Summary

John McPhee opens with a description of the working space he occupied in the mis-1960s. On a bulletin board in his office he "had long since pinned a sheet of paper on which [he] has written, in large block letters, ABC/D" (4). This represents the intended structure of a piece of writing he is working on, but he quickly asserts that this "is no way to start a writing project" (4). Instead, McPhee advises that one develop the structure from the material, rather than making the material conform to a structure. However, John explains that after many years of being constrained into the structure of writing individual profiles for The New Yorker and Time, he was seeking a way to branch out of that inherent form.

First he decides to do a double profile of two tennis players in competition, hoping that "in the...