The McPhee method for writing deeply reported nonfiction
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Re: The McPhee method for writing deeply reported nonfiction
#2I absolutely loved this:
> if you tell someone you’re a journalist they’re going to believe you. Your job is to honor their trust.
Re: The McPhee method for writing deeply reported nonfiction
#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.
Re: The McPhee method for writing deeply reported nonfiction
#4McPhee 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, although I enjoyed moments of it, now I wonder if my time wouldn't have been better spent reading something more interesting.
Re: The McPhee method for writing deeply reported nonfiction
#5Basically: 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 pop into my head. I can take all the time I want to stew on them and have a structure bubbling up all on its own.
Re: The McPhee method for writing deeply reported nonfiction
#6If there were another writer of non-fiction as deeply researched I'd compare McPhee to, it would be Robert Caro. I already knew from Caro's memoir Working that Caro did not use a tape recorder in his interviews with subjects, and from this article about McPhee's method, I learned that McPhee does not either. I'm a bit surprised: I'd have thought for such deep research one would want a recording to refer back to, but both seem to feel that the drawbacks of influencing their subjects outweigh their benefit.
Re: The McPhee method for writing deeply reported nonfiction
#7> 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.
For a magazine like the New Yorker, there was money. You might be interested in Bryan Burrough's experience writing for Vanity Fair in the 90s and 2000s.
> For twenty-five years, I was contracted to produce three articles a year, long ones, typically ten thousand words. For this, my peak salary was $498,141. That’s not a misprint—$498,141, or more than $166,000 per story. Then, as now, $166,000 was a good advance for an entire book. Yes, I realized it was obscene. I took it with a grin.
https://yalereview.org/article/burrough-vanity-fair-graydon-...
Re: The McPhee method for writing deeply reported nonfiction
#8John McPhee is a treasure. If you haven't read any of his work, I would. And if you don't want to dive into a full book, he has a number of collections of short stories.
Re: The McPhee method for writing deeply reported nonfiction
#9> 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.
> Even back when every household received a morning paper I cannot fathom how a single article could command such a high pay.
He wrote for the New Yorker, which is a magazine rather than a newspaper. The number of long-form literary nonfiction pieces that the New Yorker runs every year is drastically fewer than the number of news articles produced to fill a daily newspaper in just a couple weeks.
Re: The McPhee method for writing deeply reported nonfiction
#10This approach sounds very similar to the construction of grounded theory in ethnography/anthropology -- something I've always wanted to practise but never had the patience for!