How John McPhee's Slow Writing Process Produced Deep Articles

00:00:00.000 | So I wanted to do a quick deep dive today

00:00:04.320 | before we got into our questions.

00:00:06.400 | We do have a good collection of questions,

00:00:07.720 | but I wanted to tackle this question,

00:00:09.580 | is friction bad?

00:00:14.120 | And the precipitating event

00:00:17.360 | that got me thinking about this question

00:00:19.360 | was reading John McPhee's book, "Draft Number Four."

00:00:25.360 | So "Draft Number Four" is a book

00:00:27.440 | that John McPhee wrote relatively recently

00:00:30.880 | about the process of writing

00:00:33.260 | and things he has learned about the process of writing.

00:00:35.520 | There's a little bit of memoir thrown in there

00:00:38.020 | and quite a bit of discussion on things like structure.

00:00:40.120 | And what caught my attention,

00:00:41.460 | among other things when I was reading it,

00:00:42.880 | is that he described his research process,

00:00:46.080 | how he organized and made use of the information

00:00:49.600 | he collected during research in the pre-computer era.

00:00:53.040 | So McPhee has been active in professional writing

00:00:55.040 | since the '60s,

00:00:55.880 | a long period before there were computers.

00:00:57.920 | And here was his process.

00:00:59.640 | He would go out in the field

00:01:01.520 | and take tons of notes,

00:01:03.080 | both in notebooks and on tape recorders.

00:01:06.600 | And McPhee is a long-term researcher.

00:01:09.960 | It's not unusual for him to spend eight months,

00:01:12.960 | 12 months on a single article.

00:01:15.800 | Now, of course, back then,

00:01:16.640 | they would write articles of crazy lengths,

00:01:19.060 | like 40,000-word articles, which is crazy.

00:01:21.340 | They'd have to break them up over multiple issues.

00:01:23.040 | There are many books.

00:01:24.140 | But he would fill up many notebooks, many tape recorders.

00:01:27.560 | All right, so how do we get from that?

00:01:29.840 | How does McPhee get from that?

00:01:31.180 | Stack of notebooks, stack of tapes,

00:01:34.680 | to an article that's coming out in "The New Yorker."

00:01:37.360 | So here's what he used to do.

00:01:38.960 | First, he would painstakingly type up all of those notes.

00:01:43.960 | So he would go through the notebooks

00:01:46.600 | and type up on his typewriter,

00:01:48.720 | remember, pre-computer era,

00:01:50.400 | type up on his typewriter

00:01:53.160 | everything that was in those notebooks.

00:01:54.740 | Then he would go to those tapes

00:01:56.820 | and he would transcribe everything

00:02:00.060 | that was recorded on those tapes,

00:02:01.660 | all of the interviews and conversations on those tapes.

00:02:04.100 | He had one of those old-school dictation desks

00:02:06.460 | where you had foot pedals,

00:02:07.340 | so you could control the speed of the tape recorder

00:02:09.560 | with a foot pedal so that you could slow it down

00:02:11.380 | just enough that you could keep up when you're typing.

00:02:13.620 | This used to be real common back when dictation was used.

00:02:16.300 | So he would type everything up.

00:02:17.300 | And when he was typing it up on his typewriter,

00:02:20.060 | separate blocks of notes would be separated

00:02:22.840 | with multiple blank lines.

00:02:25.140 | So, okay, here's some notes from one conversation.

00:02:27.780 | Now here's some notes about something else.

00:02:29.380 | He'd put blank lines.

00:02:30.520 | And the reason why he would do that

00:02:31.700 | is that after he had laboriously typed up all of this,

00:02:34.940 | and we're talking weeks and weeks of work,

00:02:37.620 | he would Xerox copy every one of those pages,

00:02:40.140 | take the Xerox copies and cut out each of those blocks.

00:02:44.540 | So he had space in between each block of notes

00:02:47.100 | and he would cut out strips from these pages

00:02:50.440 | along those spaces between the blocks of notes.

00:02:53.180 | So he would just have endless slips of paper,

00:02:56.260 | each piece of paper with a separate piece of conversation

00:02:59.100 | or observation or note that he had took.

00:03:01.100 | Then he would sort those strips of papers into topic

00:03:03.720 | and put them all into a folder dedicated to that topic.

00:03:06.340 | So now he would have, after weeks of work,

00:03:09.340 | dozens of folders,

00:03:10.820 | each dedicated to a particular event,

00:03:13.620 | discussion, or topic relevant to the article.

00:03:16.980 | And the folder would be full of all of his notes

00:03:19.340 | he had taken anywhere relevant to that topic.

00:03:23.740 | Finally, he would then take a card,

00:03:26.660 | I'm assuming it'd be an index card, he didn't specify.

00:03:28.660 | And for each of these topics,

00:03:29.620 | he would write that name on a card.

00:03:30.780 | And he had a piece of plywood in his office.

00:03:34.780 | And Justin and I were talking about this earlier,

00:03:36.400 | but I was gratified to hear that early in his career,

00:03:38.880 | McPhee had a deep work HQ style office.

00:03:43.180 | It was a Nassau street above a store,

00:03:46.100 | across the hall from a massage parlor,

00:03:48.860 | just like we're above a restaurant

00:03:50.420 | on the main street of our town,

00:03:51.700 | across from a physical therapist.

00:03:53.380 | And I don't even know what the other people do.

00:03:55.740 | I think they mainly just glared us for not wearing masks,

00:03:59.220 | but I don't even know what they do.

00:04:01.020 | But in our weird HQ, so McPhee had a weird HQ as well.

00:04:06.580 | And he would lay these cards out on the plywood

00:04:09.460 | and move them around, move them around.

00:04:10.540 | What's the structure for this piece?

00:04:11.900 | And he could spend weeks doing that

00:04:13.580 | until he finally had figured out this topic

00:04:16.540 | and this topic and back to this.

00:04:17.940 | And he had all the cards figured out.

00:04:20.380 | Now he was ready to write.

00:04:21.940 | And when it came time to write,

00:04:23.020 | he would say, this is the card I'm on right now.

00:04:25.020 | Let me take the folder corresponding to that card,

00:04:27.300 | open it up, spread out all these slips of paper.

00:04:29.340 | Here's everything I know about that topic.

00:04:31.180 | So I can draw from these quotes and these citations

00:04:33.580 | and these observations as I'm writing

00:04:35.580 | that section of the article.

00:04:37.540 | Then he moved on to the next section,

00:04:38.580 | take that folder, lay them out,

00:04:40.020 | write that section of the article.

00:04:41.300 | That is how John McPhee would research

00:04:43.860 | and write his articles.

00:04:45.020 | This is an incredibly laborious process.

00:04:49.220 | It's a very time-consuming process.

00:04:50.900 | He would spend weeks and weeks

00:04:52.340 | just working with his notes before he was writing.

00:04:55.940 | It is a process that is full of friction.

00:04:58.940 | He's literally cutting paper with scissors

00:05:01.220 | and putting them in folders.

00:05:02.620 | I mean, this is a process

00:05:03.700 | where there's friction all over the place.

00:05:05.940 | But anyone reading that part of draft number four

00:05:08.260 | would say that makes complete sense.

00:05:12.180 | What John McPhee was trying to do necessitates slowness.

00:05:17.180 | He has to internalize this information,

00:05:21.580 | be exposed to it again and again,

00:05:23.860 | marinate in this information

00:05:26.700 | until he really just feels like he is in that world

00:05:29.620 | and understands it.

00:05:30.460 | So as he begins trying to structure his piece,

00:05:32.260 | he can see how it should all come together.

00:05:34.500 | And when it comes time to write a section,

00:05:36.000 | he can see what's out there and knows what to pull from.

00:05:38.620 | The friction is a feature,

00:05:40.180 | not a bug in this particular system.

00:05:43.180 | And this is common if you study the writing techniques

00:05:47.100 | and the research techniques

00:05:48.260 | of really acclaimed nonfiction writers.

00:05:51.360 | They have high friction, slow systems.

00:05:55.260 | Now, there's an early essay I wrote

00:05:57.060 | for my newsletter and blog at calnewport.com years ago,

00:06:01.260 | where I talked about

00:06:02.640 | the historian Taylor Branch's research methods.

00:06:06.420 | So Taylor Branch wrote this fantastic

00:06:10.060 | award-winning trilogy,

00:06:11.660 | three-part biography of Martin Luther King,

00:06:14.420 | epic, epic project, many, many years.

00:06:17.620 | I believe it won a Pulitzer

00:06:18.980 | or a National Book Award, one of the two, fantastic series.

00:06:22.620 | And he talked about years ago,

00:06:24.180 | and I wrote about this, a similarly slow process.

00:06:26.220 | Now, he had computers at the time he was writing this,

00:06:28.180 | but he used a Microsoft Access database

00:06:31.820 | and everything, every bit of note he would find anywhere,

00:06:35.420 | he would just read everything, everything.

00:06:38.760 | What are all the news?

00:06:39.740 | Here's a day when Martin Luther King is in this town.

00:06:42.020 | Let me go find all the newspapers from that town

00:06:44.780 | on microfiche and go read them

00:06:46.700 | and pull out anything that seems relevant

00:06:48.620 | to understanding what was going on that day.

00:06:49.840 | So, I mean, he would really read every letter,

00:06:51.980 | but would go three, four layers away

00:06:54.180 | from even what King was doing

00:06:55.940 | just to find all this tangential information.

00:06:58.140 | And he coded everything with a date

00:07:01.420 | and put it into this database.

00:07:03.420 | And then he could spit out, like, okay,

00:07:05.860 | here's the period of King's life that I'm writing about now.

00:07:09.100 | And he could spit out,

00:07:10.140 | give me everything I have notes on from like this week.

00:07:15.060 | Every letter that was written that week,

00:07:16.660 | every newspaper I looked at.

00:07:18.020 | And so, again, this laborious process

00:07:20.100 | of let me just take everything in

00:07:22.300 | and put into a database and time code it.

00:07:25.940 | So when it comes time to write,

00:07:27.000 | I can have a density of information.

00:07:28.580 | What happened on this day and this week

00:07:30.060 | and immerse myself in it and then write.

00:07:33.420 | With confidence and with that iceberg

00:07:36.300 | below the surface of knowledge,

00:07:38.780 | supporting the thing that he was actually writing about.

00:07:40.420 | A slow process, laborious process,

00:07:43.140 | but a necessary process.

00:07:45.540 | So we see this with acclaimed writers,

00:07:47.500 | high friction, slow systems

00:07:49.140 | for making sense of information.

00:07:51.360 | Where we don't see this as anywhere else.

00:07:53.860 | And that is what I was noting is that that is a problem.

00:07:57.220 | We have made productivity synonymous

00:08:02.180 | with low friction and speed.

00:08:05.020 | How do we get this done faster?

00:08:06.740 | How do we get you the information you need quicker?

00:08:09.260 | Can we make connections for you on your behalf?

00:08:12.200 | Maybe the software can show you what you need.

00:08:14.180 | Can we throw machine learning at it?

00:08:15.580 | This would be the new thing to do.

00:08:17.000 | So that the amount of extra effort you have to do

00:08:20.680 | really does get minimized.

00:08:22.220 | And when it comes to hard cognitive work,

00:08:24.340 | especially creative cognitive work,

00:08:26.640 | minimizing friction, minimizing effort

00:08:28.540 | is not necessarily what we wanna do.

00:08:31.820 | The example of John McPheen,

00:08:33.100 | the example of Taylor Branch

00:08:34.580 | is canonical slow productivity in action.

00:08:38.760 | What they were doing required in the moment,

00:08:43.940 | inefficient, slow, thoughtful work.

00:08:48.420 | You look at any one day and you might say,

00:08:49.940 | this day was not productive.

00:08:50.980 | You cut things with scissors all day,

00:08:52.700 | but you fast forward out,

00:08:54.140 | zoom out to the looking at the next year, that full year,

00:08:56.780 | you say, wow, this was a fantastic article

00:08:58.680 | you produced that year.

00:08:59.520 | It's a very productive year.

00:09:01.620 | You zoom into a particular day,

00:09:02.700 | you see you're just cutting things with scissors,

00:09:03.940 | zoom out, incredibly productive year.

00:09:05.900 | And this was my observation.

00:09:07.440 | Friction is sometimes something we wanna get rid of.

00:09:11.500 | If I'm doing a mindless administrative task,

00:09:13.860 | make it easier for me to do it, sure.

00:09:16.180 | But sometimes friction is exactly what we need.

00:09:18.300 | If you're doing something deep,

00:09:20.300 | taking your time, going slow, having old tools,

00:09:23.380 | having to do processes to take time

00:09:25.700 | can be a feature and not a bug.

00:09:27.940 | So I think it's something we just need to keep in mind.

00:09:31.340 | Sometimes going slower,

00:09:32.940 | sometimes having things be a little bit harder

00:09:34.780 | is what you need.

00:09:35.780 | That's what it sometimes takes to do hard work.

00:09:40.500 | So I admire that process.

00:09:44.220 | By the way, like McPhee goes on

00:09:46.640 | and talked about his computer setup,

00:09:49.360 | once he got a computer setup,

00:09:50.740 | and he ran this completely weird

00:09:53.820 | old school editing software called K-Edit.

00:09:57.220 | That's like a line editor.

00:09:58.460 | It's not a WSYW word processor

00:10:00.680 | that someone custom programmed for him.

00:10:03.740 | And he tried to explain it and I couldn't understand it.

00:10:06.420 | So when he got computers, it did not simplify his life.

00:10:09.500 | He did not have a sort of Rome account,

00:10:12.780 | Zettelkasten system that was automatically

00:10:14.700 | putting all of his notes around.

00:10:16.040 | Somehow his computerized system

00:10:17.580 | seemed even more complicated to me

00:10:19.300 | than what he was doing with the note cards.

00:10:22.380 | - Your buddy Ryan has a similar process too, right?

00:10:24.540 | With the note cards and folders and stuff.

00:10:26.500 | - Yeah, Ryan will write down,

00:10:27.460 | Holiday will write down everything of interest

00:10:30.580 | from the books he's reading

00:10:31.660 | and then put them away into boxes of note cards.

00:10:35.180 | And he takes his time.

00:10:36.900 | And then when it comes time to write a book,

00:10:38.100 | he'll go through and pull out the note cards

00:10:39.700 | he thinks are relevant to that book

00:10:40.980 | and the information is all there.

00:10:42.020 | Yeah, it takes a lot longer to do the reading,

00:10:44.020 | but he would say that's the point.

00:10:45.740 | It's like, yeah, I want it to take long.

00:10:46.980 | I want to pull out the ideas.

00:10:48.580 | I want to think about them.

00:10:49.500 | I want to store them so I can use them later.

00:10:51.700 | You know, slowness is underrated,

00:10:54.180 | especially in our current world of work.

00:10:57.420 | (upbeat music)

00:11:00.000 | (upbeat music)

How John McPhee's Slow Writing Process Produced Deep Articles | Deep Questions with Cal Newport

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