Your book is going to be full of “I”. That is the job. You lived the thing, you are the one telling it, and any advice that tells you to write your memoir in third person should be ignored on sight.
So the real question is what that “I” is doing to your reader.
Dr. James Pennebaker spent his career at the University of Texas counting words. He built LIWC, the software that runs language through a computer and tells you what the writer was actually feeling, and he wrote a book about what he found called The Secret Life of Pronouns.
Here is the part that should make every author sit up. People who use “I” heavily are, without knowing it, signalling that they feel subordinate to whoever they are talking to. Lower status. Less certain. The person with the power in a conversation uses “I” less.
Read that again with your manuscript open.
The problem this creates in a business book
You are writing to establish authority. That is the whole reason the book exists. It is meant to be the thing that gets you the stage, the client, the room you have been trying to get into for 3 years.
Then you open chapter 1 with 40 sentences that begin “I”. I started. I learned. I realised. I built. I want to share. Every one of them true. Every one of them quietly telling your reader that you are auditioning.
Your reader does not decide you are the expert because you said so 40 times. They decide it because you told them something that changed how they see their own situation.
Memoir is different, and it is still not a free pass
In memoir the “I” is the point. Nobody wants your life story delivered at arm’s length. What goes wrong in memoir is subtler: the “I” stops being a door and starts being a wall.
“I felt devastated” tells your reader what to think. “I sat in the car outside the school for 40 minutes because I could not make my hands open the door” puts them in the car with you. Same “I”. One of them lets the reader in.
The test that takes 4 minutes
Open any chapter. Count how many paragraphs start with “I”. If it is more than a third of them, you have a book that is talking about you rather than to your reader.
Then do the harder version. Take your 10 strongest “I” sentences and ask what each one is actually for. Some are load-bearing, they carry the story. Some are throat-clearing. The throat-clearing goes.
The fix is rarely deleting the “I”. It is usually starting the sentence somewhere else and letting the “I” arrive when it has earned its place.
“I developed a framework that helps coaches structure their books” becomes “Coaches get stuck in the same place every time: chapter 4. Here is what I built to get them past it.”
Same information. One of them sounds like a CV. The other sounds like someone who knows what they are doing.
Why this matters more in a book than anywhere else
A post disappears in a day. A book sits on a shelf for 30 years with your name on the spine, and every reader who picks it up makes a decision about you in the first 2 pages, mostly on rhythm and pronouns they will never consciously notice.
Pennebaker’s whole point is that the small words give us away. The ones we are not paying attention to. Which is exactly why they are worth 4 minutes of your attention before you print 3,000 copies.
Your Next Fave Read
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Ready to get your wisdom into the world, however you write it? Book a free validation call. We’ll figure out the right approach, coaching, ghostwriting or collaboration, for your specific book and your specific goals. writewordmagic.com
