Let’s wrap up my thoughts on John McPhee’s Draft No. 4 today with a look at his comments on structure along with a couple of leftovers ideas I want to highlight from his work.
First, by structure McPhee refers to the overall framework that organizes the work. He doesn’t quite get down to the sentence-level (although there are occasional examples, such as when he points out that direct quotations are best used to allow the reader to retain judgment about an idea). His interest in structure is more about how to use it to present a story to a reader in the most interesting possible way. He has a few rules of thumb that help him toward this aim.
One concern is that structure should never become fully visible to the reader. McPhee compares it to a skeleton – the structure should be as visible to the reader as bones are to the eye. He also hates the idea of imposing a structure, preferring instead that it emerge naturally from the material. As most stories work best when the highest point of tension breaks around sixty percent of the way into a piece, his main organizing idea is to look for this climax in the story before finding a way to remain faithful to the story’s chronology in his writing.
This presents a fascinating challenge. McPhee points out that almost all stories struggle with a structural tension between chronology and theme (and that chronology tends to win). Most writers interpret ‘telling the story truthfully to its chronology’ as a dictum to order the events in sequence and describe each in turn. Some stories cooperate with this robotic approach but most require the author to do a little more work to discover the best way to tell the story. It’s this work that McPhee calls structure – where is the tension and how can I show it to the reader? – and it again echoes the last thought I shared in my prior post – writing is selection.
First drafts and feedback
The last thought on structure is that a first draft is anything that has yet to fully form its own skeleton. Therefore, each new sentence affects all the existing sentences. This fact should encourage the writer to move slowly through the first draft in order to understand how these changes are affecting the overall work.
McPhee notes that the best feedback for a first draft should include insight, encouragement, and reassurance, all rolled into an informal conversation. It’s a lot but I think I agree with the strategy. The goal with feedback is to compel the writer to produce a second draft and it doesn’t really matter if it’s better than the first draft – once the cycle of writing and revision is established, the writer will work it out.
One important thought on feedback – as feedback comes from a reader (even if that reader is a writer), it’s important to remember how reader suggestions always reflect the reader’s rather than the writer’s passions. A good approach while delivering feedback might be to first confirm the writer’s intentions, then work out how the draft is meeting those goals.
Last thought
McPhee describes the origin of the expression ‘starboard out, starboard home’, a phrase I’d never heard before, and I was surprised by how it stuck with me. The idea refers to how the most expensive cabins on ships sailing between England and India were placed so that the rich could buy the luxury of staying out of the sun.
It made me wonder which of our present-day expressions or concepts are slated for extinction, and so I made a list of candidates:
-Panel discussions
-Coinsurance
-Poverty line
-Asian fusion
-Unleaded gasoline
-Acoustic set
-Five lane freeway
-Global warming
-True On Average
-Fast casual
-First down
-Think tank
-PowerPoint
Thanks for reading, everyone.
