Master Non-Fiction Writer Remembers

John McPhee

Much of the struggle, for McPhee, has to do with structure. “Structure has preoccupied me in every project,” he writes, which is as true as saying that Ahab, on his nautical adventures, was preoccupied by a certain whale. McPhee is obsessed with structure. He sweats and frets over the arrangement of a composition before he can begin writing. He seems to pour a whole novel’s worth of creative energy just into settling which bits will follow which other bits.

The payoff of that labor is enormous. Structure, in McPhee’s writing, carries as much meaning as the words themselves. What a more ordinary writer might say directly, McPhee will express through the white space between chapters or an odd juxtaposition of sentences. It is like Morse code: a message communicated by gaps.

Structure in Restaurant Reviews

Chronological method is effective in that it’s easy for the reader to follow, but it always seems a little amateurish, at least to me. One of the disadvantages in the method is that it encourages clutter – “and then the hostesss showed us to our table.” That is, you fall into storytelling mode and include bits that really don’t tell you useful information about the restaurant. Better reviewers usually focus on the points they want to make and don’t present them chronologically because that can waste valuable space and fog the emphasis of the review.

Of course, once chronological order is abandoned, it can result in an “elusive” structure. That is, we aren’t quite sure why the information is presented in the order it’s presented. Some reviews do seem to be exercises in “nut graf” structure. There’s the lead that grabs us by the nose, and then there’s the nut graf making several key points, which are developed in that order. And some reviews do have the feel of the old inverted pyramid structure, as if the points of criticism were presented in order of descending importance. And in other instances, the structure seems purely associational, which does give such reviews a kind of casual, conversational quality.

Bottom line: Understand what sort of structure you are using or – having “jumped into” writing and having come up with a structure that works – be able to explain why you think it works.