The McPhee method for writing deeply reported nonfiction

Summary

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...