Over the past week I’ve enjoyed flipping through John McPhee’s Draft No. 4, a collection of essays outlining his approach to writing and journalism. His essay on “structure” may be the most satisfying part of the group.
McPhee is rightly famous for his thoughtful story structures, many of which upend the traditional chronological narrative.
There’s a long section in this essay where he outlines the relationship between the raw notes and the final structure of a story:
The approach to structure in factual writing is like returning from a grocery store with materials you intend to cook for dinner. You set them out on the counter, and what’s there is what you deal with, and all you deal with. If something is red and globular, you don’t call it a tomato if it’s a bell pepper. To some extent, the structure of a composition dictates itself, and to some extent it does not. Where you have a free hand, you can make interesting choices.
He goes on to elaborate on one of those choices—a moment of stark, satisfying contrast that appears in his book Encounters with the Archdruid, which pits environmentalist David Brower against three opponents over three sections of the book. One section features McPhee, Brower, and Floyd Dominy, commissioner of the Bureau of Reclamation, on a contentious raft trip down the Grand Canyon.
There’s a moment in the book where Brower opts out of going down one of the nastier rapids in the canyon. When Dominy confronts Brower about why he didn’t ride the rapid, he simply says, “Because I’m chicken.”
McPhee then ingeniously contrasts that moment with a section detailing Brower’s hair-raising climbing adventures in the Sierra Nevada. Summiting peaks, etc.
The new section went on to describe Brower as a rope-and-piton climber of the first order, who had clung by his fingernails to dizzying rock faces and granite crags. The white space that separated the Upset Rapid and the albinism said things that I would much prefer to leave to the white space to say.
Taylor Coe 