The Creative Nonfiction Podcast with Brendan O'Meara Episode 500: Structure, Spec, and Panic with John McPhee
"Anything beats writing. Writing is tough," says John McPhee, staff writer for The New Yorker and author of more than thirty books of nonfiction.
Hey CNFers, this is Episode 500 of The Creative Nonfiction Podcast, the show where I speak to tellers of true tales about the true tales they tell. There are kilometer stones like 100, 200, 300, and 400, but this one, this is a milestone and it features the writer and journalist who made me want to write narrative nonfiction in the first place: John McPhee.
John is a titan, a soft-spoken titan. He is the author of more than 30 books, including A Sense of Where You Are, Levels of the Game, his Pulitzer Prize-winning Annals of the Former World, and the book that made me want to write nonfiction: The Survival of the Bark Canoe. John is 94 years young, still lives in Princeton where he has taught an exclusive masterclass on factual storytelling, a class taken by the likes of David Remnick and the late Grant Wahl, I believe, among countless people who have gone on to write and report with distinction.
He's been a staff writer for The New Yorker since the 1960s when William Shawn was the editor. Not long thereafter, he was offered a job to teach at his alma mater Princeton University and he famously edited students’ submissions not unlike how Shawn edited him at The New Yorker. He’s written about such wide ranging topics from basketball, to tennis, to bark canoes, to Alaska, to lacrosse, to oranges, to myriad topics in geology.
John is synonymous with thinking through structure and coming up with unique structures for most of his stories, each one something of a fingerprint: no two are alike and the facts borne out from this intensive, slow reporting dictate the shape of the story he has locked into.
His work is methodical and patient. He hangs out. He fills notebook after notebook, rarely uses a recorder, maybe only if there’s someone speaking in such technical jargon that there’s no way to keep pace. His career has been this wonderful balance of give and take: teach for most of the year and not write; then write and not teach. John is unassuming and gentle and an example of how you can do this work without bombast or pyro and still be riveting and sometimes downright hilarious.
So we talk about:
- The influence of his high school English teacher Olive McKee
- Living room fighters
- Writing on spec
- The notebooks he’s used for decades
- How a lack of confidences is an asset
- What a good editor does
- Writing as teaching
- How having a plan frees you to write
- The panic of having not written leads to productivity
- And how proud of his daughters he is
Parting shot on what it all means at 500 and maybe where I see the show going for the next 500.
Newsletter: Rage Against the Algorithm
Show notes: brendanomeara.com