The McPhee method for writing deeply reported nonfiction

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 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.

If 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.

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, although I enjoyed moments of it, now I wonder if my time wouldn't have been better spent reading something more interesting.

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?

> 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.

> I should say that in those nightly encounters I rarely go straight from notes to full sentences. I bridge the gap with a kind of pseudowriting. In effect it’s an outline that takes the form of paragraphs, mixed in with the raw notes. I write good full sentences, broken half-sentences, non-sentences that also include todos in them.

Back when i wrote a lot, i often did something like this. I used a program called Acta [1], which was described as an outliner. Basically a text editor where paragraphs form a tree, and nodes can be collapsed. I'd start with the high-level structure and recursively flesh it out, and just keep doing that until i had nodes at the level of individual sentences. Then i'd just write a sentence for each node, and concatenate them. Often i'd take a shortcut and just write a whole paragraph. But a lot of the time, i wouldn't - a difficult passage becomes easy when you're incrementally breaking it down, reordering it, revising it, etc.

[1] https://www.a-sharp.com/acta/

"McPhee has been my model. He's the most elegant of all the journalists writing today, I think."

— Tracy Kidder, author of The Soul of a New Machine and many other great writings.

My immediate reaction is to notice that this method is actually closely mirrors Barbara Minto’s Pyramid Principle, a go-to tool for McKinsey consultants for the last 40 years or so. One way to build so-called Pyramids is to go bottom up: gather raw facts, aggregate them into themes, themes align into arguments, and only then does the polished narrative (or the key idea) emerge. As far as I can tell, McPhee recommends a very similar approach.

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.

> So much of writing is managing your own emotions. The virtue of “pseudowriting” is that it helps you preserve hope for as long as possible—hope that what you will eventually put in place of those square brackets will be good. Hope keeps you coming back: it is more pleasant and low-stakes to pseudowrite than to fix actual language into the draft; and it is less daunting to return to a document where it feels like all that’s left is for you to fill in some blanks. Do that enough times and you will, in fact, end up with something you can read top to bottom.

This describes how I write a new chunk of research code, often. I'll type along until I get to something like "oh, I'll need to calculate the foo of the widget here," and I'll just put a non-existent function call calculateFoo(widget) there until later, when I'll come back and fill it in. I feel like it keeps it manageable; I'm choosing the level of abstraction that I'm drafting code at, and I come in and fill in the details later. I hadn't connected this idea to the journal articles that I am working on; I typically feel somewhat guilty when I add a FIXME in my LaTex document, but with this framing I see now that that is probably the better way to do it than aiming for a finished paragraph from the get-go. The square brackets and placeholders also seem much nicer that the FIXME I was using. Glad to have seen this at a timely moment for me!

John 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.

I absolutely loved this:

> if you tell someone you’re a journalist they’re going to believe you. Your job is to honor their trust.

What I didn’t realize until a few months ago about writing, James summarized as

> while “writing a first draft” is intimidating, “reading through all your notes” or moving note cards around on a table, contemplating structure, is not. In fact these tasks are kind of delightful.

Thanks for sharing.

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 difficult and in the end less popular across a large audience.

This seems similar to the method used by Robert Greene (and Ryan Holiday who learned it from him, and many others.) I just started using it (as in: I bought notecards and a box to store them.)

This would be a good overview of the method: https://billyoppenheimer.com/notecard-system/

Don't miss the discussion of McPhee's text editor. I would love to get more details about that. Catnip for this crowd.

> William L. Howarth, who edited the collection, described McPhee’s method for producing what the New Yorker called “fact pieces,” or deeply reported nonfiction.

He is an essayist and he wrote essays. Avoiding the word “essay” in favor of others is fine but it’s striking in a conversation about John McPhee, of all people.

“Fact pieces.” Ick.

This 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!

This is a beautiful website. The article and homepage.

> This was most of what I knew about nonfiction writing when I managed to land an assignment, on spec, to profile Douglas Hofstadter for a piece in the Atlantic’s print magazine.

That sounds like an impressively rapid climb.

The opening to John McPhee's essay "Los Angeles Against the Mountains" is part of his book The Control of Nature. This first section of that essay is one of my favorite pieces of writing I've ever read.

In Los Angeles versus the San Gabriel Mountains, it is not always clear which side is losing. For example, the Genofiles, Bob and Jackie, can claim to have lost and won. They live on an acre of ground so high that they look across their pool and past the trunks of big pines at an aerial view over Glendale and across Los Angeles to the Pacific bays. The setting, in cool dry air, is serene and Mediterranean. It has not been everlastingly serene.

On a February night some years ago, the Genofiles were awakened by a crash of thunder--lightning striking the mountain front. Ordinarily, in their quiet neighborhood, only the creek beside them was likely to make much sound, dropping steeply out of Shields Canyon on its way to the Los Angeles River. The creek, like every component of all the river systems across the city from the mountains to ocean, had not been left to nature. Its banks were concrete. Its bed was concrete. When boulders were running there, they sounded like a rolling freight. On a night like this, the boulders should have been running. The creek should have been a torrent. Its unnatural sound was unnaturally absent. There was, and had been, a lot of rain.

The Genofiles had two teen-age children, whose rooms were on the uphill side of the one-story house. The window in Scott's room looked straight up Pine Cone Road, a cul-de-sac, which, with hundreds like it, defined the northern limit of the city, the confrontation of the urban and the wild. Los Angeles is overmatched on one side by the Pacific Ocean and by the other by very high mountains. With respect to these principal boundaries, Los Angeles is done sprawling. The San Gabriels, in their state of tectonic young, are rising as rapidly as any range on earth. Their loose inimical slopes flout the tolerance of the angle of repose. Rising straight up out of the megalopolis, they stand ten thousand feet above the nearby sea, and they are not kidding with this city. Shedding, spalling, self-destructing, they are disintegrating at a rate that is among the fastest in the world. The phalanxed communities of Los Angeles have pushed themselves hard against these mountains, an aggression that requires a deep defense budget to content with the results. Kimberlee Genofile called to her mother, who joined her in Scott’s room as they looked up the street From its high turnaround, Pine Cone Road plunges downhill like a ski run, bending left and then right and then left and then right in steep christiania turns for half a mile above a three-hundred-foot straightaway that aims directly at the Genofiles’ house. Not far below the turnaround, Shields Creek passes under the street, and there a kink in its concrete profile had been plugged by a six-foot boulder. Hence the silence of the creek. The water was now spreading across the street. It descended in heavy sheets. As the young Genofiles and their mother glimpsed it all in the all but total darkness, the scene was suddenly illuminated by a blue electrical flash. In the blue light they saw a massive blackness, moving. It was not a landslide, not a mudslide, not a rock avalanche; nor by any means was it the front of a conventional flood. In Jackie’s words, “It was just one big black thing coming at us, rolling, rolling with a lot of water in front of it, pushing the water, this big black thing. It was just one big black hill coming towards us.”

In geology, it would be known as a debris flow. Debris flows amass in stream valleys and more or less resemble fresh concrete. They consist of water mixed with a good deal of solid material, most of which is above sand size. Some of it is Chevrolet size. Boulders bigger than cars ride long distances in debris flows. Boulders grouped like fish eggs pour downhill in debris flows. The dark material coming towards the Genofiles was not only full of boulders, it was so full automobiles it was like bread dough mixed with raisins. On its way down Pine Cone Road, it plucked up cars from driveways and the street. When it crashed into the Genofiles’ house, the shattering of safety glass made terrific explosive sounds. A door burst open. Mud and boulders poured into the hall. We're going to go, Jackie thought. Oh my God, what a hell of a way for the four of us to die together.

The parents' bedroom was on the far side of the house. Bob Genofile was in there kicking through white satin draperies at the paneled glass, smashing it to provide an outlet for the water, when the three others ran in to join him. The walls of the house neither moved nor shook. As a general contractor, Bob had built dams, department stores, hospitals, six schools, seven churches, and this house. It was made of concrete block with steel reinforcement, sixteen inches on center. His wife had said it was stronger than any dam in California. His crew had called it "the fort." It those days, twenty years before, the Genofiles' acre was close by the edge of the mountain brush, but a developer had come along since then and knocked down thousands of trees and put Pine Cone Road up the slope. Now Bob Genofile was thinking, I hope the roof holds. I hope the roof is strong enough to hold. Debris was flowing over it. He told Scott to shut the bedroom door. No sooner was the door closed than it was battered down and fell into the room. Mud, rock, water poured in. It pushed everybody against the far wall. "Jump on the bed," Bob said. The bed began to rise. Kneeling on it--on a gold velvet spread--they could soon press their palms against the ceiling. The bed also moved towards the glass wall. The two teen-agers got off, to try to control the motion, and were pinned between the bed's brass railing and the wall. Boulders went up against the railing, pressed it into their legs, and held them fast. Bob dived into the muck trying to move the boulders, but he failed. The debris flow, entering through the windows as well as the doors, continued to rise. Escape was still possible for the parents but not for the children. The parents looked at each other and did not stir. Each reached for and held one of their children. Their mother felt suddenly resigned, sure that her son and daughter would die and she and her husband would quickly follow. The house became buried to the eaves. Boulders sat on the roof. Thirteen automobiles were packed around the building, including five in the pool. A din of rocks kept banging against them. The stuck horn of a buried car was blaring. The family in the darkness in their fixed tableau watched one another by the light of a directional signal, endlessly blinking. The house had filled up in six minutes, and the mud stopped rising near the children's chins.

I suspect a large contingent here will really hate this suggestion but here it goes:

The McPhee method sounds like a great framework for making writing prompts. That is, prompts for LLMs to write things.

>in stage one he accumulates notes; in stage two he selects them; in stage three he structures them; and in stage four he writes. By the time he is crafting sentences the structure of the piece as a whole, and of each section, even paragraph, and the logic connecting them all, is already determined, thanks to the mechanical work done in the first three stages. McPhee is on rails the whole time he writes his first draft. From there it’s all downhill and the standard thing that everybody does: revision, revision again, then refinement—a sculptor with ax, then knife, then scalpel.

I know hackernews kinda hates LLMs but I don think this idea has to be so offensive. Much of the work and value from the author is in collecting these fragments and structuring them. Purely from a communication standpoint, I have no issues whatsoever with an LLM stitching them together and choosing the vocab and grammar.

This is a well-written, interesting article. The only issue I have is with this:

> He said, if you tell someone you’re a journalist they’re going to believe you. Your job is to honor their trust.

Sadly, that is no longer true. Today's "journalists" far too often see their job as proselytizing rather than reporting.