Imagine you are at a party. As you belly up to the . . . punch bowl, you hear a voice speaking behind you. Someone is describing a concert by your favorite rock star. Naturally, you want to hear what your rock idol did at her concert — what she said, what she sang, what she was wearing. But the punch bowl voice mainly describes what he said to his friends, how he got stuck in traffic, what he was wearing. Before long, you lose interest. You don’t know this guy, and you’re not interested in his experience.
That’s what it’s like to read a story in which a writer injects first person into a narrative that is not about him.
It’s certainly easy for a young journalist to be led astray these days, because today’s “narrative” journalism is overflowing with examples of first-person writing. Many are bad examples, with writers jumping unannounced into a story that belongs to someone else.
Paula LaRoque, former writing coach for the Dallas Morning News, has written an excellent essay on this topic. LaRoque explains, “The problem is one of focus. The best writers focus tightly and relentlessly upon some subject other than themselves. They are like cinematographers. They illumine the subject, and they themselves stay offstage.” Her excellent essay is here:
An example of intrusive first-person writing appeared in a 2011 Southern Living story about Dean Faulkner, the niece of writer William Faulkner.
It began this way:
It’s a Southern rite of passage, the moment you decide you are ready
to read William Faulkner. For me, it happened a few months ago when I found my late father’s yellowed copy of “As I Lay Dying.”
A month later, I was on my way to Oxford on a literary pilgrimage that might be cliché if my personal guide were not the last living Faulkner.
The reader couldn’t help but wonder: “Who is this person who just now discovered Faulkner? A Yankee possibly?” But alas, no further introduction appears.
It’s not that the writer was unskilled. In fact, other than her intrusion into the story, the writing was vivid and engaging. The next paragraph is terrific and quickly establishes that Dean’s relationship to her famous uncle was more of a father-daughter bond. But consider this passage later in the article, where the writer is standing prominently in the middle of the scene.
“I had a hand-me-down dress and a hand-me-down daddy,” Dean says, showing me a photo taken just before her wedding at Rowan Oak. Wearing a gown that belonged to her cousin Jill, Faulkner’s only child, who died in 2008, Dean stands slightly swayback, trying in her 1-inch heels to look shorter than Pappy, who was just 5’6”. I ask Dean if she remembers what they were saying at that moment.
“I couldn’t think of anything else to say, so I said, ‘Pappy, was Judith real?’” Judith was the star of the ghost stories Faulkner told to the children in his life, a lovesick girl who leapt to her death from the balcony above the entrance to Rowan Oak. “’No, I made her up for you and all the other children,’ he said. ‘But I believe in her. Don’t you?’”
Rewriting it with just Dean and her uncle takes only minor tweaks (changes in bold):
“I had a hand-me-down dress and a hand-me-down daddy,” Dean says, looking at a photo taken just before her wedding at Rowan Oak. Wearing a gown that belonged to her cousin Jill, Faulkner’s only child, who died in 2008, Dean stands slightly swayback, trying in her one-inch heels to look shorter than Pappy, who was just 5’6”.
Dean remembers what they were saying at that moment.
“I couldn’t think of anything else to say, so I said, ‘Pappy, was Judith real?’” Judith was the star of the ghost stories Faulkner told to the children in his life, a lovesick girl who leapt to her death from the balcony above the entrance to Rowan Oak. “’No, I made her up for you and all the other children,’ he said. ‘But I believe in her. Don’t you?’”
Aren’t the Faulkners enough to carry this vignette? In the new version, the writer doesn’t get quite the same attention for her insightful question. But the focus is now clearly on the Faulkners.
On rare occasions, first person is appropriate in a feature story. Consider a Texas Monthly feature story on the 50th birthday of Farrah Fawcett in 1997. (Good examples are rare and memorable!) Skip Hollandsworth, a well-known voice to Texas Monthly readers, was the writer. He quickly established why he was employing first person, describing Fawcett as “the ultimate Texas bombshell and the foremost sex symbol of my youth.” Throughout the article, he maintained a persona as the “every boy” who had grown up worshipping the Charlie’s Angel star. And it worked.
An article in a March 2012 issue of Newsweek took a similar approach. Part of the 1960’s themed “Mad Men” issue, the story was written by veteran newswoman Eleanor Clift. Here’s the beginning:
It’s a rainy morning in Los Angeles, and Elisabeth Moss, who plays Peggy in the television series Mad Men, is standing outside the stage door smoking. On the set the actors are restricted to herbal cigarettes, which is why she has ducked out for what she calls “the real thing.” I explain who I am (a reporter from Newsweek) and why I’m there (I started as a secretary), and she exclaims, “I am you!”
Clift maintains the theme, contributing information from her own office days of the 1960s, but not overshadowing the characters who are the focus of the story. She occupies the story as an expert witness.
In both the Texas Monthly and Newsweek examples, the writers introduced themselves. When new characters enter a story, there should be an explanation of who they are, by job title or some other description. But reporters who lapse into first person often fail to say who they are. A writer who insists on putting himself or herself into the story should at least provide a proper introduction. And they’d better have a pretty good reason for being there.
Writers who throw themselves willy nilly into a story that clearly belongs to someone else often come across as intrusive. And that’s often what they are.
