John McPhee Writing Style

Levels of the Game covers one tennis match. Arthur Ashe serves to Clark Graebner in the semifinal at Forest Hills, and between points McPhee cuts away to how each man was raised and coached and taught to price risk, so that by the time the match turns you read the two swings as arguments about two childhoods. Nothing in it is invented. The order is the invention.

He has described the method himself, in essays collected as Draft No. 4. He types his notes, prints them, cuts the printout into strips with scissors, and files each strip under the component it belongs to, one folder per strand, which means the material arrives sorted into parts before a paragraph exists. Then he draws the shape on paper. The first part of Coming into the Country is drawn as a circle, because the river trip opens at a moment the narrative later comes back to, and the reader closes the loop without being told there was one.

Imitators take the voice, which is the wrong end. Dry, exact, unhurried. That tone is what is left over after the hard decision, and the hard decision was which of several possible orders would make a reader want the next block of geology or law or freight. Choose wrong and the sentences cannot rescue it.

Writing advice online is mostly about sentences, because a sentence fits in a post. The problem above the sentence is McPhee's, and it belongs to anyone keeping a reader inside a subject the reader did not choose. Bryson solves it by walking a route you could already picture, a road, a coastline, a train line. McPhee draws the route first and then walks it.

Component folders

Every fragment of reporting gets a label naming the strand it belongs to, and the labels become the parts list for the piece. What this solves is the drafting problem where you write and search at once, a state in which structure quietly gets negotiated against whatever is easiest to reach. Sorting first makes the parts visible as quantities. You can see that the history strand is thin and the process strand is bloated before you have written a word about either, and you can go back for more instead of covering a hole with prose. The cost is that it front-loads the tedium onto the least enjoyable day of the job.

The drawn structure

The diagram is a picture of the reader's route, drawn before any drafting and argued with on paper until it holds. Its value is that a shape can be wrong in a way a list cannot, so you can look at a line that doubles back on itself and see immediately that you are explaining the same thing twice from different angles. It also makes the delay visible. If the payoff sits at the far right of the drawing and the reader has been given no reason to walk that far, the drawing has told you before the draft did. Hard part: the shape has to come out of the material rather than off a shelf, and a template applied to reporting it does not fit produces a piece that feels arranged.

The load-bearing object

One physical thing is chosen to stand for a system, and the system is then explained through what the thing does. A road cut on a highway is a page of stratigraphy you can pull over and look at. A control structure on a levee is the entire argument between a river and an engineering corps, compressed into concrete you could photograph. The reason this works is that a reader will accept an inference they drew themselves and resist the same inference handed over as a claim. Choosing badly is the failure mode, and the object that is merely picturesque will sit in the paragraph doing nothing while the explanation goes on around it.

Elicitation, not interrogation

The interview technique is to stay long enough that the subject forgets to perform and starts working. He asks questions that let an expert correct him, comes back a second and third time, and takes down the vocabulary as well as the answers, because the words a trade uses for its own tools are half the characterisation. Ask a specialist what they think and you get a position. Ask them what they did last Tuesday and how they decided, and you get a mind. The quotes that survive into the piece tend to be the ones that show a person reasoning under a constraint, which is why they can carry explanation instead of interrupting it.

Omission as a positive act

Cutting is treated as part of writing rather than as damage control, and the material left out is expected to leave a shape behind. A piece that has been cut well reads as if the writer knew a great deal more than he told you, and that impression is doing real work, since it is what lets a short passage carry a large subject. The discipline is to cut whole functions instead of trimming words. If two sections both supply background, one of them goes entirely rather than getting trimmed. What makes this hard is that the strongest thing you cut is usually the thing you reported hardest for.

The fourth draft

The last pass is a vocabulary pass, and it gets done with a dictionary open on the desk rather than a thesaurus. He goes through the finished draft putting a box around any word that is close to right, then works on the boxed words one at a time until each is the word rather than a near neighbour of it. What this fixes is the slow leak of precision that a reader feels as vagueness and cannot locate in any one sentence. It only works last. Run it early and you will spend an afternoon perfecting a paragraph that the structural pass is about to delete, which is why the sequence of the drafts matters as much as the sequence of the parts.

The braid

Two or more strands run in parallel and each one is cut into at the moment the other needs it. Levels of the Game is the pure case, one match in real time with two biographies laid into the gaps between points, and the effect is that neither strand has to carry the piece alone. The braid also solves a pacing problem that plain exposition cannot. A reader who would put down four pages of background will take the same background in six pieces, each one arriving as the answer to something they were already wondering about. Vargas Llosa's name for the general technique is communicating vessels, and his condition is the one worth remembering: proximity is not enough, the strands have to change each other.

The set piece against an opponent

Instead of arguing a position, he puts the people who hold opposing positions in the same place and reports what happens. Encounters with the Archdruid is three of these in a row, the same conservationist walked up a mountain by a mining geologist, taken round an island by a resort developer, and floated down a canyon by the man who builds dams. No verdict has to be handed down. Terrain does the work an editorial would have done, since each man's argument gets tested by the ground he is standing on, and the reader watches two competent people fail to convince each other. The device costs a great deal in reporting and almost nothing in prose.

The technical noun, unglossed

He will use the right word for the thing, then let the sentence around it do the work of a definition. A geologist's vocabulary arrives intact in Basin and Range, and the reader is not handed a definition, only enough context to keep moving, so the word stays exact and the paragraph stays fast. The gain is trust. A reader can tell the difference between a writer who knows the term and a writer who has translated it into something vaguer for their benefit, and the second one is harder to believe about anything else. The risk is obvious enough. One noun too many and the paragraph closes over the reader's head, which is why the technique needs the concrete object nearby, holding the door open.

The withheld explanation

The information a reader most wants is the information he holds back longest. A section will run for pages inside a process before naming the principle that governs it, so that when the naming comes it reads as confirmation of something the reader had half worked out. That is a different sensation from being taught. It also protects the explanation from the reader's scepticism, because a rule offered before the evidence invites an argument while a rule offered after it invites a nod. Getting the delay wrong is easy in both directions, since too short and you have written a textbook with anecdotes, too long and the reader gives up before the payoff and blames the subject.

Taking the calm register and skipping the sorting

The register is the easiest thing to hear and the least of what is going on. Someone reads a McPhee paragraph, notices that it is level and unhurried and free of adjectives doing emotional work, and writes three thousand words in that key without deciding what the piece is shaped like, which produces prose that is pleasant for two pages and then stops going anywhere. Calm is a consequence. It comes from a writer who already knows which part comes next and therefore has no need to oversell the part he is in. Without the sorting underneath, the same voice reads as a man with nothing at stake.

Mistaking the volume of research for structure

A stack of research is not a structure. The reporting that goes into a piece like Rising from the Plains is enormous, and the temptation is to treat that as the achievement, so the draft becomes a survey with everything in it and no answer to the question of why this paragraph sits after that one. McPhee's folders are a filter as much as a store. A strand that fails to earn a place in the diagram stays in the folder, and the reader is spared it. Gladwell runs the risk from the opposite direction, arranging material to serve a thesis he arrived with. Both errors have the same cure, which is to let the shape of what you found decide the shape of what you write.

Using a scene as scenery

A scene that only shows you something is a stall. In McPhee the opening scene carries the problem the rest of the section will solve, so when the Icelanders in The Control of Nature aim seawater hoses at a wall of advancing lava, the spectacle is also the setup for everything that follows about what it costs to argue with a volcano. Drop in a colorful moment with no seed in it and the reader notices the join. The piece starts to feel like a slideshow with commentary. Fewer scenes will not fix that. Pick scenes for what they oblige you to explain next.

Explaining in the voice of a teacher

Signposting is the tell. Once a writer starts announcing what the next section will cover, the delay that generates the pull is gone, because the reader has been handed the map and no longer has to want it. McPhee prepares the reader instead of warning him. A word or an image from the end of one part turns up in the first line of the next, slightly changed, and the transition reads as the reader's own thought rather than the writer's instruction. Klinkenborg calls the alternative logical indicators, the however and the moreover that insist on a logic the sentences have not earned. Cut them and see whether the sense of the turn survives, which is a cheaper test than it sounds.