So What Are You Working On?

In “Draft No. 4,” a recent piece in The New Yorker, author John McPhee offers sage advice on the writing process, all the way from those first torturous days of dealing with writer’s block through to the final line-by-line edit. “So what are you working on?”, well-meaning friends and family ask. For many writers, even professionals, that can be a terrifying question. 

Lucky for us, McPhee begins with a call to take heart: “if you lack confidence in setting one word after another…if you feel sure that you will never make it and were not cut out to do this…you must be a writer.” “How could anyone ever know that something is good before it exists?” he asks.

By extension, how could we know that something is bad? Why should we let ourselves decide that it’s all a mess, that the project is irredeemable, before we’ve gotten to the final page of that first draft? We all know that the first draft is usually the hardest. McPhee advises writers to simply “blurt out, heave out, babble out something—anything—as a first draft.” His advice echoes that of author Anne Lamott, who famously (and in more colorful language) urges writers to embrace the “shitty first draft.” The SNL Writing Guide agrees, and you can find a number of suggestions for getting through this tough stage in the Drafting section. Be prepared for this stage of writing to take the longest; McPhee estimates that he spends about four times as much time on the first draft as each subsequent draft.

After the “first awful blurting,” McPhee moves on to the issue that guides the rest of his essay: revision. “Revision,” he asserts, is “the essence of the process. The adulating portrait of the perfect writer who never blots a line comes express mail from fairyland.” At this point, he’s still focusing on what you might have heard called “global” revision or “higher order concerns." Ideas are still shifting, paragraphs are being cut or expanded, structure is still being worked out. In fact, it’s not until “Draft No. 4” that McPhee feels ready to move on to his strategies for “local” revision, or “lower order concerns.”

And he starts with boxes: boxes around words or phrases that don’t seem quite right, or words that may present an opportunity. “While the word inside the box may be perfectly O.K.,” he says, “there is likely a better word…a word right smack on the button, and why don’t you try to find it?” At first glance, McPhee seems to be recommending what writing teachers have worked long and hard to communicate: that revision is much more, and much harder, than pulling out a thesaurus. But McPhee is quick to caution us: “thesauruses are useful things...They are also dangerous. They can lead you to choose a polysyllabic and fuzzy word when a simple and clear one is better.” (For more on the value of simple words, read Richard Lederer’s excellent—and appropriately short—essay “The Case for Short Words.”)

McPhee’s essay offers some useful examples of the pitfalls of developing a case of “thesaurusitis.” It’s the dictionary, he believes, that we should be reaching for instead. Thesauruses can be helpful, but “they don’t talk about the words they list.” When we’re presented with a slew of synonyms, it’s hard to decide which is truly the best fit (or, le mot juste). The dictionary, on the other hand, can provide us with not only the denotation of a word—its literal meaning—but also its connotation, or what we can use the word to imply. McPhee describes these subtleties as “hues,” similar to the differences we assign to colors. For example, “gleam” appears in a list of synonyms for “flash.” If we want to describe someone who is angry, we might say, “her eyes flashed,” but we’re unlikely to say “her eyes gleamed,” instead reserving that word for a happier person.  

The trick is making sure you have a good dictionary. DePaul’s library provides access to several comprehensive dictionaries, including the gold standard, the Oxford English Dictionary (which, if you’re truly curious, will provide all of the above plus etymology—how the word developed or was first used).

Finally, McPhee discusses the last step in the writing process: the line-by-line, word-by-word edit. Authors like McPhee have expert copy editors for this task. For the rest of us, there are a number of reference books, such as Garner’s Modern American Usage, Fowler’s Modern English Usage, and the Saint Martin’s Handbook, to help us decide whether our sentences are parallel and our verbs agree, whether we need “constitute” or “comprise,” or whether they’re “Dickens’s novels” or Dickens’ novels.” 

And, at last, when the nerve-wracking first draft has been transformed into the carefully, thoughtfully revised final product, we have the pleasure of starting all over. And once again, friends, family, and colleagues ask, “So what are you working on?”