Words Fail Me (16 page)

Where objectivity—or at least the appearance of it—is important, the first person is discouraged or greatly restricted. This is especially true with newspapers and newsmagazines. A reporter covering hard news (a coup d'état, say, or a vote in Congress) is supposed to remain in the background and let the facts speak for themselves. Even the occasional personal comment is often given in the third person:
This correspondent heard heavy artillery
or
Heavy artillery was heard,
instead of
I heard heavy artillery.

Manipulative writers, however, can slant the news without resorting to the first person. In fact, they'll avoid it like the plague. Why get personal and alert readers that opinions are coming? There goes the illusion of impartiality. A few first-person intrusions would tip off even the sleepiest reader:

The House of Representatives voted unanimously today to increase salaries of members of Congress by 75 percent.
I can't wait to see the polls.
The bill's sponsors mustered bipartisan support for the measure.
I'll just bet they did!
Sponsors argued
—
this slays me
—
that existing salary levels might prohibit all but the wealthy from running for office.
Tell me another one.

Okay, that's an exaggerated example. The point is that first-person writing is generally frowned on in the news pages (though not in columns, reviews, features, and analyses).

Other places where
I, me,
and
my
aren't always welcome include scientific and academic journals and corporate and government reports. For the most part, such writing is deliberately impersonal, even if that makes it dry and indirect.

My husband once helped a French scientist translate a research paper into English. It emerged so clear, simple, and direct that no scientific journal wanted it. The paper had to be rewritten in formal academese—dense, impersonal, and indirect—before it could be published.

Here are some of the ways scientists make
I
disappear:

•They use
one
instead:
Subtracting the magnetic moment of the neutron from that of the proton,
one
observes that the Heisenberg principle is an inverse function of the Planck effect.

• They use
we: The equation changes when
we
expand this definition to include Bohr's hypothesis.

• They replace
I
with
the author: In this study,
the author
has attempted to show that magnetic moment bears an occipital relationship to acceleration squared.

• They use a passive verb:
As
will be demonstrated,
chaos theory undermines the dynamics of the Lorentz measurements.

You don't like this kind of writing? Well, I don't either. My instincts tell me to avoid indirect writing, but the choice isn't always up to me. And it won't always be up to you. What's the lesson? If readers want impersonal, give them impersonal. Hold your nose if you must, but accept that the audience you're writing for is always right.

If you have to be impersonal but you don't want to sound dry and remote, try this. Write a rough draft in the first person, then go through and take out every
I, me
, and
my
. You may have to tinker here and there, but it's worth the trouble. By the way, those first three methods scientists use to avoid
I
and company aren't quite as bloodless as the fourth, where there's nobody in the picture at all.

To be fair, the first person is often inappropriate in a formal academic paper, and not just because of its informal tone.
I, me
, and
my
can make an argument look weaker, as if it's based on opinion instead of evidence:
In my judgment,
Abélard is not a tragic figure.
It appears to me
that he is one more example of the irresponsible clergyman. By seducing Héloïse, fathering a son, and secretly marrying her,
I believe,
he determined his own fate.
I think
that's why
he is remembered today more for his love letters than for his theological writings.

If you write like that, hedging your bets, you'll sound as though you don't have confidence in your argument. When you have a case you believe in, don't emasculate it.

Fiction writers are often more comfortable, more themselves, in the first person. Beginners seem to find it natural to write in the voice of a character. But they're not alone. Some of literature's greatest novels have first-person narrators:
Jane Eyre
("Reader, I married him"),
Great Expectations
("The man, after looking at me for a moment, turned me upside down, and emptied my pockets"),
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
("I felt so lonesome I most wished I was dead"),
Moby-Dick
("When I go to sea, I go as a simple sailor").

Be warned, though. Using the first person may be the easiest way to begin a work of fiction and the hardest way to finish one. Limiting yourself to one character's point of view can make it difficult to be everywhere you want to be and say everything you want to say.

A first-person narrator can't see around corners or through walls; only an omniscient narrator (one who's all-knowing and all-seeing) can. An individual character can't know other characters thoughts; only an omniscient narrator can. If what you're writing requires godlike knowledge of everything and everyone, the first person won't work.

Say you're planning a story about a young couple's visit to the obstetrician, and you want to write it entirely
from the husband's point of view. If he's in the waiting room while the doctor and the patient are in the examining room, you can't very well describe the doctor listening through the stethoscope—unless you're writing science fiction and the prospective dad has X-ray vision.

An extremely skilled novelist, however, can write in the first person and still tell the reader things the narrator doesn't know. I'm thinking of Kazuo Ishiguro's
The Remains of the Day,
a novel seen through the eyes of a butler with blinkered vision. The narrator himself is unaware of the emotional and political turmoil around him, but through him the reader sees what he doesn't.

In one episode, Stevens, the butler, reminisces about Lord Darlington, the nobleman he devotedly served for thirty-five years, and about the importance of well-polished silver in the running of a great household. "I am glad to be able to recall numerous occasions when the silver at Darlington Hall had a pleasing impact upon observers," he says.

As he talks about the silver, we learn little by little that something much more serious was happening at Darlington Hall back in the 1930's—a meeting between a British Cabinet minister, Lord Halifax, and a Nazi diplomat, Herr Ribbentrop.

"But then at one point I overheard Lord Halifax exclaiming: 'My goodness, Darlington, the silver in this house is a delight. I was of course very pleased to hear this at the time, but what was for me the truly satisfying corollary to this episode came two or three days later, when Lord Darlington remarked to me: 'By the way, Stevens,
Lord Halifax was jolly impressed with the silver the other night. Put him into a quite different frame of mind altogether.' These were—I recollect it clearly—his lordship's actual words and so it is not simply my fantasy that the state of the silver had made a small, but significant contribution towards the easing of relations between Lord Halifax and Herr Ribbentrop that evening."

The unwitting narrator sees only the world reflected in his exquisitely polished silver. But between the lines, readers learn that his adored employer, Lord Darlington, has been secretly furthering Hitler's cause among leading figures in the British government.

Not all writers can pull that off. If you'd like to try, read as much first-person fiction as you can, and pay attention to what's going on. Some wonderful first-person writing is layered and complex, like the passage above, and some is more straightforward. But all of it has a feeling of inevitability, as though it couldn't have been written in any other way. It's hard to imagine Ralph Ellison's
Invisible Man,
the story of a young black man's struggle for identity, in anything but the first person:

"I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids—and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me."

That feeling of alienation, of barely suppressed anguish, wouldn't come across if the passage had been written in the third person. See for yourself. Try replacing
every
I
with a
he
. Do the same thing when you have doubts about your own writing. Strip each
I, me,
and
my
from an important passage. If it collapses, the first person is the right choice. If your presence isn't called for, get out.

But enough about you.

Every playwright knows you don't put a gun onstage unless you intend to use it. That's a good rule to follow, no matter what kind of writing you do. A careless hint or a subject that's raised and then dropped is a gun left in plain view but never fired. It's a promise to the audience—"Trust me to deliver the goods"—that's never kept.

A writer makes promises to keep the reader reading (or the audience awake). The promises can be quite obvious, like saying you have a major announcement to make, or more subtle, like the gun that leaves folks wondering when it will go off.

A promise is anything that piques interest and begs for explanation:
As we shall see, his failure to test the bungee cords was to have tragic consequences.
Or:
Leona bailed out at $13 a share, a decision she would later regret.
Or:
They kissed outside the cryogenics lab, vowing to meet again in a better world, but it was not to be.

Even small details can be promises. You might begin a profile of a corporate executive by describing her office, littered with promises: a wheelchair in one corner, a stuffed sailfish on the wall, a half-eaten jelly doughnut on the desk. Every promise raises a question. Is that her wheelchair? If so, what happened? Did she land that fish? Is she going to finish the doughnut? Readers will keep reading because they want to know.

And you have to tell them. An audience has the memory of an elephant. Never raise expectations you don't plan to meet. You might forget a casual teaser, but readers won't. And what you see as an insignificant aside (
He knew he had to fix that step one of these days
) might seem a portent to your readers. Don't leave them hanging.

Suppose you're writing a magazine article on dry-cleaning methods and you mention that you were furious when your marabou boa came back from the cleaner's. Readers will expect to be told why. Or you're giving a speech on exotic pets and you happen to recall warning your late brother-in-law not to hand-feed his crocodile. The audience will expect to hear the rest of the story, so keep your promise.

Those of you with attention deficit disorder may need nudging, especially if you're writing something long. Jot
down a note whenever you make a promise in your writing—when you mention a subject or refer to an incident you plan to pick up later. Stick your reminder in an obvious place, on a wall or bulletin board or at the edge of your computer terminal. Any loose ends should be tied up eventually.

Our reading, both fiction and nonfiction, is full of promises that hint at where we're going and help move us along. Since we could be going almost anywhere, a promise can hint at almost anything, from unusual plot twists to a startling scientific discovery.

A promise or two at the beginning of a book can give readers a taste of what's to come:

"How did our Sun come into being, what keeps it hot and luminous, and what will be its ultimate fate?"

(George Gamow,
The Birth and Death of the Sun
)

"This is the saddest story I have ever heard."

(Ford Madox Ford,
The Good Soldier
)

"Benjamin Disraeli's career was an extraordinary one; but there is no need to make it seem more extraordinary than it really was."

(Robert Blake,
Disraeli
)

A promise at the end of a chapter can engage readers and make them turn the page. In these examples, the promise is a note of suspense:

"As the year of 1931 ran its uneasy course, with five million wage earners out of work, the middle classes facing ruin, the farmers unable to meet their mortgage payments, the Parliament paralyzed, the government floundering, the eighty-four-year-old President fast sinking into the befuddlement of senility, a confidence mounted in the breasts of the Nazi chieftains that they would not have long to wait."

(William L. Shirer,
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich
)

"Halfway down I paused and leaned on the handrail and told myself that I was descending into trouble: a pretty young woman with a likable boy and a wandering husband. A hot wind was blowing in my face."

(Ross Macdonald,
The Underground Man
)

"The truth about his new American correspondent was a great deal stranger than this detached, innocent, and otherworldly Scotsman could have ever imagined."

(Simon Winchester,
The Professor and the Madman
)

"It would be many hours before I learned that everything had not in fact turned out great—that nineteen men and women were stranded up on the mountain by the storm, caught in a desperate struggle for their lives."

(Jon Krakauer,
Into Thin Air
)