.

 “Not only is fiction checked but also cartoon captions and the drawings itself”.  That leaves a lot for us to think about in the age of disinformation, hate-speech and government propaganda.

If The New Yorker were to write a piece on President Biden’s fashion sense and style, it wouldn’t publish one without verifying the number of navy blue suits in his closet.

In his essay Draft No.4, John McPhee handles the subject of writer’s block, the frustration and despair when the ink stops flowing and when words no longer take form. 

John McPhee queries the difference between “further” and “farther” and the plural of “attorney general.” Would that be “attorneys general” or “attorney generals”?

As I struggle to get my punctuation rules for quotations correct and my periods in place, I find solace in McPhee’s words- “ If your prose seems stillborn and you completely lack confidence, you must be a writer”.

 “First drafts are slow and develop clumsily.” Amen to that.