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Why not simply call it fiction?
In light of the latest "Fiction is Better than Reality" Memoir scandal, I am curious to hear from our viewers on this topic. Would it matter if Julie Klam's memoir was fictional? Is it an ethical issue or a literary one? Or perhaps even more simply a mere question of semantic. Who knows after all what is true in many "unauthorized biographies"; History itself changes as new documents are made available or are discovered.
More important, perhaps: who is at fault here? the writer desperate for attention/and humiliation or an industry that -- like every other one -- cares about sales and ratings?
posted by Odile on March 23, 2008 at 5:33 PM
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More and more it seems it is
More and more it seems it is the industry that is making a mockery out of documentary works!
I think ultimately it does matter whether it's called fiction or otherwise; nonfiction or a novel. The creation of nonfiction differs greatly from fiction in one simple way: intent.
Writing takes two directions, principally: Convergence or Divergence.
Fiction writers divert from the truth to explore all the available avenues and possibilities...and we the reader go along for the sojourn.
With nonfiction writers, the opposite is, em, true; nonfiction writers converge on the one answer, the only answer.
For example: Write down your name.
Now, write down a pseudonym.
To write down your name is an act of convergence. There is -- for 99.9% of us -- only one true answer.
To write down a created name is an act of divergence for there is only one wrong response.
The intent of nonfiction is to converge, and to do so with subjectivity. Nonfiction says more about the writer, than does fiction. Readers do not suspend disbelief, but rather are asked to believe the subject.
Huge difference.
Interesting. But if you look
Interesting. But if you look at it purely from a narrative point of view -- should the reader care about the process you are describing as long as he/she is being drawn into the narrative?
Ah there's the rub. We don't
Ah there's the rub.
We don't live our lives in narrative. So when a memoirist or nonfiction writer does place their truths into recognizable patterns it provides the reader with the formula for transformation -- the verity of all art. By this I mean to write a dramatic arc in fiction is quite simple, given that I can change whatever I like to suit this purpose. But the nonfiction writer must deal with the data of reality and "find," meaning, and shape in the episodic, fragmented, illogical, much the way a reader will look upon their own farrago of a life and discern pattern(s).
Fiction makes sense. Life often doesn't
Nonfiction attempts to make sense.
Few of us live lives of recognizable dramatic arc.
Both draw the reader in, you're correct, one simply does so with less fabrication and in doing so provides its audience with a model for fashioning sense out of their own experiences.
Nonfiction breeds the hope for honesty in our lives, not fabulism. Fiction suspends. Nonfiction secures.