Having trouble writing? Try this famous author’s technique “Sometimes in a nervous frenzy I just fling words as if I were flinging mud at a wall,” says Pulitzer Prize winner John McPhee. “Blurt out, heave out, babble out something – anything – as a first draft,” he says in an article called Draft No. 4 now in The New Yorker magazine where he’s been appearing regularly for 48 years. McPhee, the author of 32 books, says he first wrote these words of advice in a letter to his daughter Jenny years ago when she was starting out as a writer herself. “The way to do a piece of writing is three or four times over, never once,” he told her. “You work it over and alter it, you begin to shape sentences that score higher with the ear and eye. Edit again, top to bottom. The chances are that about now you’ll see something that you are sort of eager for others to see.”