Its combination of shop talk, war stories, slices of autobiography, and priceless insights and lessons suggests what it must be like to occupy a seat in the McPhee classroom (but at a significantly lower sticker price) ... The McPhee-ites are partial to the natural world as a topic, especially as traversed by passionate and eccentric characters (again, usually male). And they find much to emulate in their paragon’s prose: the careful selection and presentation of gem-like facts unearthed from months or even years in the reporting mines, understated humor, a laser eye for the revealing detail, precise and often unexpected choice of words and long paragraphs with a sometimes wandering but always persistent rhythm, like one of the rivers Mr. McPhee is fond of navigating by towboat, canoe or raft. Those qualities are on full display in Draft No. 4 ... I was not uniformly charmed by Draft No. 4. Mr. McPhee is entranced by structure, and my eyes glazed over at his explanation of the recondite patterns underlying his pieces. His several pages on the computer program with which he writes is as about as interesting as you would expect several pages on a computer program with which a writer writes to be ... Assent, demur or file away for future reflection, Mr. McPhee’s observations about writing are always invigorating to engage with. And Draft No. 4 belongs on the short shelf of essential books about the craft.
...a sunny tribute to the gloomy side of the writing life: the insecurity, dread, shame, envy, magical thinking, pointless rituals, financial instability, self-hatred — the whole 'masochistic self-inflicted paralysis of a writer’s normal routine.' And then the queasy desire to do it all over again ... It’s McPhee on McPhee; commentary on his greatest hits, a little backstory, a little affectionate gossip, much of it about the genius and squeamishness of the longtime editor of The New Yorker, William Shawn, 'the iron mouse,' who blanched at profanity, mentions of sex and articles about any place cold. It’s an intimate book — and intimacy is rare in McPhee’s work ... He can lapse into occasional hokiness. But generally his advice is in the service of making the text as sturdy, useful and beautiful as possible ... reading McPhee makes you realize that perhaps writers wax about craft because it’s the easiest part of writing to talk about. It’s much harder to account for the flashes of inspiration, the slant of seeing, the appetite for the world — to know it down to its core — that keep you coming back to McPhee...You want to lick the pages.
If the book is any indication of the kind of instruction students at Princeton receive, they’re a lucky bunch indeed. McPhee’s knowledge of, experience with, and command over narrative nonfiction structure is masterful ... Draft No. 4 contains a carefully balanced ratio of directly instructive writing advice, behind-the-scenes views on McPhee’s greatest hits, and war stories from the golden age of post-WWII American magazine publishing. This is near the bullseye of what you’d hope for from an octogenarian doyen, and it’s a pleasure to read. Any writer or editor could learn something from McPhee, as many famous and successful ones already have.
While there’s plenty of shop talk, including analysis of his own work, McPhee dispenses an ample dose of literary gossip and lore from his 50-plus years on staff at The New Yorker. In other words, this is a book for writers, editors and readers of all stripes ... Perhaps most entertaining are the sections devoted to The New Yorker, which detail McPhee’s ties to legendary editor William Shawn, and others. He describes policies at the magazine, notably a former longstanding refusal to incorporate vulgar slang in its pages – a section that’s both fascinating and funny ... The beauty of Draft No. 4 lies partly in our watching a master deconstruct the nearly invisible habits of his work. The result celebrates a life – probing, colorful, singular – devoted to writing.
McPhee is the master of, in the words of McPhee profiler Sam Anderson, 'small detonations of knowledge,' which Draft No. 4 reveals are aided by obsessive note-taking and a customized word processing program that is used by only a handful of people ... Structure especially is an obsession of McPhee’s. The book is dotted with drawings representing his different approaches, each a puzzle that he both created and solved himself ... McPhee brings considerable clarity to the profound sense of doubt that simultaneously drives writing and threatens to derail it ... The trick is learn to think and act as genuine version of oneself. Let Draft No. 4 serve as inspiration, not a how-to.
For a writer reading McPhee’s newest collection, Draft No. 4: On the Writing Process, this is a sobering takeaway. It’s all about work and more work, and where’s the fun in that? ...his 32nd book, comprises eight essays, all of them originally published in The New Yorker ...differs from the others in his oeuvre by billing itself as a look into the process and craft behind that other work ... Recounting anecdotes, offering practical and anecdotal instruction. Significantly — interestingly — it may be the least interesting of his books. Something is missing ...essays take up various aspects of the writing life, ranging from the collection and ordering of materials...if McPhee has a core obsession in Draft No. 4, it is, as I’ve suggested, structure ... His impulse to elaborate detail is as strong as ever, but for some reason the vital accompanying context has lost its vitality.
...this insider’s guide to long-form journalism, though somewhat meandering, is a book that any writer, aspiring or accomplished, could profitably read, study and argue with. However, its opening two chapters, in which McPhee presents his various systems for structuring articles, do require a bit of perseverance ... For over half a century, John McPhee — now 86 — has been writing profiles of scientists, eccentrics and specialists of every stripe. All are exceptional at what they do. So, too, is their discerning chronicler.
Draft No. 4 is as lean and punchy a book as anything McPhee wrote in his thirties ... But there's plenty of fuzziness in Draft No. 4, and those readers will be glad of it. The book's ostensible focus of imparting the wisdom accumulated over a lifetime of writing blurs often and very enjoyably with reminiscences about McPhee's own long apprenticeship in the craft; readers are treated to many digressions about the crafting of journalistic pieces that would later become prize-winning books ... The star attraction here isn't the method but the man; readers who go in knowing that will be endlessly fascinated – and may learn a good deal.
Writers looking for the secrets of his stripped-bark style and painstaking structure will have to be patient with what is a discursive, though often delightful, short book. McPhee’s publisher is presenting it as a 'master class,' but it’s really a memoir of writing during a time of editorial cosseting that now seems as remote as the court of the Romanovs. Readerly patience will be rewarded by plentiful examples of the author’s sinewy prose and, toward the end, by advice and tips that will help writers looking to become better practitioners of the craft and to stay afloat in what has become a self-service economy ... Perhaps the most generous passages in this generous book are in these final chapters: letters to the student of a fellow writing teacher, Anne Fadiman (whose yearly seminar at Yale was endowed by a former student in honor of Zinsser), and to Martha and Jenny, two of his four daughters, now both professional writers.
Graceful, effortless work resulting from meticulous, detailed and painstaking preparation is what a reader sees in John McPhee’s fascinating Draft No. 4: On the Writing Process … McPhee details in a series of eight essays, which originally appeared in the New Yorker, how he progresses from blank stares into the sky to pages filled with words. To start, he illustrates how he plans the structure of his pieces with complex, sometimes abstruse diagrams … The detailed accounting of his methods, the witty sense of the writer’s life and the sincere encouragement McPhee offers in Draft No. 4 will surely encourage able writers to believe that they, too, might follow his precepts and craft a description like this one — something so good it makes them want to dance up the side of a wall.
Eight crisply instructive and drolly self-deprecating essays [are] gathered here in this exceptionally entertaining and illuminating book . . . [Draft No. 4] is expert, charming, and invigorating.
...there’s his composure on the page: a finely-milled crystalline prose that never announces itself yet pins its subjects with felicitous precision; the apotheosis of the New Yorker’s signature patrician style ...McPhee is not so brash a writer, his catharsis slower to pay out ...Draft No. 4 is a different kind of book — a writing manual-cum-professional memoir. This invites a certain windy raconteurship. There are intriguing glimpses of the operation behind The New Yorker’s exquisitely modulated prose — a kind of virtual organization...is, no less, a period piece; a treasury of keen insights from a painstaking craftsman and a capsule of the charmed status of an elite practitioner during what looks today like a golden era of magazine journalism replete with extended parlays with editors, protracted fact-checking triangulation, and two weeks on a picnic table.
McPhee has set the standard for the genre of creative nonfiction ... With humor and aplomb, he recalls anecdotes about how he approached a story: from interviewing and reporting to drafting and revising, to working with editors and publishers . . . [Draft No. 4 is] a well-wrought road map to navigating the twists and turns, thrills and pitfalls, and joys and sorrows of the writer's journey.
The main personality throughout the collection is McPhee himself. He is frequently self-deprecating, occasionally openly proud of his accomplishments, and never boring. In his magazine articles and the books resulting from them, McPhee rarely injects himself except superficially. Within these essays, he offers a departure by revealing quite a bit about his journalism, his teaching life, and daughters, two of whom write professionally. Throughout the collection, there emerge passages of sly, subtle humor, a quality often absent in McPhee’s lengthy magazine pieces. Since some subjects are so weighty—especially those dealing with geology—the writing can seem dry. There is no dry prose here, however. Almost every sentence sparkles, with wordplay evident throughout ... A superb book about doing his job by a master of his craft.
McPhee the teacher is a presence throughout, though rarely proscriptive. Questions guide—what must you put in, and leave out? How to handle your subject’s own words? Along with specific advice, there is an implied and comforting message: that for most writers, this is not easy. McPhee lays it all out with the wit of one who believes that 'writing has to be fun at least once in a pale blue moon.'”
