When I first started writing for a real publication, I taught myself “reporting” with a simple self-made curriculum unfolding over six or seven articles. The first two pieces I wrote from my head, with reference to things I already knew or to books I’d read. For the third, I actually got out of the house, but didn’t yet have to play the journalist; I just wrote about taking a flying lesson in a small airplane. The fourth article required more gumption: I decided to shadow a friend of mine for a day while he did his job as a derivatives trader. I’m not sure how he got me in the door.
Real reporting involves talking to strangers. For my fifth article I did a single phone interview with someone I’d never met. That wasn’t so bad. For the seventh article, the real leap, I shadowed someone I didn’t know—my old driving instructor. I’d only met him briefly many years before. I asked to go along for a ride in his teaching car—two steering wheels, two sets of pedals. Later, we pulled over and chatted about his life and work. I had not gone to school for this. But I liked the advice I’d gotten from a journeyman reporter. He said, if you tell someone you’re a journalist they’re going to believe you. Your job is to honor their trust.
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 felt like a big break. But I also wasn’t quite sure what I was supposed to do.
I ended up relying on a very short user’s manual I’d discovered in the The John McPhee Reader, a book of collected journalism from the New Yorker writer John McPhee. In the introduction, William L. Howarth, who edited the collection, described McPhee’s method for producing what the New Yorker called “fact pieces,” or deeply reported nonfiction. I liked the sound of the method, and I liked the products of it. So I just did my best to copy what Howarth said McPhee did. It’s basically the process I’ve used ever since. The method is not that hard to describe and it’s so useful that I think it bears broadcasting. In fact I think those two or three pages from Howarth’s introduction are a decent substitute for journalism school, at one one-hundred-thousandth the price.
In brief, McPhee’s idea is to never face a blank page. Instead, 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.
Stage 1: Gathering notes
A simple but important question I had going into that first big assignment was when do you start writing? Should you do a little reporting, then write a little, then fill in the holes with more reporting? Or should you do all the reporting up front? (By “reporting” I just mean reading, doing research, calling people, going places, spending time with people in person.)
In the McPhee method, you do all the reporting up front. McPhee usually had one person at the center of each piece, so he would aim to spend a lot of time with that person. He’d go on long backpacking trips with them, or stay at their cottage for a season, or drive across the country with them. He’d immerse himself in their lives for months. And along the way he’d talk to their family, their friends, coworkers, rivals, other people in the same field—to say nothing of all the calls or visits he’d make to experts who could weigh in on this or that.
You can get a sense for what deep reporting looks like by reading one of McPhee’s articles. In “A Sense of Where You Are,” McPhee profiled Bill Bradley, then a wunderkind basketball star at Princeton. (Later, a U.S. senator.) In one set piece, Bradley is practicing jump shots in a gym somewhere.
Last summer, the floor of the Princeton gym was being resurfaced, so Bradley had to put in several practice sessions at the Lawrenceville School. His first afternoon at Lawrenceville, he began by shooting fourteen-foot jump shots from the right side. He got off to a bad start, and he kept missing them. Six in a row hit the back rim of the basket and bounced out. He stopped, looking discomfited, and seemed to be making an adjustment in his mind. Then he went up for another jump shot from the same spot and hit it cleanly. Four more shots went in without a miss, and then he paused and said, “You want to know something? That basket is about an inch and a half low.” Some weeks later, I went back to Lawrenceville with a steel tape, borrowed a stepladder, and measured the height of the basket. It was nine feet ten and seven-eighths inches above the floor, or one and one-eighth inches too low.
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