# Draft No. 4 * Author: [John McPhee](https://www.amazon.com/John-McPhee/e/B000AQ4582/ref=dp_byline_cont_ebooks_1) * ASIN: B06X18NHC1 * ISBN: 0374537976 * Reference: [[https://www.amazon.com/dp/B06X18NHC1]] * [Kindle link](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B06X18NHC1) --- I loved Mrs. McKee, and I loved that class. So—a dozen years later, when Mort Sahl was overwhelming me, and I was wallowing in all those notes and files—I thought of her and the structure sheets, and 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.” — location: [243](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B06X18NHC1&location=243)Organize your structure around main thoughts & themes. --- Structure has preoccupied me in every project I have undertaken since, and, like Mrs. McKee, I have hammered it at Princeton writing students across decades of teaching: “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: [258](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B06X18NHC1&location=258) --- Developing a structure is seldom that simple. Almost always there is considerable tension between chronology and theme, and chronology traditionally wins. The narrative wants to move from point to point through time, while topics that have arisen now and again across someone’s life cry out to be collected. — location: [317](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B06X18NHC1&location=317) --- 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: [430](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B06X18NHC1&location=430)Structure should be supportive of the nature of the content. You can't force any structure on any set of ideas or facts. --- A piece of writing has to start somewhere, go somewhere, and sit down when it gets there. — location: [434](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B06X18NHC1&location=434) --- 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: [440](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B06X18NHC1&location=440)This seems like an impossibly boring task now, given all the tools we have. But this patience and repeated viewing of the material also probably helps to do the job properly. --- One after another, in the course of writing, I would spill out the sets of slivers, arrange them ladderlike on a card table, and refer to them as I manipulated the Underwood. If this sounds mechanical, its effect was absolutely the reverse. 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: [446](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B06X18NHC1&location=446)He thought about structure and organization beforehand) and then focused his effort on writing freely within those bounds. --- Writing a successful lead, in other words, can illuminate the structure problem for you and cause you to see the piece whole—to see it conceptually, in various parts, to which you then assign your materials. You find your lead, you build your structure, you are now free to write. — location: [627](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B06X18NHC1&location=627) --- 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: [647](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B06X18NHC1&location=647) --- 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: [1017](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B06X18NHC1&location=1017)Have a strong basis of belief. --- You can develop a distinct advantage by waxing slow of wit. Evidently, you need help. Who is there to help you but the person who is answering your questions? The result is the opposite of the total shutdown that might have occurred if you had come on glib and omniscient. If you don’t seem to get something, the subject will probably help you get it. — location: [1199](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B06X18NHC1&location=1199)Other people want to feel smart and helpful. Act dumb to give them that feeling and they will give you mere info. --- Don’t assume that everyone on earth has seen every movie you have seen. — location: [1573](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B06X18NHC1&location=1573)Know who you are writing for, and what understanding of the world they have. --- Frames of reference are like the constellation of lights, some of them blinking, on an airliner descending toward an airport at night. You see the lights. They imply a structure you can’t see. Inside that frame of reference—those descending lights—is a big airplane with its flaps down expecting a runway. — location: [1581](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B06X18NHC1&location=1581) --- Frank wrote that he was wondering if all of us are losing what he felicitously called our “collective vocabulary.” He asked, “Are common points of reference dwindling? Has the personal niche supplanted the public square?” — location: [1637](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B06X18NHC1&location=1637)Proliferation of books, movies, pop culture, music, and interests diminishes the common ground of mutual interest and frames of reference. --- In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed—but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock. — location: [1894](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B06X18NHC1&location=1894)This is an interesting quote, maybe useable in the future. --- 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: [2087](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B06X18NHC1&location=2087)He suggests just getting some words to paper about your topic and what you want to write. Telling someone else about your troubles primes your mind for narrating. What works for me often is to talk to someone, get thee to ask questions, and write down later what I said during conversations You just need to have some content to build on. Things you need to say or talk about, and then how to connect those facts & ideas, and then developing the writing. It's an incremental process. --- First drafts are slow and develop clumsily because every sentence affects not only those before it but also those that follow. The first draft of my book on California geology took two gloomy years; the second, third, and fourth drafts took about six months altogether. 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: [2104](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B06X18NHC1&location=2104) --- “Dear Jenny: The way to do a piece of writing is three or four times over, never once. For me, the hardest part comes first, getting something—anything—out in front of me. Sometimes in a nervous frenzy I just fling words as if I were flinging mud at a wall. Blurt out, heave out, babble out something—anything—as a first draft. With that, you have achieved a sort of nucleus. Then, as you work it over and alter it, you begin to shape sentences that score higher with the ear and eye. Edit it again—top to bottom. The chances are that about now you’ll be seeing something that you are sort of eager for others to see. And all that takes time. What I have left out is the interstitial time. You finish that first awful blurting, and then you put the thing aside. You get in your car and drive home. On the way, your mind is still knitting at the words. You think of a better way to say something, a good phrase to correct a certain problem. Without the drafted version—if it did not exist—you obviously would not be thinking of things that would improve it. In short, 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. Until it exists, writing has not really begun.” — location: [2114](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B06X18NHC1&location=2114)This is exactly my experience as well. You need a starting point. Then you progress incrementally. Despair during writing comes from not making 'fast enough' progress based on your own high expectations. --- The developing writer reacts to excellence as it is discovered—wherever and whenever—and of course does some imitating (unavoidably) in the process of drawing from the admired fabric things to make one’s own. Rapidly, the components of imitation fade. What remains is a new element in your own voice, which is not in any way an imitation. Your manner as a writer takes form in this way, a fragment at a time. — location: [2144](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B06X18NHC1&location=2144) --- 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. While the word inside the box may be perfectly O.K., there is likely to be an even better word for this situation, a word right smack on the button, and why don’t you try to find such a word? If none occurs, don’t linger; keep reading and drawing boxes, and later revisit them one by one. — location: [2162](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B06X18NHC1&location=2162)This is a practice that has been helpful for me to more precisely convey my thoughts. --- The value of a thesaurus is not to make a writer seem to have a vast vocabulary of recondite words. 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: [2182](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B06X18NHC1&location=2182) --- I was scarcely eighteen, and already collecting rejection slips, when I heard or read about a twenty-two-year-old Vassar graduate named Eleanor Gould, who, in 1925, bought a copy of the brand-new New Yorker, read it, and then reread it with a blue pencil in her hand. When she finished, the magazine was a mottled blue on every page—a circled embarrassment of dangling modifiers, conflicting pronouns, absent commas, and over-all grammatical hash. She mailed the marked-up copy to Harold Ross, the founding editor, and Ross was said to have bellowed. What he bellowed was “Find this bitch and hire her!” — location: [2246](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B06X18NHC1&location=2246)Interesting anecdote on how adding value, and doing things for others that they can't or won't do, is what makes someone professionaly desirable. --- Writing is selection. From the first word of the first sentence in an actual composition, the writer is choosing, selecting, and deciding (most importantly) what to leave out. — location: [2443](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B06X18NHC1&location=2443) --- Creative nonfiction is not making something up but making the most of what you have. — location: [2487](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B06X18NHC1&location=2487) --- The greening I did in Time Edit convinced me that just about any piece I write could be improved if, when it was supposedly ready to hand in, I looked in the mirror and said sternly to myself “Green fourteen” or “Green eight.” — location: [2529](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B06X18NHC1&location=2529)There is always something that can be cut while the story remains true to itself often, cutting lines & words will improve the story. It's a good practice to cultivate. --- in the words of the literary critic Harold Bloom, writing on Shakespeare: “Increasingly in his work, what he leaves out becomes much more important than what he puts in, and so he takes literature beyond its limits.” — location: [2542](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B06X18NHC1&location=2542)