Mercy! Mercy! That Dang Nabed PERCY!

Getting a Story to Fly

Getting a Story to Fly

Yesterday I finished working off the gigs to my RC Model airplane that surfaced last Thursday. When I finished I taxied it about the yard. The grass was harder to maneuver on than a hard surface but it was like the Club's flying field. Again the touch was so much different than the computer flight simulator. To get the airplane to move the throttle had to be carefully bumped up and watched as the craft began to accelerate. Then the touch had to be coordinated with the rudder to taxi about. I noticed that one of the ailerons wasn’t trimmed. For taxiing that was no big deal but when I let it rise slightly off the grass it pitched to the left and stood on its nose. This revealed a deficiency in the fuselage where the front and rear portions had been insufficiently glued.

Again the analogies with writing a longer work reared their heads. Just as in learning to fly, learning to write requires the balancing of many different functions and components. In the Exploratory Writing Workshop (EWW) a lot of effort goes into explaining these functions and how they work together. There is a synergism to flying an RC model that is the same as writing a longer work. There are many little things that have to be learned and included that are not self-evident. For example there must be a blend of dialog and exposition. A writer has to both show and tell. Dialog is an important part of the showing just as exposition aids in the telling. Then there is the life changing event, a series of crisis and things like premise, themes, momentum building, symbolism, repetition and character snapshots as the action proceeds. These are all balls the writer needs to keep in the air and they all act concurrently to provide stability and glide to the story.

On my lap-top flight simulator there are a host of different aircraft models a student can choose to fly. One of the most interesting and the aircraft that seems the most analogous to writing a story is the WW2 B-17 Bomber. When the student chooses this one the bomber pops on the screen ready to go. The student gives it the throttle, the engines reverberate and she launches down the runway. A little up elevator and the bomber takes to the air. Then the pilot lightly works the controls and gets it to gain altitude and begin making a slow long circle of the landing field. Care is taken not to let the craft get out of sight but to go out far enough to give the pilot a chance to align with the runway and begin a controlled approach.

Meanwhile the RC model is experiencing some turbulence. The nose wants to rise and the trim wants to pull the pilot off course. The whole experience is fits and starts as the plane is aligned with the runway, nosed down and brought onto final approach. The glide angle is critical and so is the airspeed. Too much down elevator and it goes into a steep dive, too little and the pilot will overshoot the approach. Concurrently the throttle must be adjusted downward the closer the runway gets and the ailerons tweaked to make sure everything stays level. As the descent reaches the edge of the field the throttles must be powered still further down as the glide path levels and the aircraft settles onto the runway. If this isn’t like writing a novel I don’t know what is.