The Essence of the Process

If you read only one book about the writing process this year, I hope you'll consider John McPhee's Draft No. 4: On the Writing Process.

It contains eight essays on the writing process that were previously published in The New Yorker, the magazine where McPhee's work has appeared since 1965, and where you may have read some, or all, of these pieces.

If you have read any of these essays before, I recommend reading them again, since I find McPhee's work so rich that it can easily sustain multiple readings, each time offering up some new jewel that the reader may have missed or overlooked. And if you haven't yet read any of them, you are in for a treat.

You'll discover a man's love of the craft of writing, and a devotion to the process of putting words on paper reminiscent of a religious scribe, a man passionate about language and its usage and the delight that it provides for reveling in life's joys and mysteries.

McPhee believes wholeheartedly in revision as the core of the process. "The difference between a common writer and an improviser on a stage (or any performing artist) is that writing can be revised. Actually, the essence of the process is revision. The adulating portrait of the perfect writer who never blots a line comes Express Mail from fairyland."

If you take away just one nugget of truth from this book, let it be this one: The essence of the process is revision.

One of the things that I love about McPhee's approach to writing, and his willingness to teach writing to others (he's taught students at Princeton University, his alma mater, for years), is his understanding that each writer is cut from different cloth and approaches the problem of getting words on paper differently.

He gives us as examples the different ways his two daughters deal with the process.

"Jenny grew up to write novels, and at this point has published three. She keeps everything close-hauled, says nothing and reveals nothing as she goes along."

But keeping things close-hauled isn't the way his younger daughter Martha goes about the process.

"Her sister Martha, two years younger, has written four novels. Martha calls me up nine times a day to tell me that writing is impossible, that she's not cut out to do it, that she'll never finish what she is working on, et cetera, et cetera, and so forth and so on."

Two writers, two different ways of approaching the process.

Actually, three writers. There's McPhee himself who shares his own approach.

"It is toward the end of the second draft, if I'm lucky," writes McPhee, "when the feeling comes over me that I have something I want to show other people, something that seems to be working and is not going to go away. The feeling is more than welcome, but it is hardly euphoria. It's just a new lease on life, a sense that I'm going to survive until the middle of next month."

There's a wealth of information in Draft No. 4 that will provide sustenance for you as a writer for weeks, if not months and years, whether you write fiction or, like McPhee, nonfiction.

And if you love reading The New Yorker, you'll love learning a bit of what goes on behind its cover and pages since McPhee generously shares stories about his working relationships with editors at the magazine who have nurtured and guided him along the way.

If you're curious about the kind of advice McPhee offers, here's a link to his essay, "Draft No. 4," as it appeared in 2013 in The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/04/29/draft-no-4 

And here's a link to the book, if you want to take a look: 
https://www.amazon.com/Draft-No-4-Writing-Process/dp/0374142742

And if you're interested in The New York Times' review of the book, click this link:  https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/13/books/review-draft-no-4-john-mcphee.html

The Shell Path

Even though I don’t live near the sea, there’s a shell path on the side of our front yard, a narrow swath of white seashells that marks the boundary between our property and our neighbor’s yard.

It’s not a very wide path, perhaps two feet across, and it’s not a very long path, maybe thirty or forty feet long, but it helps establish a clear line between the two yards, and I love the way the shells remind me of the sea, even if I can’t see or hear it from our home.

Every month or so I spend a few hours moving up and down the path pulling weeds. It is tedious work because the weeds are often long and stringy and deeply rooted. It’s not easy to grasp them, especially when wearing gardening gloves, and it’s never easy to pull them out entirely.

I’ll squat on my heels, stretching my calves and Achilles tendons, straining my quads, until I switch legs for balance or to relieve a cramp, and I’ll work with my back bent beneath the warm sun and think about the sea and how the sunlight sparkles off its surface and how the waves roll into shore and then retreat out to sea again.

After ten or fifteen minutes, it’s easy to lose my patience and perspective, to forget the larger picture—how the path serves as a boundary between our yards, how the shells, once weeded, look so beautiful, like a path stretching toward the sea—and it’s easy to become frustrated because the work doesn’t go faster.

But becoming frustrated doesn’t help the work. It only inhibits my ability to enjoy the sight of the shells and the vision of the finished path in my mind.

That's when I have to remind myself to slow down, to let go of my expectations of how the work should go, and to see—really look hard and see—what’s in front of me at this moment, to understand what needs to be taken care of now.

Maybe the weeds don’t belong where they are growing, or I'd prefer them to grow elsewhere, but rushing to pull them will only mean that I’ll miss more of the weeds than I’ll pull. And then I’ll only have to return to pull out the rest at some point.

This process of weeding, of keeping the shell path free of weeds, reminds me of the way the revision process works.

I’ll put down words in the same way a gardener might put down a shell path. At first, the words look perfect. The sentences appear straightforward, the verbs and adjectives strong and firmly rooted, and there isn’t a weed in sight.

But then I begin to see things that I didn’t see, not because I wasn’t careful or precise when I put the words down, but because I simply lacked the ability to see the weeds. I was too close to the material.

So, when I go back to the beginning of a manuscript to revise it, I try to slow down, to look at it as part of a larger picture, to understand what needs to be done in this moment. It’s the same process as weeding the shell path.

I have to pull unnecessary words the same way I pull weeds on the shell path. I have to go back to the beginning and start over. Neatening, straightening, clearing out clutter, cleaning up.

I want the manuscript to read cleanly, without any distractions for the reader, just as I want the path to offer a clear, unobstructed path, whether it leads to our back yard or to the sea in my imagination.

This kind of work takes patience. It requires a willingness to slow down and really see what is on the page (not what I might hope or think is on the page but what is actually there).

Most of all, it takes a certain commitment and devotion to work on the path, to keep working, even when my legs and back ache, even when my fingers start to bleed from reaching past the sharp edges of the shells and the gloves have torn, even when the mosquito bites itch and the red ant bites burn as if my skin is on fire.

Each writer must learn how to stay in the moment and do this work.