Draft No. 4, John McPhee
Draft No. 4, John McPhee
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Draft No. 4
On the Writing Process

Author: John McPhee

Narrator: John McPhee

Unabridged: 6 hr 49 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Recorded Books

Published: 09/05/2017


Synopsis

The long-awaited guide to writing long-form nonfiction by the legendary author and teacher

Draft No. 4 is a master class on the writer’s craft. In a series of playful, expertly wrought essays, John McPhee shares insights he has gathered over his career and has refined while teaching at Princeton University, where he has nurtured some of the most esteemed writers of recent decades. McPhee offers definitive guidance in the decisions regarding arrangement, diction, and tone that shape nonfiction pieces, and he presents extracts from his work, subjecting them to wry scrutiny. In one essay, he considers the delicate art of getting sources to tell you what they might not otherwise reveal. In another, he discusses how to use flashback to place a bear encounter in a travel narrative, while observing that “readers are not supposed to notice the structure. It is meant to be about as visible as someone’s bones.” The result is a vivid depiction of the writing process, from reporting to drafting to revising—and revising, and revising.

Draft No. 4 is enriched by multiple diagrams and by personal anecdotes and charming reflections on the life of a writer. McPhee describes his enduring relationships with The New Yorker and Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and recalls his early years at Time magazine. Throughout, Draft No. 4 is enlivened by his keen sense of writing as a way of being in the world.

About John McPhee

John McPhee was born in Princeton, New Jersey, and was educated at Princeton University and Cambridge University. His writing career began at Time magazine and led to his long association with The New Yorker, where he has been a staff writer since 1965. Also in 1965, he published his first book, A Sense of Where You Are, and in the years since, he has written over thirty books, including Oranges, Coming into the Country, The Control of Nature, The Founding Fish, Uncommon Carriers, and Silk Parachute. Encounters with the Archdruid and The Curve of Binding Energy were nominated for National Book Awards in the category of science. McPhee received the Award in Literature from the Academy of Arts and Letters in 1977. In 1999, he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Annals of the Former World. He lives in Princeton, New Jersey.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Adam on January 02, 2018

Fun, insightful collection of linked essays (all of which appeared in The New Yorker) that detail various aspects of McPhee's approach to "creative non-fiction" - a phrase that both he and I find inscrutable. That notwithstanding, I'm teaching an intermediate "creative non-fiction" class this Spring......more

Goodreads review by Roy on January 04, 2018

I include what interests me and exclude what doesn’t interest me. That may be a crude tool but it’s the only one I have. I came to this book from an odd angle. Neither a reader of The New Yorker (where McPhee has published the lion’s share of his work), nor a reader of John McPhee’s books, nor ev......more

Goodreads review by Lisa on November 12, 2017

You might imagine that, as someone who writes all day, and therefore thinks about writing most of the day, I might not want to spend my off hours thinking about writing more. But you'd be wrong. I really like reading books on craft, especially if they're crafty themselves, and this absolutely qualif......more

Goodreads review by Stephen on December 01, 2017

McPhee is one of our best writers of non-fiction, and in this short book he does two things: first, report his own long experience as a writer at the New Yorker and elsewhere; and second, provide an array of good advice for aspiring writers. Particularly useful, I thought, were his comments on struc......more