get another ship

On reading John McPhee's Draft No. 4 and the question of fuck in a written piece.

In late 2024 I read John McPhee's “Draft No. 4 On the Writing Process”, which I forgot pretty quickly was to be read as a writer's manual, the details and accounts of several stories he's written for The New Yorker over the years were too entertaining.

I was engrossed.

The stories he tells, the assignments that took him to faraway places and inside the lives of regular people most of us never consider, are the anchors for what is really a telling of what it’s like to write for The New Yorker. (Pro tips for the general writing process included.)

I love this book even more for the adventures he’s taken as a writer. All I ever want is to experience an interesting life and write about it, and he’s been doing that on an immersive level since the late 1960s. He even spent time on the road with a 18-wheeler truck driver, an adventure I longed for in college and one that still occasionally percolates back to the surface of my present consciousness.

What would a life on the road be like? The wonderful solitude, the off days to devote to reading and writing, the rich characters I’d meet along the way. I could even take my cat with me. Once, while working as a ride share driver in New Orleans, I picked up a young couple who were working as a team to drive a big old tractor-trailer, their cats living it up in the back of the truck cabin. They were making thousands of dollars a week. I was making a small few hundred.

All of McPhee’s adventures required closely following experts in the field. Traveling in a bark canoe in the Alaska wilderness, for example. But experts are also real humans, usually existing outside the dome of public performance and under the radar of popular culture and its voyeurs. Real humans use common nomenclature.

Sometimes people curse.

As a stand-up comedian I know well that most hobby comics and up-and-comers, greener, younger, newbies rely heavily on raunch and cursing. Sometimes I wonder, when a comic uses “fuck” so many times in his set, Why is he so mad? Though I think it’s nerves more than a conscious decision. Still, it detracts from the punchlines, weakens the jokes.

Years ago someone I didn’t know well asked me what I was doing in Argentina. I’d just moved to Alabama for a stay at my mothers after a year living abroad in Buenos Aires. Just fucking around, was my response. Another person in our party said, in a chiding tone, You couldn’t have said that another way? No, I thought. I was doing diligence, honest reporting.

But the question of language arises differently when it comes to The New Yorker. Chiefly, there’s an editor involved. In the chapter "Editors & Publishers", McPhee writes about his piece "Looking for a Ship" and the dilemma over certain sailor lexicon, whether or not it was appropriate for the magazine, even if it was solidly true to the story.

McPhee writes,

I had gone to Miami, Cartagena, Balboa, Buenaventura, Guayaquil, Callao, and Valparaiso on the merchant ship Stella Lykes, and had written sixty thousand words, of which Gottlieb was buying all but one. It had come out of the mouth of a sailer named John Shephard, who said, “It’s a rough life. Rough life. Go ashore, you spend your money, get kicked in the tail. Plenty of friends till the money runs out. A seaman smells like a rose when he’s got money, but when he has no money they say, “Motherfucker, get another ship.”

Of course, McPhee is quoting a source here. It’s honest reporting.

That was 1975, the year I was conceived. This is 2025 and persons 25 years younger than me causally use the word “fucks”, as in “that fucks” or “I fucks with that”. Loose translation, it’s a positive, like “cool” and “rad”. If I had the time and desire I would dig into deep history for similar examples of language evolution, or devolution depending on which side you mount your horse. But it wouldn’t change the fact that I’m for a fuck here and there.

McPhee writes about his own personal philosophies around the word, how his two daughters, as teenagers, threw it around casually in the back seat of the car, the sound of it “more shocking than a thunderclap.” His parents thought it a “rhetorical crime.” I have to, again, do my own honest reporting and give credit where credit is due; my mother taught me the word at a very young age. I was an early adopter in my peer group.

But McPhee, despite his personal preference, had no qualms with including the direct quote of “motherfucker”. The piece was done when Gottlieb called him into his office to ask if there might be another way, to “reconsider the sailor’s word.” McPhee stood by his reporting. Gottlieb responded by writing the word MOTHERFUCKER on a bright-yellow four-inch Post-it pad in black marker, then stuck the note to his shirt pocket.

McPhee writes,

Off and on that day, Gottlieb walked the halls of the magazine wearing his MOTHERFUCKER Post-it as if it were a name tag at a convention. He looked in at office after office and loitered in various departments. He drew a blush here, a laugh there, startled looks, coughs, frowns. He gave writers moments of diversion from their writing. He gave editors moments to think of something other than writers. He visited just about everybody whose viewpoint he might absorb without necessarily asking for opinions. In the end, he called on me. He said The New Yorker was not for “motherfucker.”

I love this debate. It’s as split as whether or not you put ketchup on your burger. Or if you call it catchup. The right answer is only for the individual.

When does the cursing detract from the conversation? From the art? Almost always. But I stand by it.

My copy of “Draft No. 4” is thoroughly Amy-marked, tagged with so many slender Post-it tabs sticking out from the margins like little flags or tiny fingers beneath a door angling to be included in one of these essays. Like the idea of always looking for my next motherfucking ship, the next topic to explore.

I found this book through Cal Newport’s “Slow Productivity”. Or maybe there’s an interview with McPhee from The Paris Review that Newport referenced, which I found and read, and that led me to this book on writing. See how one ship leads to another?

Anyway, I recommend Newport’s book for writers (artists, creators, entrepreneurs) who are writing or struggling to write and fighting against the collective ego that tells us constantly, You are behind, you are behind, you are behind. A message meant to dissuade and discourage and keep you in place, in the role of a sheep.

Fuck that.

And I recommend the book, “Draft No. 4” for writers and careful readers, for curious souls who like to look behind the curtain and who like The New Yorker.

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