#journalism

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.