My day job is airline pilot. I love flying as much as I love writing, and I get irritable or lonely if I don’t do either for too long. Lonely because those are the two things in the world that connect me to myself, so I miss them if they’re gone.
I have flown dozens of kinds of planes, been (and loved being) a flight instructor, taught aviation at a college, and when I retire, will have my own plane. At over 8,000 hours, I have more flight hours than approximately 95% of pilots. And yet I still couldn’t understand what this story at Air Facts magazine was supposed to be about.
You can read it for yourself (or try to), or you can take my word for it that it’s Threat Level Midnight bad. It rambles, it meanders, it throws in random philosophy, and it’s fragmented to the point of incoherence. But here’s its greatest sin:
It’s a story written in the first person that’s about the first person, not the story.
Never get in the way of your story. Unless you’re writing a memoir (in which case, good luck because everyone and their literal grandma is doing that nowadays), you are not the story. Even when you’re writing in the first person.
It is possible to write in first person well, and it is possible to write in first person terribly. It’s a natural style because we don’t have to place ourselves into the minds of other people, which is why the first stories most budding authors write are in first person. The drawback is that there is nothing there to pull us out of our own head and deposit us into the reader’s mind, and that is what makes that Air Facts story such a mess. The author is too concerned with what he thinks to care about what you’re supposed to think, and along the way he forgets to tell us what the story even is.
The novel I’m currently working on is a departure from my usual style as it is in first person. It’s locked solidly into that viewpoint because it is entirely a diary. Nonetheless, when people are done reading it, they won’t think, “This was what Stephanie Robinson thought about everything in the world.” Instead, they should come out of it thinking, “That was the story of a poor girl from rural Pennsylvania who worked her way into a prestigious boarding school and then into Vassar and then became a successful artist despite physical, social, and emotional challenges.”
See the difference between those two takeaways? The second one includes the word story. Never, ever get in the way of the story.
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