Draft No. 4

McPhee’s collection of eight essays on how he actually writes — structure, interviewing, checking facts, and the long misery of a fourth draft. The title is his own term for the pass where a piece stops being research and becomes prose.

Context: McPhee has taught writing at Princeton since 1975 and has been at The New Yorker since 1965; the essays first ran there. The quote Packy pulled is about factual writing as a treasure hunt — that the good material tells you what it is when you find it, and often hands you the beginning, the ending and the title.

Connections

• Some of my favorite books… (tweet) — where this was recommended.
• John McPhee — the author.
• The odd one out on a list otherwise made of business history and biography: this is a book about the craft of writing the kind of narrative non-fiction the rest of the list is made of.