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The McPhee method for writing deeply reported nonfiction

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Re: The McPhee method for writing deeply reported nonfiction

#21

Post by hluska »

nonethewiser wrote: post #14
Dilettante_ wrote: post #5

Basically: Don't crystallize too early, have a primordial soup of notes that you coagulate/congeal bit by bit. Take little iterative steps on local slices, don't try to construct the final product from the get-go. This method came quite naturally to me during my writing-based personal projects since I have no deadline or anything and am literally just collecting thousands of little A6/A7 notes that I capture as they…

I suppose some of the beauty of this is that the "notes" are easy . Whereas writing is hard. So the more you can leverage these fragments, the better. I wonder how the non-fiction element plays into it. I guess if you have a lot of fragments the hard part is organizing and then glueing them together. But in non fiction a lot of this is done or you. You are given the order and a lot of the glue. The glue you are missi…

> But in non fiction a lot of this is done or you. You are given the order and a lot of the glue. The glue you are missing is probably relatively obvious ("why did they do this?") and you can get that information and include it, or you cant and there is nothing to be done about it ("the motive is unknown" etc).

I published a long time ago and ended up doing some deep reporting on a couple of issues. And honestly, it’s a lot closer to writing fiction than I would have thought going in. In ways, it’s actually a lot harder.

Starting out, I believed roughly what your quote said - that I could get into a deep piece and all the glue would be there. In practice, it’s a lot messier because you try to tell the truth related by witnesses with unpredictable self interests. So as you go through the process, you find multiple truths that can each be corroborated with other sources.

It’s a lot more like building with Lego. A piece could be the nose of a horse or the gutter of a house. It’s where judgment, ethics and good note taking practices come in. Witness problems are a big reason why journalists develop their own note taking style to code interviews - an outlining style gives the freedom to consider each fact as a piece of a larger build.

Edit - If it makes you feel better about writing fiction, I wouldn’t worry so much about plausibility. I wasn’t a great journalist but have heard (and verified) stories that the most creative minds would call impossible. Good characters can make the implausible into magic.

Re: The McPhee method for writing deeply reported nonfiction

#22

Post by Isamu »

munificent wrote: post #19
Isamu wrote: post #16

This is about journalism, in an age when journalism is being bulldozed by cheap content, AI hallucinations and other clickbait tactics. Journalism still has the idea of finding facts, things that correspond to something in reality. It’s been shown that people in fact prefer to have their beliefs confirmed, rather than challenged by investigative reporting, hence the decline in real journalism, because it is both more…

I disagree with the cynical take in your second sentence. I think people prefer to be right. Any animal that wants to walk the Earth successfully has an intrinsic need to understand the world as it is, not as they wish it to be. Wanting the fruit tree to be right outside the cave doesn't make it so. But that desire to have correct beliefs is complex in humans where we also have beliefs about ourselves and others have…

You are right, I am being casual in asserting what “people prefer”.

You assert that people prefer to be right, I agree but in practice “being right” requires having to accept changes in your beliefs, and that’s painful.

Also “being right” requires some effort to check what the facts are, and that is arduous when people are busy with life.

As a result I think people prefer to feel like they’re right rather than dig deeper, and so they prefer information sources that tend to confirm their beliefs.

Re: The McPhee method for writing deeply reported nonfiction

#23

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

wodenokoto wrote: post #3

> McPhee usually had one person at the center of each piece, so he would aim to spend a lot of time with that person … stay at their cottage for a season Even back when every household received a morning paper I cannot fathom how a single article could command such a high pay.

How do you think Googlers command such high pay?

Re: The McPhee method for writing deeply reported nonfiction

#24

Post by nonethewiser »

munificent wrote: post #19
Isamu wrote: post #16

This is about journalism, in an age when journalism is being bulldozed by cheap content, AI hallucinations and other clickbait tactics. Journalism still has the idea of finding facts, things that correspond to something in reality. It’s been shown that people in fact prefer to have their beliefs confirmed, rather than challenged by investigative reporting, hence the decline in real journalism, because it is both more…

I disagree with the cynical take in your second sentence. I think people prefer to be right. Any animal that wants to walk the Earth successfully has an intrinsic need to understand the world as it is, not as they wish it to be. Wanting the fruit tree to be right outside the cave doesn't make it so. But that desire to have correct beliefs is complex in humans where we also have beliefs about ourselves and others have…

I enjoyed your thoughts on people preferring to be right but having competing personal interests.

I have started and stopped writing several chains of thought related to it. But it makes me think about what categories of things we may prefer to be right about. And how they do or do not fit into the model you described. For example, empirical (the elephant weights more than a mouse), pragmatic ("hot water is good for your health" in Chinese culture), moral (murder is bad), etc. "Truth", "being right" etc. are just loaded terms I guess. The claims about being able to function effectively seem largely true for the more empirical stuff but the sort of information silos discussed online draw more idealogical lines.

Also made me think how a nihilist or social constructivist might behave or model things differently. it just seems like if you have a more relativist interpretation of truth, being right and believing in something is just the same thing. So it would be literally impossible for those things to be in conflict (either naturally or from the perspective of the person).

Re: The McPhee method for writing deeply reported nonfiction

#25

Post by tptacek »

This is such a great piece and I admire Somers Atlantic writing. I just want to say, this process feels similar to the process Michael Lewis used in his later books, particular with "Going Infinite", where he embedded deeply and for a long time with FTX, emerging to write just as the story shifted from FTX legitimizing the world of cryptocurrency to becoming its chief villain.

So I do wonder, when you dig in that deeply before coming close to getting any work product, how do you ensure that you'll be able to cut your losses, as opposed to what Lewis did, trying (and failing) to salvage a narrative that had been demolished by events and other reporting?

Re: The McPhee method for writing deeply reported nonfiction

#26

Post by sizzzzlerz »

hcrisp wrote: post #4

McPhee was recommended as someone whose writing "makes boring things interesting". I did enjoy The Curve of Binding Energy (nuclear science) and to some extent Coming out of the Country (Alaska). Both of those featured interesting vignettes and colorful characters which propelled along the narrative. However, I then turned to his magnum opus on geology, Annals of the Former World . That was a long slog which, althoug…

I own every book McPhee published and have read each one at least twice. He is, without question, the finest writer of non-fiction I know. Annals, as you may know, was originally published as 4 separate volumes, each covering a particular US region. Assembling California is my absolute favorite McPhee work. I have a layman’s interest in geology and plate tectonics that I developed specifically because of this book.

Re: The McPhee method for writing deeply reported nonfiction

#27

Post by munificent »

Isamu wrote: post #22
munificent wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree with the cynical take in your second sentence. I think people prefer to be right. Any animal that wants to walk the Earth successfully has an intrinsic need to understand the world as it is, not as they wish it to be. Wanting the fruit tree to be right outside the cave doesn't make it so. But that desire to have correct beliefs is complex in humans where we also have beliefs about ourselves and others have…

You are right, I am being casual in asserting what “people prefer”. You assert that people prefer to be right, I agree but in practice “being right” requires having to accept changes in your beliefs, and that’s painful. Also “being right” requires some effort to check what the facts are, and that is arduous when people are busy with life. As a result I think people prefer to feel like they’re right rather than dig de…

Behavior makes a lot more sense when you realize that humans are trying to have as accurate a view of the world as possible while also conserving cognitive resources. Running a brain is actually astonishingly expensive in terms of calories, so we've evolved to be judicious in how much thought we put into things.

Changing an existing belief is hard because we already spent effort acquiring the belief in the first place. Throwing that out should be expensive because otherwise we risk thrashing where we are constantly vacillating between competing beliefs. It makes more sense in terms of efficiency and being able to take action if there is some hysteresis and beliefs are sticky.

Note that while people don't change beliefs easily, they do acquire them pretty easily. If I tell you something that doesn't directly conflict with an existing belief, it's easy to absorb.

Re: The McPhee method for writing deeply reported nonfiction

#28

Post by Animats »

It's the "too much information" style of writing. The subject has to be worth it. I've read his "Basin and Range" (geology), "The Deltoid Pumpkin Seed" (aircraft design), and "The Curve of Binding Energy" (nuclear weapons). Only the last is worth reading. He went off on a years-long geology tangent, interesting only if you're really into geology.

William Langewiesche had a similar style. He died recently, and leaves behind some good writing on aviation. He was the son of Wolfgang Langewiesche, known for writing "Stick and Rudder", a very well written book for pilots on how airplanes really work.

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