Spacial Disorientation: The Bookmuda Triangle

Like most people, the Bermuda Triangle was always an enthralling mystery to me during my childhood. Even as an adult, I’ve never tired of its irresistible draw. So, understandably, a few months ago, I was eager to watch the documentary on BBC Four (The Bermuda Triangle: Beneath the Waves) where a scientist and an aviation expert declared they would finally put the mystery of the triangle to rest.

I was intrigued; would we finally know what happened to all those ships, planes and people who simply vanished into thin air? What I didn’t expect was that, by the next morning, it struck me how one particular triangle incident bore an interesting relevance to novel writing. Let me explain.

Most of the focus of the program was on the five military airplanes who lost their way sixty years ago, yet had kept radio contact almost until their fuel had run out. No one knew where they were flying when they went down, so officials never found any wreckage. Through a British aviation expert, using modern day aviation theory, the pieces of the puzzle were put together.

From a book called Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell, I’m already a little familiar with the importance of cockpit conversations when solving how most aviation accidents happen. This is a really interesting book, but particularly the aviation chapter. By piecing together the subtext of the conversations between both airplane crew members and the pilots, and with air traffic control, experts are able to work out how most accidents occur.

The same is true of our Bermuda Triangle pilots. Through their radio contact the expert understood that the leader of the squadron had, early on in the trip, a mental ‘breakdown’ of sorts. Not realising they had overshot the marker where the squad were supposed to turn north, when he saw land on the wrong side of him he assumed the wind had blown them down towards the Gulf of Mexico. So convinced was he of this ‘fact’ that it informed every decision he made from there-on-in, most notably that their compasses— all fifteen between five planes — were not working. He believed this until they ran out of fuel, crashed into the sea, and drowned.

It’s what’s called spacial disorientation. You could call it tunnel vision. Because he was so entrenched in this belief that they were flying around the Gulf of Mexico, he couldn’t imagine an alternative, which meant he couldn’t think of a viable solution. And the worse the situation got the more he clung onto his idea, because the human brain feels more assured when an obvious solution is apparent. In the pilot’s mental state, latching onto this idea seemed safer than the alternative of not having any clue at all.

Because of this early and mistaken assumption, the pilot led his squad further out to sea believing they were heading towards land. And even when one radio operator suggested they weren’t where the pilot thought they were, he wouldn’t listen. The radio man became more desperate and more frustrated because he knew they had made some sort of mistake, but the pilot just wouldn’t – couldn’t — cooperate and work out their whereabouts so they could pinpoint their location. The metaphorical shutters were well and truly down.

So what’s this got to do with writing? Well, two things struck me. First, that of characterisation. The story of this air squad pivots on the belief of one person. The whole chain of events was set off because of this one person’s belief drawing him into a dire situation and working against what he needs to do for his own well-being, making things worse. That is how story works in fiction, too.

All of us in life suffer a certain amount of spacial disorientation. We all have our view of things, views that inform our actions. Often that view — that tunnel vision — can be misguided, but we would never recognise in what way. And so we continue on our flight paths, even if it undermines our goals at every step.

If we can understand this of ourselves, then we can understand it of our fictional characters and write them with deeper conviction.

But this spacial orientation isn’t just about characterisation, it’s also about us, the writers.

We create the story and with it become so entrenched in it existing the way it first landed on the page we can’t bring ourselves to consider doing any differently. Even if we know something isn’t working, by the time we’ve written out our first draft the map has been laid out, the compass set and obscurity is ultimately what awaits us. Sometimes this can mean leading our squad — i.e. our characters — out into oblivion to crash and drown.

We’ve all said it: our critique partners don’t understand what we’re trying to do; I’m not changing my story because the agent/publisher tells me to – this is about artistic integrity! But maybe, just sometimes, we need to listen to that outside voice, that radio operator who isn’t in amid the panic and stress of the direct situation. Maybe we need to be pulled out of our own spacial disorientation, lead our squad out of the ‘Bookmuda Triangle’ and fly them triumphantly back to land.

After all, isn’t that what we say our protagonists must do in order to survive? Don’t we expect them to rise up out of their entrenched ways in order to overcome the villain of the piece, or their own fatal flaws?

I suffered from this writerly ‘spacial disorientation’ with my own novel. I knew deep down inside something wasn’t working, but darned if I could see what. I just kept fiddling with words, dialogue, characterisations because — like the Bermuda Triangle pilot — clinging to the initial idea was better than allowing my brain to travel through the scary open space of conjecture. Then, one day, while revising, it suddenly hit me; my pacing was all off. The end of the middle was faster paced and more intense than my climax — the whole focus the story snowballs towards! The radio controller had finally got through and I was listening.

So I rewrote the last quarter. It worked so much better. The stakes were raised and the new version gave another layer of complexity it had previously lacked. Of course, I then had to go back and rework earlier chapters, too, to accommodate the new ending. But it was all good.

This novel hasn’t yet been accepted for publication, but I did have an agent write to me and tell me she thought I had a compelling plot, she just wasn’t into the style/voice. I couldn’t have given a hoot at that point (well, maybe a bit); that’s the way it often goes. I was just relieved that I’d stepped off my map, allowed my brain to ‘what if’, and that it paid off. I’m also sure it’s made me a better editor all round.

It’s hard though, gaining that kind of perspective. Many people rely on crit partners or editors to show them the way forward, and maybe that would be quicker. But I think it’s incredibly important in your growth as a writer to study the mechanics of writing and more so, to critique fellow writers. So many people don’t not realising how much you can gain from the process, how much you learn. And something I never realised when I first started writing; it’s just as much about developing effective editing skills as it is about conjuring up the details of the piece.

So do your novel a favour, if you haven’t already, and learn to step out of your flight path: learn to revise and edit. Take a short story you’ve written and rewrite it with an entirely new scope, or ending, or entire direction. You can keep both versions to remind yourself how liberating it is, to see how confidence building it is, to know that you can find viable alternatives.

It could make all the difference in saving your crew from the ‘Bookmuda’ Triangle.