Ever wondered how to turn complex subjects into compelling stories? For John McPhee, a pioneer of narrative nonfiction, even *starting* proved a monumental challenge - he once spent two weeks paralyzed at his picnic table, unable to write a single word. This struggle ultimately led him to develop a now-famous, meticulously detailed system for research and writing that would redefine the genre.
The subject was the Pine Barrens of southern New Jersey. He had spent roughly eight months driving down from Princeton day after day, or taking a sleeping bag and a small tent. He had interviewed woodlanders, fire watchers, forest rangers, botanists, cranberry growers, blueberry pickers, keepers of a general store. He had read all the books, scientific papers, and a doctoral dissertation. He had assembled, in his own later phrase, enough material to fill a silo. And now he could not write a single sentence.
This is the origin story every writer needs to hear: even John McPhee, who would go on to publish more than thirty books, teach creative writing at Princeton University for decades, and win a Pulitzer Prize for his geological trilogy Annals of the Former World, once lay flat on his back for two weeks more than face the blank page.
What changed everything was not inspiration. It was structure. Specifically, it was a method so mechanical it involves scissors, plywood, and manila folders a system McPhee developed to answer a question that haunts every writer who has ever sat down with too much research: in what order should this stuff go?
The Frame First, the Voice Later
McPhee's insight, which he has described in essays collected as Draft No. 4 and elaborated in a 2013 New Yorker essay on structure, is that structure and prose are two different crafts. Most writers blend them, drafting their way toward an architecture they discover as they go. McPhee does the opposite. He builds the skeleton first, tests its logic, and only then writes the sentences that will give it life.
The approach, as he frames it, is like cooking. You go to the market, you come home with your ingredients, you set them out on the counter. What is there is what you deal with, and all you deal with. The order of cooking depends on what you bought. In factual writing, the structure depends on what you found.
James Somers, writing at jsomers.net, describes the four-stage process McPhee has used for decades: first, accumulate notes; second, select them; third, structure them; fourth, write. By the time McPhee is crafting sentences, the structure of the piece as a whole, of each section, even each paragraph, and the logic connecting them all is already determined. McPhee is on rails the whole time he writes his first draft, Somers observes. From there it is all revision a sculptor with ax, then knife, then scalpel.
This inversion of the usual writing process is what makes McPhee's method distinct. Most writers treat structure as something they find while drafting, or impose after a messy first pass. McPhee treats it as a problem to be solved before drafting begins, and he solves it with the rigor of an engineer.
The Physical Cartography of a Story
To solve the structural problem, McPhee builds a physical map. Before computers, this meant a specific, tactile routine: he would type up all his notes, leave blank space after each one, print the whole thing out, and then go through it with a pencil, coding each note in the margins according to which component of the story it belonged to.
Then came the scissors.
After reading and rereading the typed notes and developing the structure and coding the notes accordingly in the margins, McPhee would photocopy the whole set and then go at the copied pages with scissors, cutting each sheet into slivers of varying size. If the structure had thirty parts, the slivers would end up in thirty piles, each placed in its own manila folder.
The folders lived on a card table. When it was time to write a particular section, McPhee would spill out just that folder's contents nothing else. If the contents of the seventh folder were before me, he wrote, the contents of twenty-nine other folders were out of sight. Every organizational aspect was behind me. The procedure eliminated nearly all distraction and concentrated only the material I had to deal with in a given day or week. It painted him into a corner, he said, but in doing so it freed him to write.
The setup sounds tedious. It is meant to. McPhee's method is a deliberate trade: more work before drafting, less anxiety during it. The physical cutting and sorting forces the writer to handle every piece of research individually, to touch it, label it, and place it somewhere. By the time the writing begins, there are no surprises lurking in an unmarked notebook. The questions have already been answered, or at least filed in a folder to be answered later.
The Plywood and the Shape
Before the folders come the shapes. McPhee draws the architecture of a piece on paper before writing begins, not as a list but as a geometry a line, a circle, a Y, a spiral, whatever describes how the reader will travel through the material.
The drawing is cheap, McPhee has said, and the wrong order is not. He drew these shapes by hand for pieces that ran to book length. The New Yorker editor Austin Kleon, who has written about McPhee's structural method, notes that McPhee usually has his beginning and ending in mind when he starts writing the frame is already partially built. What the physical sorting does is locate the beginning and ending within a structure that makes the reader want to turn pages.
For the first part of Coming into the Country, McPhee drew a circle. The reason: the narrative opens at a moment the story later comes back to, and the reader closes the loop without being told there was one. The shape did the work that an explicit callback would have done clumsily.
This is McPhee's core argument about structure in nonfiction: nothing in it is invented. The order is the invention. Every fact is true, but the way facts are arranged creates suspense, revelation, and meaning. A reader does not experience a piece of narrative nonfiction the way they read a Wikipedia article, moving from section to section as if checking boxes. They experience it as a journey, and the writer controls the pace of that journey by controlling where the path goes next.
Testing the Structure: The Question at the End of Every Section
How does McPhee know if a shape works? He tests it with a simple question: what question does each section leave the reader holding at its last line, and does the next section answer that question or a different one?
If two parts answer the same question, one of them goes. This is structural economy. McPhee's method is relentless about not wasting the reader's curiosity. Every section earns its place by raising a question or answering one. Nothing sits still for long.
The writer Verlyn Klinkenborg has warned, and McPhee keeps the signal on his desk: there is no such thing as memory's arrow or thought's arrow. Chronology will offer itself first, because that is the order the notes arrived in. But chronology is rarely the argument. If a piece is about why a particular river matters, the story does not need to follow the calendar. It needs to follow the logic.
Writing advice online, McPhee has observed, is mostly about sentences, because a sentence fits in a post. The problem above the sentence the problem of structure, of how to arrange a reader's experience of information they did not choose to encounter is his domain. It belongs to anyone keeping a reader inside a subject the reader did not choose.
From the Pine Barrens to Levels of the Game
The Pine Barrens piece ultimately consisted of some five thousand sentences. It was, in McPhee's telling, the first time he had tried to put so many different components characters, description, dialogue, narrative, set pieces, humor, history, science into a single package. The picnic-table crisis was the moment he learned that the package needed an architecture before it could hold anything.
That architecture became the template. Years later, when McPhee was working on Levels of the Game his portrait of the 1969 U.S. Open semifinal between Arthur Ashe and Clark Graebner at Forest Hills he used the same method to solve a different structural problem. The book covers one tennis match. Between points, McPhee cuts away to how each man was raised and coached and taught to price risk, so that by the time the match turns, the reader reads the two swings as arguments about two childhoods. Nothing in it is invented. The order is the invention.
The Levels of the Game structure also introduced what McPhee calls the "fourplex portrait." After creating a dual portrait successfully, he decided to attempt something with four people. The solution was to identify one main character and show how that character interacts with three others. The lead character, first among equals, gives the piece a unity; the three other characters reveal a wider range of perspectives and personalities. McPhee pictured his scheme as ABCD a main character in the center, three satellites in orbit.
This is not a formula. It is a design principle. The ABCD structure works because it solves a specific problem: how to write about complexity without losing the reader's thread. The main character provides continuity. The satellites provide context. The structure does not announce itself; it simply makes the reader feel oriented without being told they are oriented.
Why This Matters for MyWritersReview Readers
For writers working on longform nonfiction whether a 3,000-word magazine feature or a multi-year book project the McPhee method offers something counterintuitive: more preparation, less creative freedom, and a stranger kind of confidence. The system does not make writing easier. It makes the hard part happen earlier, when there is still time to fix things.
Modern writing tools have made McPhee's scissors and manila folders largely unnecessary. Digital outlining software, note-taking apps, and the ability to tag and sort research electronically accomplish the same structural work faster. But the underlying principle remains: the structural phase of writing is separate from the prose phase, and confusing the two is where most longform projects stall. When a writer faces a blank page, they are usually facing a structural problem they have not yet solved. McPhee's method says: solve the structure first. Then write.
The other practical insight is this: McPhee's method is scale-neutral. The same principles that organized a 5,000-word Pine Barrens essay in 1966 organized a Pulitzer-winning geological trilogy decades later. A writer does not need to be John McPhee to use index cards and a plywood board. They need only be willing to treat structure as a craft beyond a consequence.
The Voice That Comes After
There is a detail in the accounts of McPhee's method that often surprises readers: the famous McPhee voice the dry, exact, unhurried tone that readers recognize in any of his pieces comes after the structural decisions, not before. That tone is what is left over after the hard decision, and the hard decision was which of several possible orders would make a reader want the next block of geology or law or freight.
Choose wrong, McPhee has said, and the sentences cannot rescue it. This is a signal and a permission. It tells writers that their best prose will not save a poorly structured piece but it also tells them that structure is learnable, repeatable, and testable in a way that prose voice is not. You cannot always control whether a sentence lands. You can always test whether a section answers the question the previous section raised.
When McPhee is asked how he knows when he is done, he says he just knows. He is lucky that way, he adds. What he knows is that he cannot do any better and that someone else might do better, but that is all he can do. So he calls it done. There is no method for the final decision. There is only the accumulated judgment of a lifetime spent cutting sentences and shuffling index cards until the structure sings.
What This Means for Writers Today
McPhee's method, developed across sixty years of work for The New Yorker and published in books like Draft No. 4, is one of the few systematic accounts of how a master nonfiction writer actually works. It is not mystical. It is not inspirational. It is a set of physical habits type, cut, sort, draw, test that any writer can adopt.
The core discipline is separation: keep the structural phase and the prose phase separate. Do not try to solve the architecture while you are worrying about word choice. Do not try to find the shape while you are still reporting. Finish the research, sort the material, draw the structure, test the logic and only then open a blank page with the confidence that you know where it goes.
That confidence is what McPhee found under the ash tree in 1966, after two weeks of fear. He did not wait for it to arrive. He built it, card by card, until the structure was ready and the writing could begin.
Where to Read Further
The most comprehensive account of McPhee's method is James Somers' deep breakdown at jsomers.net, which traces the four-stage process and explains why separating structure from drafting changes everything about how a writer approaches a project. McPhee's own 2013 New Yorker essay on structure remains the essential primary source, detailing the Pine Barrens crisis and the scissors-and-folder routine that solved it. Austin Kleon's compilation of McPhee's structural principles distills the key ideas into a practical framework for writers working with complex material.