#partly because it's relevant to my muse among other things

[reginrokkr]

This morning I've been reconsidering my stance in holding off when it comes about spoilers every time a new patch comes. Mainly because I've noticed that each person has their priorities when playing Genshin and what might me important to me (heavy lore 99% of the times), might not be for the next person and chances are that for example a questline such as the Aranara's has never been played even up until now by some. Meaning that even after all this time, talking about that questline would be spoilers for someone. Some might put more interest in events that are more lighthearted and include a large variety of characters and prioritize that over what I do, while I, even if usually I take a bit longer until I get to play those events (sometimes I don't, depending of time restrictions but also depending of my interest on things I see here and there) and sometimes I don't even play them myself and simply limit myself to what I see peeps talking and what I search deliberately to inform myself of.

Furthermore, I've noticed some people who would talk about recent things without a warning at all and nothing seems to happen (as it should imo, it's just this constant fear of mine which I should let go of). Related to myself now, I also realized thanks to the previous patch that this hype kind of dies down when waiting to comment things and it doesn't quite feel the same anymore, even if the content of what there is to transmit is essentially the same.

So in view of what I discussed here and more that are hard to put into words, I'm making the decision of establishing this blog as not spoiler free effective immediately. That is not to say that I will start bombarding the dash now with things I want to talk about, as these posts tend to take time to be written to begin with and by the time I finish putting all my thoughts in order and start posting, chances are that for a good portion of people it won't count as spoilers anymore. All in all, I want this experience to be less restrictive to myself, specially seeing people talking about spoilers without making mention that they are and nothing really happens.

[mercerislandbooks]

Draft No. 4 by John McPhee

John McPhee has been doing basically the same thing for over fifty years, and been doing it so well that there’s now a name for what he helped invent: creative non-fiction. More than simple reportage, his writing is always distinctive and artistic while remaining resolutely truthful. Critic Michael Dirda says of him, “Never as flashy as Hunter Thompson or Tom Wolfe ... McPhee has always relied on prose that is fact-rich, leisurely, requiring a certain readerly patience with scientific and geographical description, and nearly always enthralling.” I might quibble with the use of the word nearly there, but otherwise spot on. Any McPhee book deserves notice, but the one he’s produced at this late stage in his career is worthy of more than usual. In Draft No. 4, he brings his full arsenal of talents to bear on the subject of his own life and work—catnip for his fans. I count myself among them, and so does the writer Matthew Fleagle, a frequent guest at Message in a Bottle. It was inevitable that we’d have a long conversation about DN4 and want to share it with this audience. Thanks in advance for your certain readerly patience.

--James

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Matt: I've been trying to synthesize the various points of my enjoyment of this book into something either insightful or provocative to lay on your doorstep. Clever and sweeping I left sitting in the car. Good thing, too, because even those first two have run off like unleashed hounds and won't come back. I'm left holding a book whose page edges are speckled with "archivally correct" nonstaining, bronze book darts marking chunks of advice I'd like to remember in my own writing, or phrases particularly well crafted, or judgments I strongly agree with or harbor slight anxiety about. Or just little delights that gave me a feeling of solidarity with the author. (I would start with the very title of the book and McPhee's use of the abbreviation “No.” for number, which I consider lovely and which I recently and with sadness opted not to use at work because I feared my colleagues would no longer know what it could possibly mean.) It's not that there's nothing to say about the book as a whole, it's just that I found so little controversial or even surprising in it. In fact, the only moment of disquiet I experienced was righteous anger on the author's behalf when he was confronted by misguided editors. More on those later, perhaps.

One thing I kept noticing is that this book is one big example of itself, or at least of the second chapter, "Structure." You read about how McPhee decides on an organization that best suits the material he's gathered, and then a little later, even in other chapters, you notice how anecdotes are arranged out of chronological order and what the net effect of that is, and it induces you to reflect on why he chose that structure for that section. In that way, reading Draft No. 4 felt a little like a favorite uncle explaining economics to me while slipping five dollar bills into my jacket pocket. How did the work strike you as a whole? I've not read many books on the writing process before, but maybe you have? How does it stack up?

James: I have read quite a bit on this topic in my time, but I won't mention any titles here. I don't want to embarrass the authors of those books with my stubborn refusal to put their good advice into practice. Kill my darlings? Never! McPhee's book is quite a bit different than the others I've read. Those were mostly full of prompts and exhortations, tips about priming your muse's pump and developing regular literary habits, but Draft No. 4 assumes a reader who's already a practitioner. He doesn't bother coaxing words out of you, he just talks about how you might better focus your good ideas and cope with the torrents of prose you're producing. Or more accurately, he talks about how he does those things. It's rather flattering to be treated with such respect, as though his lofty, glossy-magazine, major-publishing-house concerns are relevant to us, the grubbiest of Grub Street hacks.

So I'm not sure I'd say that these are the first pages to turn for aspiring writers. They are, however, a joy for anyone who loves to read. As he has done so many times before (more often than anyone living?) he takes up the smallest, dullest, most overlooked pebble on the shingle, holds it to the light, and makes it sparkle. Oranges? Shad fishing? What can't he do? I swear, if he decided to investigate the mysteries of colonoscopy, I would be first in line to buy that book. Luckily for the squeamish, here we're dealing with a more seemly topic, the minutiae of writing and revision. He does go pretty deep into the weeds during the "Structure" chapter you mentioned, when he discusses the careful organization of his manila folders, but it's not boring, it's humanizing and fascinating. Says McPhee, "If this sounds mechanical, its effect [is] absolutely the reverse." He's talking about his process, but he might as well be talking about this very book. Draft No. 4, like all his writing, is replete with details about how a skilled, intelligent person goes about doing what he does, and that specificity is what makes his writing so generally insightful. Even if you're not a barge captain or a tennis champion or an award-winning nonfiction writer, you can relate. After all my years behind the counter at Island Books, I couldn't help but relate to his paean to the noble typewriter, for example. And I commiserated with him through every paragraph about his long war with his editors over the appropriate use of profanity in his work. I dropped a couple of—ahem—clinical terms in a blog post half a decade ago and I still feel the aftershocks occasionally. I'm sure your sparkly pebbles were different than mine, though. Other highlights for you?

Matt: You said "different than" instead of "different from." I believe McPhee's Miss Gould would bluepencil that usage were the venerated New Yorker copyeditor not in her grave these dozen years; he says so on page 168. I must admit my nature is sufficiently compulsive that I enjoyed the discussions of the fiddly little rules and style conventions that make English such a Tartarus for some people and such an Eden for people like me and I presume you. I also like the particular way he slalomed past them. He didn't say, now these are the rules of grammar and usage I insist on. If his narrative is like a downhill ski course in which his primary purpose is to tell a number of anecdotes, the rules are rather like the poles his elbows happen to slap on his way down the hill, and often the discussion of a rule is by way of telling an amusing story about an editor or a fellow writer. Still, I fasten onto the rules themselves—can't help it—and I grin with puerile self-satisfaction to find that, for example, Mr. McPhee and I understand each other with regard to “that vs. which.” Or that we're on the same side of the coyness issue: ”He became close to a Georgetown neighbor—a young senator named John F. Kennedy”—gah! When I read about his having to defend his understanding of the possessive of “Corps” before the editors of The New Yorker, I found myself so deep in his corner on this point (it can only be Corps', say John and I) that I had to hogtie my inner Yosemite Sam to keep from popping a vein. It's shameful to use an author of such stature in this ferrety little way, but we're talking about how we enjoyed the book, yes? This is partly how.

I did feel a bit strange navigating his section on frame of reference, which in the main I thought was extremely useful, especially his image of points of reference as the lights on a night-flying airliner, a structure whose size and shape and rate of travel are implied (but not EXplied—my word) by these lights. The author makes a strong point about what we're asking the reader to do, and how we fail them, when we use cultural references that don't help them imagine the structure we have in mind. But it backfires for me. When properly caffeinated I'm okay quick of wit, but I'm never more learnéd than I am. The author took pains to illustrate why some references are too fleeting in the culture not to be stale before they reach the editor, and others too obscure ever to be useful. But throughout this section and indeed the whole book he uses references that sail over my shoulder like the can of beer that Bruce Willis tosses to Matthew Perry at the end of the movie The Whole Nine Yards (there's one McPhee would strike, I'm sure) while he himself actually seems to relish dismissing Wilford Brimley as someone he thinks no one's ever heard of. Wilford Brimley! It made me think, truly I am a Philistine if one of the few references in McPhee's book that I get is one that he says one of his students used in a giant fail. But one I did understand was Philistine, which is on his white list, and which I've just used, so I won't fall apart over this. Still, with all the reading I did in college I didn't read Proust, so I don't know what the madeleine signifies, and McPhee never tells me. It all seems a little arbitrary. I guess you have to know which parties you'll be comfortable at. Did anyone else here find Henry James' use of the word lugubrious in The Princess Casamassima distracting? As you mentioned, any book by McPhee is a delight to read. Off the top of my head, I remember smiling at “innumerate” for people challenged by digital things—the disciplinary Antipodes of “illiterate.” And “ficused over” to mean obscure cheaply and quickly, referring I guess to hiding a crack in the plaster by moving a potted fig against the wall. Maybe these are old barnstormers, but I hadn't seen either before. And the beautifully vivid line describing what it was like using a tape transcriber, which was "activated with foot pedals, like a sewing machine or a pump organ." But more than any of these details—although I've focused a lot on them—the book really delivers as a series of purposeful and constructive reflections on how McPhee delivers a story, soup to nuts, complete with omissions (the section on cutting good material out of a story is bound to cut a lot of us to the quick). And I like your assessment that, while anyone who enjoys good prose might enjoy it, this book most usefully falls into the hands of a writer who is already working on a biggish project, maybe some poor blighter already sitting on the floor surrounded by piles of scissor-cut strips of typewritten notes, manila folders at the ready. Did I say that out loud? How about you, James, were there things in DN4 that you might incorporate into your own process?

James: I’d love to say yes, but it’s hard to see how. My writing projects don’t have nearly the scope that McPhee’s do (although this blog post is threatening to move in that direction). What I take away from DN4 is mostly very general, with potential application in any field, personal or professional. Over and over, McPhee demonstrates how curiosity and close observation can reveal wonders, how talent is actually the product of effort, and how important it is to find the right tool for the job and use it well. His tools just happen to be words; yours might be bedpans or socket wrenches or Perl commands. Pay attention, take care, and keep trying. If this is a how-to guide, it’s really a How To Live.

You made fun of yourself earlier, but I’m going to stick up for mustelids everywhere and defend the ferrety picking of nits. One of the significant lessons here, as in all our man’s work, is that small details matter. You don’t get the proper Big Picture without them. I like knowing that a Union Pacific coal train is exactly seven thousand four hundred and eighty-five feet long and that a WWII-era Japanese incendiary balloon did not cross the entire Pacific Ocean and demolish a plutonium reactor at Hanford. At least not exactly.

I even like the things I don’t know. I mean, I knew about the madeleine and Wilford Brimley, but I sure as heck didn’t know until now that odobene was the perfect adjective to describe his facial hair. “Writing has to be fun at least once in a pale blue moon,” says Mr. McPhee, and his mustache fashion show was a monkey barrel’s worth.

I’m going to resist the temptation to talk about all this ad infinitum, piling up drafts of our own in double-digit quantities. Before we wrap up, though, I have to say something about the last pages of the book. My note about the anecdote that concludes Draft No. 4, the story of a meeting between a five-star general and a nondescript college kid—a young writer by the name of John McPhee (gah!)—was a simple one: “What an ending!” It inspires me to finish our conversation with a big musical number or something equally splashy. But since that ending is so great largely because it’s about the impact of what’s left out and not said, I’ll skip it.

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