Does John McPhee not have an editor? I, too, have spent afternoons agonizing over how I could possibly start or continue or finish a piece. Luckily, I’ve editors who I can consult and who sometimes know the inside of my brain better than I do. Or maybe this is a consequence of McPhee’s antipathy towards a nutgraf — something that I have always found to be a useful exercise, even if it does not remain in the final form of the piece.
I, for one, found his description of structure totally incomprehensible. Clearly, he has found a consistent way to do things, but I think Ceci is correct to say that this is more a look inside his head than applicable advice for us other human beings. I felt similarly with Rosenthal’s napkin drawings. Are the lines meant to indicate rising tension, or the story “coming back,” or something else?
In my experience, structure is intimately tied to the content of the reporting. I feel that McPhee and Rosenthal really gloss over this (Stewart feels slightly better). Sometimes, the narrative is obvious: X happened and then Y happened which shows Z. A scene might be so arresting and strongly reported that it can stand entirely on its own, the connections to the rest of the story so obvious they don’t need to be drawn out. Others might require popping in and out of the narrative to explain to the reader what exactly is happening. You don’t know what the story requires until you get down to the ground-level details.
I take the position, then, that the reporting comes first, and then the structure. Following a story requires chasing threads and conducting interviews that might end up being dead ends; naturally, those do not go in the piece. I think reporters generally have an instinct that, for their story, they need a central character or anecdote, some contextual information, and a thesis, and they will keep reporting until they have found all of those components. That’s not structure, which is much more intimate. I see that as much closer to gathering the basic ingredients for a story. I suppose the process of structuring can reveal deficiencies in reporting: you really need another scene, or don’t quite have the correct contextual quote, or some other crucial building block. But I guess I still don’t see that as structure guiding the reporting. Yes, you know that you need something specific to plug the hole; but you only know that specific thing exists and is sourceable because you’ve spent all that time reporting in the first place.
I am surprised that McPhee seems to skip over another essential component of the structuring process: deciding what doesn’t go in. “When I was through studying, separating, defining, and coding the whole body of notes, I had thirty-six three-by-five cards, each with two or three code words representing a component of the story. All I had to do was put them in order,” he writes. The presumption at the beginning of the writing process that it will all fit is astonishing. I have never once found that to be the case in my writing.
