Lessons from John McPhee
A February 2019 podcast conversation between Tim Ferriss and Jim Collins introduced me to John McPhee. I’d never heard of the Pulitzer Prize winner McPhee who has written thirty-three books, all of them non-fiction (he prefers the label ‘factual writing’) until that moment.
Over the past two and a half years, I would occasionally wonder about this McPhee, whom I’d never heard of. So, in the past few months, I added him to my reading list and went exploring to see what we might learn from Mr. McPhee. What a journey it has been!
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Strategy
One of life’s curious conundrums is that many of us do not enjoy structure and process, and yet they can deliver both effectiveness and efficiency. Yet, knowing the truth of the latter does not prevent us from ignoring them. We know that they would help, but somewhere deep-down lurks a suspicion that we’re about to be controlled, our individuality suppressed, and our creativity quashed. We choose to bumble along instead, frustrated that we aren’t as effective as we’d like to be, relieved that we are at least free, and still wasting energy, time, and resources that ironically might make us freer, more creative, more ourselves.
McPhee unpicked this conundrum for me. He is a devotee of structure’s virtues, to the extent that his book Draft No. 4: On the Writing Process, has a forty-five-page chapter on the subject – nearly a quarter of the eight-chapter book. The pages of that chapter are filled with all manner of diagrams demonstrating how he structured material for his many articles and books. Looking at them makes me feel tired. There’s a part of me that feels constricted by those structures. However, with hundreds sometimes thousands of hours of interviews conducted over weeks, months, and sometimes years, it is not hard to imagine that a structure and a process might be helpful. There’s that conundrum again.
In a Spring 2010 Paris Review interview, McPhee notes that “Structure is not a template. It’s not a cookie-cutter. It’s something that arises organically from the material once you have it.”
He echoes Jim Collins who wrote that “you must work how you work best (and let others do the same).” In other words, let the structure of your life arise from the material that you are. And then, “count your time and make it count.”
However, this emergence is not magical, it is intentional. McPhee immerses himself in the raw material from his research, transcribing interviews, re-reading the transcripts, until slowly the pattern starts to emerge for him. Collins describes how the leaders of high-performing companies ‘zoom in’ to the detail, they are connected to the heart-beat of their company, and then ‘zoom out’ to the strategy. In my work with clients, we immerse ourselves in their biography, their story, and then with that focused attention the structure, the strategy emerges, almost magically but in truth a product of deep, focused attention.
McPhee explains that once the structure has emerged, he orders all his research material around it. This prompts his interviewer to ask him whether it doesn’t risk becoming mechanical. It is a question that I often encounter when helping clients think through structures and processes for their lives or their businesses.
McPhee’s response is instructive; “It sounds very mechanical, but the effect is the exact opposite. What it does is free you to write. It liberates you to write… You get away from the mechanics through this mechanical means. The spontaneity comes in the writing, the phraseology, the telling of the story—after you’ve put all this stuff aside.”
Having a structure, a process, a plan frees you to be spontaneous, to do the creative work, to put the energy into the craft of whatever it is that you do to build a livelihood. For it to be effective it must ‘arise organically’, it must make sense in your life, in the cycle of your business. It is both.
/Self
McPhee reflects that although it sounds like he’s got a simple formula for writing, the actual practice is more complicated. Although he starts each writing day at nine, often hours go by before he gets a sentence down. He says “It’s four-thirty and I’m beginning to panic. It’s like a coiling spring. I’m really unhappy. I mean, you’re going to lose the day if you keep this up long enough. Five: I start to write. Seven: I go home. That happens over and over and over again. So why don’t I work at a bank and then come in at five and start writing? Because I need those seven hours of gonging around. I’m just not that disciplined. I don’t write in the morning—I just try to write.”
We often push ourselves to be productive, by which we often mean ‘busy’, yet as McPhee demonstrates, it is often those hours of seeming inactivity that ultimately unlock the momentum that we need.
And why doesn’t he keep going past seven once he’s hit his stride?
Because he’d learnt that if he did that, if he pushed to the early hours of the morning, he’d be ineffectual for days to come but if he stopped each day at seven, at the end of the month he’d achieved more.
Describing how all those ‘last-minute’ two hours add up, he says “if you put a drop in a bucket every day, after three hundred and sixty-five days, the bucket’s going to have some water in it.” Consistency is cumulative.
In a recent piece in The New Yorker, McPhee (now 90 years old) tells us that he’d decided in high school that he wanted to write for The New Yorker. His first rejection slips from them came whilst he was in college. By the time he eventually got a piece published he was thirty-two and his ‘collection of rejection slips could have papered a whole wall’. He comments that his experience is a ‘chronicle of rejection as a curable disease.’
Somewhere in many of our lives a fantasy takes hold that somehow, we will never experience failure or rejection, yet the reality is far more like McPhee’s. We try. We fail. We get rejected. We learn. We amend. We try again. And sometimes, but not always, we succeed. Rejection is a curable disease.
McPhee is currently engaged in writing a series called Tabula Rasa, in which he describes “the many writing projects that I have conceived and seriously planned across the years but have never written.” I take courage from the fact that one can be ninety and still publishing, that one can be a four-time Pulitzer finalist, have published more than a hundred articles in The New Yorker, have written thirty-three books, and still have a long list of ‘ones that got away.’
Soul
In Draft No.4 McPhee takes us to a moment in his book Encounters with the Archdruid, where he and others needed to cross the Grand Canyon’s Upset Rapid, a rapid defined on maps of the Colorado River as “cannot be run without risk of life.”
David Brower, founder of the Sierra Club, stays on the riverbank choosing not to risk the rapid. When another rafter asked him why he didn’t ride the rapid, Brower responded “Because I’m chicken.” McPhee goes on to tell us that the Climber’s Guide to the High Sierra list thirty-three peaks that were first ascended by Brower.
In ‘Encounters’ McPhee doesn’t comment on these facts, he just brings them together, for us to contemplate the contrast.
In Draft No. 4 he comments that the white space on the page that separated those two scenes said more about ‘courage and lack of courage and how they can exist side by side in the human breast’ than any ‘violin phraseology.’ We are complex, often in ways that escape words. It helps to remember that.
Karl
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(This letter was first published on 24 October 2021)