Added 01 June 2013
Remember the bullet-points we listed? Here they are
again:
· The piece must be fact-based.
It must be based on something that happened, something that is happening, or
something that will happen.
· Show, don’t tell. Use scenes
that indicate something happening that will serve to move the story forward.
Remember, even when you start the piece you should have an end in view – work
towards it.
· Use dialogue. Positively seek
it out. Don’t put words in people’s mouths, though – simply report what they
said.
· Try and put yourself into the
story. Use the first person singular where possible. Sometimes the story is
better when it is a story about someone trying to get to the bottom of the
story.
· It should lead from the
specific to the general. That is, the smaller truth of the story should allow
you to reveal the larger, more universal truth that the story
illustrates.
We are going to look at them in more detail, now, to see just how
important they are to the piece that has to be
written.
First: The piece must be fact-based.
It must be based on something that happened, something that is happening, or
something that will
happen.
A Case Study – John
Steinbeck
John Steinbeck was one of
the titans of American literature in the 20th century. His 1939 novel, The
Grapes of Wrath, was awarded a Pulitzer Prize. In 1962 he was awarded the Nobel
Prize for his lifetime work.
During WW2,
Steinbeck served as a war correspondent, writing for
The New York Herald Tribune. He
covered the American bombing campaign over Europe, and then took part in
small-scale commando raids against German-held islands in the Mediterranean,
until wounds caused by an explosion in North Africa sent him home. He later
published two books about his experiences: Once There Was a War, and Bombs Away:
The Story of a Bomber Team.
By the 1960s
Steinbeck’s writing life was coming to a close. His best work was behind him. In
1962 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for his lifetime
work.
But Steinbeck wasn’t quite
finished. In 1966 and 1967, he returned to war reporting, traveling
through the major combat zones of the Vietnam War, recording his experiences for
the magazine Newsday.
Before that, though, in
1960, Steinbeck decided to make a tour throughout America to see how it had
changed since he wrote about it back in the 1930s, at the depths of the
depression, when it seemed that the country would never get back on its
feet.
He obtained a pick-up truck and had a
camper top put on as living quarters, and set off across the United States with
his dog ‘Charley’, a standard poodle.
In a
letter to a close friend, Frank Loesser, Steinbeck explained the reasons behind
the planned trip:
“In the fall - right after
Labor Day - I’m going to learn about my own country. I’ve lost the flavor and
taste and sound of it. It’s been years since I have seen it … I’m going alone,
out towards the West by the northern way but zigzagging through the Middle West
and the mountain states. I’ll avoid cities, his small towns and farms and
ranches, sit in bars and hamburger stands and on Sunday go to church. I’ll go
down the coast from Washington and Oregon and then back through the Southwest
and South and up the East Coast but always zigzagging. Elaine (Steinbeck’s wife)
will join me occasionally but mostly I have to go alone, and I shall go unknown.
I just want to look and listen. What I’ll get I need badly - a re-knowledge of
my own country, of its speeches, its views, its attitudes and its changes. It’s
long overdue - very long.”
Steinbeck wrote the
journey up from the notes and journals he had kept and published it as Travels
with Charley. It was an immediate hit and has sold consistently ever since. In a
recent edition, one writer said in an introduction|:
“Moving through the woods and deserts, dirt
tracks and highways to large cities and glorious wildernesses, Steinbeck
observed - with remarkable honesty and insight, with a humorous and sometimes
sceptical eye - America, and the Americans who inhabited it. What he saw was a
lonely, generous nation too packed with individuals for single judgements; what
he saw made him proud, angry, sympathetic and elated. His vision of how the
world was changing still speaks to us prophetically through the
decades”.
Some proponents of creative nonfiction have held
Travels with Charley up as an exemplifier of the genre. Here was a true book - a
travel book - in which the author used his own personality and experience to
relate what he had found during his journey around America. For many travel
writers, the book served as a template for their own attempts at conveying a
foreign place to the reader.
In 2010, exactly
fifty years after Steinbeck made his trip, another writer, Bill Steigerwald,
decided to replicate it, to see what had changed in American between Steinbeck’s
travels and his own.
This isn’t a new
idea. The journey in George Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier has been retaken
again and again, at different intervals, by writers seeking to record the
changes that have occurred since the original journey. It’s a good journalistic
device - re-examine a story from decades earlier to determine what differences
there are now between time now and time
then.
Bill Steigerwald is a professional
journalist who has worked for the Los Angeles Times, the Post-Gazette, and the
Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. He retired from the daily newspaper business in 2009.
His motives in re-tracing Steinbeck’s route were as much self-interest as a
genuine wish to see how the country had changed in the intervening period. As
Steigerwald says himself in his introduction to the book, Dogging
Steinbeck:
“In a last-ditch effort to
attract national media attention, a few hours before I left my house, I blasted
a self-promotional email to nearly everyone I had even known, worked for or
pitched freelance articles to in journalism. It was as over-the-top as I could
make it and as far as I can tell it did me and what was left of my career no
good at all.”
The email
read:
Ex-newspaperman Bill
Steigerwald to chase John Steinbeck’s ghost for 10,000
miles.
To go everywhere Steinbeck and
dog Charley went in “Travels With
Charley.”
Will follow great author’s
exact route half a century later.
Desperate act of drive-by journalism by former Pittsburgh / LA paperboy,
columnist, editor.
Will take no
federal stimulus money.
Will take no
dog.
Hello friends, former
co-workers, fellow libertarians, people who have no idea why they’re getting
this email blast.
On Thursday, Sept.
23, I’ll leave John Steinbeck’s former seaside home in Sag Harbor, New York, a
place I could never afford to live or visit for more than two hours, and begin
chasing his ghost around America’s blue highways for 10,000
miles.
I’m going to retrace the
iconic road trip Steinbeck made in the fall of 1960 and turned into his 1962,
nonfiction bestseller “Travels With Charley.” I’m not taking an iconic dog and
I’m not driving an iconic pickup truck/camper. I do hope to write a book hooked
around following exact route Steinbeck took and telling the whole story of what
he did or did not do on his journey exactly 50 years
ago”.
What Steigerwald found was
profoundly unsettling, especially for Steinbeck fans, as well as those readers
who had viewed Travels With Charley as iconic among travel books. Most of the
book was made up. Steinbeck hadn’t been everywhere he said he had been. Few, if
any, of the conversations he recorded ever took place. Some of the things he
said he saw could not have been seen by him or anyone else. He could as well
have stayed at home in Sag Harbor for the forty-two days he said he was on the
road and written his book in his study.
If Steinbeck had been a modern author, even one of his standing, and had been
sent by - say - The New Yorker to write about the state of America, hardly one
page of his manuscript would have got past the magazines fact-checkers, and it
would have caused the most almighty rumpus on the editorial floors. If it had
been published, then it would very quickly have been exposed as a fraud and the
writer hounded from TV studio to TV studio until he broke down and begged for
mercy. If he had been one of your ordinary run-of-the-mill young journalists
trying to make a name for himself or herself, he or she would have been sacked
on the spot and would be lucky to get a job selling classifieds for another
paper.
But the reaction to Steigerwald’s
book, Dogging Steinbeck, is interesting - and a little worrying. Most of the
support for Steigerwald and condemnation for Steinbeck came from those
politically opposed to Steinbeck’s left-leaning position. [You can be dead and
buried forty-five years and still despised for your politics].
Steinbeck scholars had an interesting
response: Susan Shillinglaw, a scholar at the National Steinbeck Centre, told
the New York Times: “Any writer has the right to shape materials,
and undoubtedly Steinbeck left things out. That doesn’t make the book a lie …
(and) … Whether or not Steinbeck met that (person) where he says he did, he
could have met such a figure at some point in his life. And perhaps he enhanced
some of the anecdotes … Does it really matter that much?”
Jay Parini, author of a Steinbeck biography,
and who wrote the Introduction for the Penguin edition of Travels,
told the newspaper:
“I have always
assumed that to some degree it’s a work of fiction. Steinbeck was a fiction
writer, and here he’s shaping events, massaging them. He probably wasn’t using a
tape recorder. But I still feel there’s an authenticity there. Does this shake
my faith in the book? Quite the opposite. I would say hooray for Steinbeck. If
you want to get at the spirit of something, sometimes it’s important to use the
techniques of a fiction writer”.
And Bill
Barich, who wrote Long Way Home: On the Trail of Steinbeck’s
America, a retracing of Steinbeck’s footsteps, said: “I’m fairly certain
that Steinbeck made up most of the book. The dialogue is so wooden. Steinbeck
was extremely depressed, in really bad health, and was discouraged by everyone
from making the trip. He was trying to recapture his youth, the spirit of the
knight-errant. But at that point he was probably incapable of interviewing
ordinary people. He’d become a celebrity and was more interested in talking to
Dag Hammarskjold and Adlai Stevenson. The die was probably cast long before he
hit the road, and a lot of what he wrote was colored by the fact that he was so
ill. But I still take seriously a lot of what he said about the country. His
perceptions were right on the money about the death of localism, the growing
homogeneity of America, the trashing of the environment. He was prescient about
all that.”
From these comments it would seem
that it doesn’t really matter if a writer of an ostensible nonfiction book makes
things up, or invents, events, so long as he or she gets to the spirit of
the enterprise.
Much of what Steinbeck
said about the America he found was true: the centre of cities were dying,
suburbia was spreading at an alarming way, often wiping out places of scenic
beauty. American was becoming much-of-a-muchness, the same stores, the same
fast-food joints, the same has-stations, in state after state after state.
The differences that had been present in America of Steinbeck’s youth were
levelling themselves out, speech patterns were the same everywhere, the
influence of radio and television was making itself
felt.
But did he have to spend 72 days on the
road to come to that conclusion?
Most nights
Steinbeck stayed in hotels or boarding-houses or motels, rather than camping
with other travellers. The conversations he had were either invented, or put
together from a variety of sources. It’s probable that he started with his
conclusions and then sought evidence to support
them.
By using the angle of a journey around
the US, though, he lent verisimilitude to his account, he cloaked it with the
semblance of truth, and he presented it as something that came as a result of
his research.
Steigerwald’s researches and
the resulting book seem hardly to have impinged on Steinbeck’s reputation. The
publisher of Travels With Charley, Penguin Books, inserted a slip into
the book pointing out that much of the book might have been recreated by
Steinbeck, but his standing as a writer seems
intact.
But Steinbeck also published two books
compiled from reports he sent from the frontline to the newspaper he represented
in the US. What would be the result if those reports, too, proved to be
semi-fictional, that they had been recreated by Steinbeck going over things in
his own mind, and that much of them were composed of things he might think
would happen rather than those that
did?
Would that have reflected more
badly on his reputation? Would it have destroyed
it?
It’s curious that many of those who think
Steinbeck’s making-up of things in Travels With Charley is
only moderately wrong are from the academic world, scholars, tutors and
teachers. Anyone who has been into academia learns very quickly that the way
garner high marks for an essay is to take a point of view quickly and put it
over as forcefully as possible.
When I was
studying history at University I had in my class two Marxists, and a
Conservative of very right-wing views. The rest of the class were apolitical. It
was notable that the Marxists and the Conservative consistently got higher marks
for their written work than anyone else in the class. It didn’t matter what the
subject was – the causes of the French Revolution, the failure of Japan to
industrialise at the same time as the rest of the world, the impact of the
railway to American agriculture – they seemed to be able to dash off a
well-argued polemic. Of course, the secret was that while everybody was spending
all their time reading up the subject from every point of view, and then trying
to write something that reflected those points of view, the three extremists
started out with a prejudice and sought the evidence to support it – and, as
every historian knows, there is evidence aplenty to shore-up any point of
view.
To an academic, then, the facts can be
pliable, especially if they are used to exhibit a writer’s virtuosity – her or
her art.
A
Second Case Study – John D’Agata
John
D’Agata is an American writer who holds Master of Fine Art qualifications in
both poetry and nonfiction. He has received fellowships from prestigious
American foundations. He teaches creative writing at the University of
Iowa.
In 2003, D’Agata submitted an article to
Harper’s. The story was about a teenager who had committed suicide in Las Vegas
by throwing himself from a building. D’Agata used the event on which to hand a
meditation about Las Vegas and the despair that the city can induce in residents
and visitors.
Harper’s rejected the piece
because it could not verify all the facts that it contained. D’Agata then
submitted it to The Believer, a magazine of interviews, essays and reviews.
There then ensued a seven-year long correspondence between D’Agata and the
fact-checker assigned to the piece by the magazine, Jim
Fingall.
The article was never published by a
periodical; instead, it was printed in one of D’Agata’s books, “About a
Mountain”, together with Fingal’s scrupulous
annotations.
This is part of the email
exchange between D’Agata and Fingal:
JIM FINGAL: Hi, John. I’m the intern who’s been assigned
to fact-check your article. I was hoping you could clarify how you determined
that there are thirty-four strip clubs in the city while the source you’re using
says thirty-one.
JOHN
D’AGATA: Hi, Jim. I think maybe there’s some sort of
miscommunication, because the “article,” as you call it, is fine. It shouldn’t
need a fact-checker. I have taken some liberties in the essay here and there,
but none of them are harmful. I’m not sure it’s going to be worth your time to
fact-check this.
FINGAL: I hear you. But I think it’s just policy to
fact-check all the nonfiction pieces the magazine publishes. So could you help
me out with that number?
D’AGATA: All right. Well, from what I can remember, I got
that number by counting up the number of strip clubs that were listed in the
local yellow pages. However, since that issue of the phone book was long gone by
the time I started writing this, I found that porn article that I gave the
magazine so that they could check up on my
estimate.
FINGAL: I
guess that’s where the discrepancy is, because the number that’s mentioned in
the article is different from the number you’re using in your
piece.
D’AGATA: Well, I
guess that’s because the rhythm of “thirty-four” works better in that sentence
than the rhythm of “thirty-one,” so I changed
it.
*
* *
FINGAL: Hey, John. . . again =). I was wondering
if you could weigh in on this tic-tac-toe game with the chicken. It looks like
it happened after Levi Presley died. Also, the woman who won it wasn’t really
from Mississippi. I think she was a local resident. Does this
matter?
D’AGATA: I
realize that, but I need her to be from a place other than Las Vegas in order to
underscore the transient nature of the city—that nearly everyone in Vegas is
from someplace else. And since she did in fact originally come from Mississippi,
I think the claim is fine as it is.
FINGAL: What about that fact that this didn’t occur on the
day Presley died? It’s not accurate to say that it
did.
D’AGATA: It was
part of the atmosphere of that particular
summer.
FINGAL: Then
isn’t that how it should be framed?
D’AGATA: No, because being more precise would be less
dramatic. I don’t think readers will care whether the events that I’m discussing
happened on the same day, a few days apart, or a few months apart. What most
readers will care about, I think, is the meaning that’s suggested in the
confluence of these events—no matter how far apart they occurred. The facts that
are being employed here aren’t meant to function baldly as “facts.” Nobody is
going to read this, in other words, in order to get a survey of the demographics
of Las Vegas or what’s scheduled on the community calendar. Readers can get that
kind of information elsewhere.
FINGAL: There’s no mention of this accident in the
archives of either the Las Vegas Review-Journal or
the Las Vegas Sun, the two major papers in the city. John, do you
have a source for this?
D’AGATA: I heard about this from a woman I interviewed at
the Aztec Inn, which is across the street from the
Stratosphere.
FINGAL: Can you send me a copy of your notes from this
interview?
D’AGATA: I
didn’t keep notes from the interview. I just relied on my memory of what she
told me. Besides, this wasn’t a formal interview. I was just wandering around
the Stratosphere trying to gather information.
FINGAL: To be honest, I suspect your casual interviewing
strategy is going to be a problem.
D’AGATA: Well it might be a problem, but with all due
respect, it’s your problem, Jim, not mine. I’m not a reporter, and I have no
interest in pretending to be a reporter or in producing journalism. Also, even
if this had been a formal interview, I still wouldn’t have taken extensive
notes, because I tend to be casual whenever I’m interviewing people so that they
feel more comfortable with me. The minute you take out a tape recorder or a
notebook during an interview people get self-conscious and start “performing”
for you, watching what they say and how they say
it.
FINGAL: Well,
OK. . . I guess. . . but this still seems to violate about
ten different rules of journalistic integrity.
D’AGATA: I’m not sure that matters, Jim. This is an essay,
so journalistic rules don’t belong here.
* *
*
FINGAL: “. . . his answers to the questions on
the last pop quiz he took in school. . .” These questions are taken
from an “Art Pretest” rather than a “pop quiz.” And the test is dated August 25,
1999, and Levi’s death was on July 12, 2002, so even if this were a “pop quiz,”
it’s very unlikely that it was “the last pop quiz he took in school,” unless he
was one lucky kid.
D’AGATA: OK, you’re probably right that this wasn’t his
“last” quiz. But it’s more dramatic to say that it was, and I don’t think it’s
harming anyone to do that. It’s not like there’s a quiz out there that’ll get
jealous if we claim that this was Levi’s last quiz. Really, Jim, respectfully,
you’re worrying about very stupid shit. (By the way, also very stupid would be
calling this quiz a “pretest,” because I kind of suspect that half the readers
out there wouldn’t even know what the fuck that
was.)
FINGAL: Unfortunately I don’t get to decide which facts
are stupid; I have to check all of them.
* *
*
FINGAL: Can’t find any
reference to this Zurich ordinance anywhere.
Source?
D’AGATA: I’m
sure I could find it if nailing down this tiny little fact is that
important.
FINGAL: “Important” is relative at this point. But I’d
like to have it for the sake of thoroughness.
D’AGATA: OK, will hunt
around.
FINGAL: Awesome,
thank you.
D’AGATA: Sorry, can’t find
it.
*
* *
FINGAL: “There was, for a long time, when construction on
it began, the rumor of an anomaly that locals called a ‘kink,’ a bend in one of
the tower’s three 800-foot-high legs.” I can’t find evidence of this.
John?
D’AGATA: The
“rumor” about the Stratosphere kink is entirely anecdotal, which is why it’s
called a “rumor.” I took my first trip to Las Vegas in the summer of 1994. On a
bus tour I took from Las Vegas to Hoover Dam, we sat briefly in traffic at the
foot of the tower, and the bus driver—who doubled as our tour guide—told us that
one of the three legs on the tower’s tripod was crooked and that because the
sight of it so unnerved local residents (even though it was supposedly safe),
the building’s contractor filled in the leg’s crooked angle with
Styrofoam.
FINGAL: Do
you have any documentation of that, like notes from your
trip?
D’AGATA: You’re
asking for evidence of a rumor?
FINGAL: If you’re saying that there was a rumor, I have to
find out whether there was in fact a rumor, even if I ignore the truth value of
the rumor. Do you remember the name of the company that ran the
tour?
D’AGATA: Are you
serious? No, I don’t remember the name of a tour company from more than fifteen
years ago. Sorry, readers are going to have to feel factually unfulfilled
here.
FINGAL: Then what
about the notes you took during that trip?
D’AGATA: In 1994 I was a sophomore in college, studying
Latin and Greek—not writing—and on vacation with my grandparents. We were going
to Hoover Dam on a thousand-hour bus trip through the desert without any
air-conditioning. No notes were being taken, Jim.
[CITATIONS]
It’s difficult to
believe that it took seven years to shape D’Agata’s article so that it was
suitable for publication, but that is what we are told. There was a mixed
response to the book and to what it revealed about truth in writing and
fact-checking. Josh Dzieza, in The Daily Beast, suggested that D’Agata
wanted to go further in bending the truth than a journalist would feel
comfortable doing – he combined quotations, formed composites of the people who
uttered them, and changed dates. Why? Because D’Agata doesn’t think of himself
as a journalist. He sees himself as an essayist, working a seam of literature
that – according to D’Agata – has historically had a looser relationship with
the facts than that of journalism. Dzieza asserts that no-one recognises the
category as D’Agata describes i, - “For man, an essay or report or article are
interchangeable; f it isn’t labelled ‘fiction’, readers assume it’s telling the
truth”.
Jennifer B. MacDonald, in The New
York Times, accuses D’Agata of using ‘facts’ “that aren’t facts to make a
statement about a ‘reality’ that is real for no-one but himself, and relies on
‘coincidences’ that aren’t coincidences to reveal something ‘profound’ about Las
Vegas, or the cosmos, that is not profound but rather an accidental accumulation
of detail and event”.
[CITE]
She lists the
exchanges D’Agata made with the truth to achieve a more ‘literary’ result with
his article: he states that there are 34 licenses strip clubs in Vegas – in fact
there were only 31 at the time; the name of a saloon is changed; the name of the
protagonist’s school is changed, because D’Agata felt the real name was too
“clunky”; the name of a nail bar was changed; and a fleet of dog-grooming vans
that were coloured pink became purple, because D’Agata needed the two beats in
the word ‘purple’ for his sentence.
Does any
of that matter? Does it make any difference if Vegas has 34 strip clubs instead
of thirty-one? Probably not. And does it diminish the article if vans are
described as one colour when, in reality, they are another?
Doubtful.
But where do you draw the line?
Fact-checking is taken very seriously, in the United States, at least, and most
large magazines have departments devoted to nothing else except ensuring the
veracity of the article submitted for
publication.
This is what one fact-checker,
Hannah Goldfield, of The New Yorker, wrote online about
D’Agata’s book and the ‘liberties’ he tried to take in his article about Las
Vegas: [CITE]
What
D’Agata fails to realize is that not only are these liberties indeed
harmful—even if only to the reader, who is trusting the writer to be accurate in
his or her description of what exists or took place in reality—they are also
completely unnecessary to creating a piece of great nonfiction. The conceit that
one must choose facts or beauty—even if it’s beauty in the
name of “Truth” or a true “idea”—is preposterous. A good writer—with the help of
a fact-checker and an editor, perhaps—should be able to marry the two, and a
writer who refuses to even try is, simply, a hack. If I’ve learned one thing at
this job, it’s that facts can be quite
astonishing.
This is not to
say that truth cannot be found in fiction. As E. M. Forster famously wrote,
“Fiction is truer than history, because it goes beyond the evidence, and each of
us knows from our own experience that there is something beyond the evidence.”
But fiction does not lie to us—it creates other worlds, with other rules, that,
if rendered well, can tell us something true about our own world. The reader
understands this, just as the reader (well, most readers, anyway)
understands when reading, say, David Sedaris, that comedy inherently allows room
for exaggeration, and even fabrication. (It should be noted that,
at The New Yorker, when a fictional world intersects with the real
world, or when comedic exaggeration seems poised to do damage, the details are
fact-checked. Even in cartoons.)
And not all nonfiction must be journalistic; there is great worth in
“experimental” or narrative nonfiction, too, but the leading lights of that art
form, such as Susan Orlean, Joan Didion, or John Jeremiah Sullivan, don’t
doctor the facts; where they experiment is in deciding how to use and interpret
them. D’Agata, in his attempt to “reconstruct details in a way that makes them
feel significant,” in the name of “art” and “a good experience,” is neither
going beyond the evidence, nor experimenting with it stylistically; he’s simply
ignoring it, and abusing the reader by doing
so.
Fingal gives him a run
for his money on this point, but seems to cave in the end, judging by his very
last fact-checking note. “Even if I could definitively determine to a fraction
of a second exactly when it was that Levi left his house,” he writes, “and from
how high it was that he jumped and what direction the wind happened to be
blowing—and how hard, and at what temperature, and whether there was dust or
not—when he dove off the tower at 6:01:53 PM and plummeted for a total of 8
seconds onto a sidewalk of brown-brick herringbone…well, then…I don’t know. I’d
have done my job. But wouldn’t he still be
dead?”
This question, no
matter how it’s interpreted—as a nihilistic sigh, or as an argument that all
that matters are the broad strokes—is a royal cop-out. Altering and
cherry-picking details is an easy, hollow game for a writer. The challenge, and
the art, lies in confronting the facts—all of them, whether you like them or
not—and shaping them into something
beautiful.
It’s difficult to argue
with that point of view. Put simply: If the facts don’t fit the story, change
the story, not the facts (with apologies to Albert
Einstein).
A Third
Case Study – Jayson Blair
This is
what happens when you go off the rails
entirely.
Jayson Blair was born in Maryland in
1976 and studied at the University of Maryland, College Park. While at college
he was editor-in-chief of the student newspaper. In 1998 he spent the summer as
an intern at The New York Times and returned to the newspaper in June 1999 to
become an ‘intermediate reporter’. To all intents and purposes he worked
diligently at the newspaper for the next four years. Then his world came to
pieces.
In April 2003, the NYT was contacted
by the senior editor at the San Antonio Express-News who questioned the
similarities between a story Blair had written for the NYT and one that had been
published in the Express-News and written by their reporter, Macarena
Hernandez.
The NYT held an inquiry and
discovered that since at least 2002 Blair had been fabricating some articles and
plagiarising others. For example, in 2002, Blair had written a piece about the
interrogation of John Muhammad, who was known as the ‘Washington Sniper’ and who
was later convicted several counts of murder. In his piece, Blair claimed that a
dispute between the police authorities involved in the case had ruined the
questioning of Muhammad. This was denied by everyone who had taken part in the
interrogation process. Blair had also named as witnessing the questioning
present several lawyers who had not been present – the following year, Blair
wrote another piece about Muhammad’s crimes, in which he claimed to be in
Washington, when he was not; he plagiarised quotations from a Washington Post
story, invented others from a person he had not interviewed, and used material
that he had promised his sources would be ‘off the record’ – In another
piece about the same case later, Blair claimed to be in Fairfax in Virginia,
when he was not; he described a videotape of the co-accused in the case, Lee
Malvo, being interviewed by police: no such take existed; and claimed that a
detective had noticed blood on Malvo’s jeans, which led the youth to confess to
murder: no such confession occurred – A few days later, Blair wrote another
piece for the NYT, entitled ‘ Relatives of Missing Soldiers Dread Hearing Worse
News’, about the fighting in Iraq, in which he claimed, again, to be in West
Virginia, when he was not; spoke to a relative of one of the US soldiers listed
as missing in Iraq, who had no recollection of meeting Blair; described the view
from the house of the parents of another of the missing soldiers, Jessica Lynch,
which could not be visible from the house; wrongly stated that Lynch’s brother
was a member of the National Guard; misspelled Lynch’s mother’s name, and
fabricated a dream that he claimed she had had – A week later, Blair was
claiming to be covering the rescue of Jessica Lynch from her home town of
Palestine, West Virginia, a town he had never visited. His entire contribution
to the NYT’s coverage of the rescue story consisted of rearranged details from
Associated Press’ stories – Four days after that, Blair wrote an account of a
church service in Cleveland, Ohio, and an interview with the minister who
conducted the service: Blair never went to Cleveland; he only spoke to the
minister on the telephone; he copied most of the article from an earlier
Washington Post piece; he plagiarised quotations from The Plain Dealer and New
York Daily News; he made up a detail about the minister keeping a picture of his
son inside his bible, and he got the name of the church wrong – On April 19, the
NYT published a piece by Blair in which he described interviewing four injured
soldiers in a naval hospital: he never went to the hospital, and only spoke to
one of the soldiers on the telephone, to whom he attributed fabricated
quotes.
Blair resigned from the NYT, and in
April 2003 the newspaper published a front-page story reporting on the events,
and describing the affair as ‘a low point in the 152-year history of the
newspaper’.
How did Blair respond to what had
happened? He stated that his main motivations was a fear that he would not live
up to the expectations that he and others had had for his
career.
Pressure of the job, in other words.
And one can see how it might happen – you are a young reporter working for a
prestigious newspaper which expects the best from its staff, you have the
example of previous writers to live up to, and you inhabit a world where
everyone wants to know everything immediately, and your paper wants to be the
organ that imparts the best news the earliest. Why shouldn’t you take
short-cuts? And what difference did it really make? No-one questioned you, until
someone noticed similarities between your work and that of another writer. And
if you are Blair, don’t you want to see the NYT examine every story
from everyone with the same rigour that it is approaching your work?
Isn’t everyone else doing the same as you, on the
sly?
Possibly. But probably not.
It didn’t help that Blair had a history with
the fabrication of stories. When he was working for his student newspaper he
made four serious errors as a reporter and editor that brought his integrity
into question, according to a letter signed by 30 staff members of the paper.
Those members of staff claimed that Blair’s mistakes had been brought to the
attention of the board that owned the newspaper, which chose to ignore the
matter.
So what do we have? A young man in a
hurry who padded some of his stories with untruths. And a newspaper that didn’t
do quite as much checking as it could have, either into Blair’s record, or the
veracity of his stories. The NYT is a newspaper, though, and fact-checking is a
luxury it cannot afford if it is to keep abreast of the competition. But perhaps
some retrospective story checking could have been – should be being – done.
Blair was thrown to the wolves, of course.
His career as a writer continues, though his success is doubtful, and certainly
very few people take him at all seriously.
* *
*
I could go on with case studies. There have
been other cases similar to Jayson Blair’s in the last few years. Why is this?
Laziness on the part of the writer? People who have not been able to make it as
fiction writers applying what talent for fiction they do have to nonfiction? The
almost insatiable demand of publishers for ‘creative fiction’ books, even if
most of their editors don’t quite know how to define the
genre?
All of the above,
I would say and
more.
Submissions for the first edition of thesnailmagazine are coming in in slowly but steadily. I am surprised at the
consistently high quality of most of them – perhaps this has something to do
with the demographic profile of the people I have been canvassing for material.
I joined Linkedin and so far have links to 3,500 people. Almost without
exception they are college professors, writing instructors, publishers, literary
agents, magazine and book editors, experienced writers. I have avoided the flood
of badly-written or poorly-though out pieces from writers who might have year or
so to go before they can produce professional
work.
The material covers a wide spectrum of subjects, from an account
attempts, after the Bay of Pigs fiasco, to mount new attacks on Cuba, to sexual
harassment at a University in Morocco; from a brief profile of a murderer turned
trucker, to an account of the new phenomenon of Mechanical Turks (no, I had
never heard of the expression either), and a review of a long-out-of-print book
that reveals (again) Victorian man’s disinterest in the life of other creatures
except as paid-for specimens for the natural history museums that were
taking-off in 19th-century Britain. There is also a considered
examination of the decline of the American newspaper industry over the last
twenty or so years.
The magazine is about half-full now, but I am still looking for
more material. So if you, or any of your friends, have something you think might
be worth a look at, please send it to submissions@thesnailmagazine.com, either
as an attachment or within the body of the
e-mail.
I am also looking for book reviews. If you have recently read a
new book that you think falls into the category of ‘creative nonfiction’, why
not take some time, sit down and write six hundred words about the book, and
give it anything from 0 to 5 stars.
There are web-sites that show how to structure a book review. No
harm in trying.
Added 19 May 2013
These are two of the hardest things to do for a writer:
1. Find a subject that interests you enough to write about it.
2. Write about the subject in such a way that it draws the interest of the reader.
Some writers can do 1, but not 2. And some can to 2, but not 1. Advocates of creative nonfiction suggest that what distinguishes one of their practitioners from the role of reporter is that they bring a heightened sense of the subject to the reader, whereas the reporter ‘just’ brings the facts. Any trained reporter can be put on to any story: a sports-writer could cover a fire. A police-reporter could cover a council meeting, and a business reporter could cover a state funeral. The ability for one is relevant to all. What happened? Where did it happen? Who did it happen to? How did it happen?
Sometimes ‘why did it happen’ might be apparent and can be reported:
‘A man was killed last night at the junction of Fourth Street and Seventh Avenue after two drivers fought over a parking space. The victim, 27-year old Lee Tuck of Regentsville, was stabbed to death. A man has been arrested by the police in connection with the incident and will appear in court tomorrow. Police are appealing for witnesses to come forward.’
The above is a squid that might appear in the pages of any regional or national newspaper in the US or the UK. Two men argued over a parking space – the fight escalated – one of them had a knife and used it – someone died. The next story would be about the appearance in court of the alleged perpetrator. The victim’s family might be interviewed.
How would feature writers approach the same story? They would know the facts of the case. They would do some research to see if anything similar had occurred in the past, either in the same location or in other locations involving the same set of circumstances.
Let’s say it hasn’t happened before in their town. Now the ‘why’ of the story seems more important. The ‘why’ was that two men fought over a parking space. Why should they have to? The features writer digs deeper. He or she spends time in the area, talks to people who live and work there, interviews the victim’s and the alleged culprit’s family and friends. Builds up a bigger picture. Eventually, the reporter will have enough material to construct a feature. It might go like this:
There never used to be problems over parking spaces at Fourth and Seven. Until a few months ago there was enough room for everyone who wanted to stop their car or truck and get out and do some shopping in the area. Then the Jets came to town. They shut down their field out on Brandon Road and built a state of the art stadium over on Second Street where the old ice-skating rink used to be – the rink where our mothers and fathers and grandparents learned to skate, but where we were never able to after it went out of business thirty years ago.
What used to be a derelict lot, attracting all kinds of unsavoury activity, is now a gleaming monument to post-modern architecture where the City Jets, some would say, ply their own brand of post-modern baseball.
The stadium was welcomed by almost everyone in town when it was built. But some people had their doubts. Especially those who live and work in the vicinity, on Third, Fourth and Fifth Street, and on Seventh Avenue.
“We knew there would be trouble,” said Denzel Jackson, a grizzled, thirty-year resident of the area, and proprietor of a mom-and-pop store on the corner of Fourth and Seventh. “What’s going to happen on games’ nights when people come to a game and find there is no place to park outside the stadium?” He waved his hands at the street, hands that bore the scars that evidenced his nearly fifty years work in Neely & Smith’s metal-working plant, before it closed down and pushed Jackson and his wife into the grocery trade. “There’s hardly room to swing a cat out there on games' night. Cars on the sidewalk, cars blocking the alleys and delivery gates. Darned cars everywhere. We knew this kind of thing would happen eventually.” He nodded sagely for a moment. “Except we expected someone would use a gun and more people would be killed.”
The difference between the two pieces above goes a little way to illustrating the techniques the creative nonfiction writer would use to put his or her story together. There is almost a template most advocates of the genre use, and since they seem to like bullet-points we, too, will employ them:
· The piece must be fact-based. It must be based on something that happened, something that is happening, or something that will happen.
· Show, don’t tell. Use scenes that indicate something happening that will serve to move the story forward. Remember, even when you start the piece you should have an end in view – work towards it.
· Use dialogue. Positively seek it out. Don’t put words in people’s mouths, though – simply report what they said.
· Try and put yourself into the story. Use the first person singular where possible. Sometimes the story is better when it is a story about someone trying to get to the bottom of the story.
· It should lead from the specific to the general. That is, the smaller truth of the story should allow you to reveal the larger, more universal truth that the story illustrates.
To be Continued…
Remember the bullet-points we listed? Here they are
again:
· The piece must be fact-based.
It must be based on something that happened, something that is happening, or
something that will happen.
· Show, don’t tell. Use scenes
that indicate something happening that will serve to move the story forward.
Remember, even when you start the piece you should have an end in view – work
towards it.
· Use dialogue. Positively seek
it out. Don’t put words in people’s mouths, though – simply report what they
said.
· Try and put yourself into the
story. Use the first person singular where possible. Sometimes the story is
better when it is a story about someone trying to get to the bottom of the
story.
· It should lead from the
specific to the general. That is, the smaller truth of the story should allow
you to reveal the larger, more universal truth that the story
illustrates.
We are going to look at them in more detail, now, to see just how
important they are to the piece that has to be
written.
First: The piece must be fact-based.
It must be based on something that happened, something that is happening, or
something that will
happen.
A Case Study – John
Steinbeck
John Steinbeck was one of
the titans of American literature in the 20th century. His 1939 novel, The
Grapes of Wrath, was awarded a Pulitzer Prize. In 1962 he was awarded the Nobel
Prize for his lifetime work.
During WW2,
Steinbeck served as a war correspondent, writing for
The New York Herald Tribune. He
covered the American bombing campaign over Europe, and then took part in
small-scale commando raids against German-held islands in the Mediterranean,
until wounds caused by an explosion in North Africa sent him home. He later
published two books about his experiences: Once There Was a War, and Bombs Away:
The Story of a Bomber Team.
By the 1960s
Steinbeck’s writing life was coming to a close. His best work was behind him. In
1962 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for his lifetime
work.
But Steinbeck wasn’t quite
finished. In 1966 and 1967, he returned to war reporting, traveling
through the major combat zones of the Vietnam War, recording his experiences for
the magazine Newsday.
Before that, though, in
1960, Steinbeck decided to make a tour throughout America to see how it had
changed since he wrote about it back in the 1930s, at the depths of the
depression, when it seemed that the country would never get back on its
feet.
He obtained a pick-up truck and had a
camper top put on as living quarters, and set off across the United States with
his dog ‘Charley’, a standard poodle.
In a
letter to a close friend, Frank Loesser, Steinbeck explained the reasons behind
the planned trip:
“In the fall - right after
Labor Day - I’m going to learn about my own country. I’ve lost the flavor and
taste and sound of it. It’s been years since I have seen it … I’m going alone,
out towards the West by the northern way but zigzagging through the Middle West
and the mountain states. I’ll avoid cities, his small towns and farms and
ranches, sit in bars and hamburger stands and on Sunday go to church. I’ll go
down the coast from Washington and Oregon and then back through the Southwest
and South and up the East Coast but always zigzagging. Elaine (Steinbeck’s wife)
will join me occasionally but mostly I have to go alone, and I shall go unknown.
I just want to look and listen. What I’ll get I need badly - a re-knowledge of
my own country, of its speeches, its views, its attitudes and its changes. It’s
long overdue - very long.”
Steinbeck wrote the
journey up from the notes and journals he had kept and published it as Travels
with Charley. It was an immediate hit and has sold consistently ever since. In a
recent edition, one writer said in an introduction|:
“Moving through the woods and deserts, dirt
tracks and highways to large cities and glorious wildernesses, Steinbeck
observed - with remarkable honesty and insight, with a humorous and sometimes
sceptical eye - America, and the Americans who inhabited it. What he saw was a
lonely, generous nation too packed with individuals for single judgements; what
he saw made him proud, angry, sympathetic and elated. His vision of how the
world was changing still speaks to us prophetically through the
decades”.
Some proponents of creative nonfiction have held
Travels with Charley up as an exemplifier of the genre. Here was a true book - a
travel book - in which the author used his own personality and experience to
relate what he had found during his journey around America. For many travel
writers, the book served as a template for their own attempts at conveying a
foreign place to the reader.
In 2010, exactly
fifty years after Steinbeck made his trip, another writer, Bill Steigerwald,
decided to replicate it, to see what had changed in American between Steinbeck’s
travels and his own.
This isn’t a new
idea. The journey in George Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier has been retaken
again and again, at different intervals, by writers seeking to record the
changes that have occurred since the original journey. It’s a good journalistic
device - re-examine a story from decades earlier to determine what differences
there are now between time now and time
then.
Bill Steigerwald is a professional
journalist who has worked for the Los Angeles Times, the Post-Gazette, and the
Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. He retired from the daily newspaper business in 2009.
His motives in re-tracing Steinbeck’s route were as much self-interest as a
genuine wish to see how the country had changed in the intervening period. As
Steigerwald says himself in his introduction to the book, Dogging
Steinbeck:
“In a last-ditch effort to
attract national media attention, a few hours before I left my house, I blasted
a self-promotional email to nearly everyone I had even known, worked for or
pitched freelance articles to in journalism. It was as over-the-top as I could
make it and as far as I can tell it did me and what was left of my career no
good at all.”
The email
read:
Ex-newspaperman Bill
Steigerwald to chase John Steinbeck’s ghost for 10,000
miles.
To go everywhere Steinbeck and
dog Charley went in “Travels With
Charley.”
Will follow great author’s
exact route half a century later.
Desperate act of drive-by journalism by former Pittsburgh / LA paperboy,
columnist, editor.
Will take no
federal stimulus money.
Will take no
dog.
Hello friends, former
co-workers, fellow libertarians, people who have no idea why they’re getting
this email blast.
On Thursday, Sept.
23, I’ll leave John Steinbeck’s former seaside home in Sag Harbor, New York, a
place I could never afford to live or visit for more than two hours, and begin
chasing his ghost around America’s blue highways for 10,000
miles.
I’m going to retrace the
iconic road trip Steinbeck made in the fall of 1960 and turned into his 1962,
nonfiction bestseller “Travels With Charley.” I’m not taking an iconic dog and
I’m not driving an iconic pickup truck/camper. I do hope to write a book hooked
around following exact route Steinbeck took and telling the whole story of what
he did or did not do on his journey exactly 50 years
ago”.
What Steigerwald found was
profoundly unsettling, especially for Steinbeck fans, as well as those readers
who had viewed Travels With Charley as iconic among travel books. Most of the
book was made up. Steinbeck hadn’t been everywhere he said he had been. Few, if
any, of the conversations he recorded ever took place. Some of the things he
said he saw could not have been seen by him or anyone else. He could as well
have stayed at home in Sag Harbor for the forty-two days he said he was on the
road and written his book in his study.
If Steinbeck had been a modern author, even one of his standing, and had been
sent by - say - The New Yorker to write about the state of America, hardly one
page of his manuscript would have got past the magazines fact-checkers, and it
would have caused the most almighty rumpus on the editorial floors. If it had
been published, then it would very quickly have been exposed as a fraud and the
writer hounded from TV studio to TV studio until he broke down and begged for
mercy. If he had been one of your ordinary run-of-the-mill young journalists
trying to make a name for himself or herself, he or she would have been sacked
on the spot and would be lucky to get a job selling classifieds for another
paper.
But the reaction to Steigerwald’s
book, Dogging Steinbeck, is interesting - and a little worrying. Most of the
support for Steigerwald and condemnation for Steinbeck came from those
politically opposed to Steinbeck’s left-leaning position. [You can be dead and
buried forty-five years and still despised for your politics].
Steinbeck scholars had an interesting
response: Susan Shillinglaw, a scholar at the National Steinbeck Centre, told
the New York Times: “Any writer has the right to shape materials,
and undoubtedly Steinbeck left things out. That doesn’t make the book a lie …
(and) … Whether or not Steinbeck met that (person) where he says he did, he
could have met such a figure at some point in his life. And perhaps he enhanced
some of the anecdotes … Does it really matter that much?”
Jay Parini, author of a Steinbeck biography,
and who wrote the Introduction for the Penguin edition of Travels,
told the newspaper:
“I have always
assumed that to some degree it’s a work of fiction. Steinbeck was a fiction
writer, and here he’s shaping events, massaging them. He probably wasn’t using a
tape recorder. But I still feel there’s an authenticity there. Does this shake
my faith in the book? Quite the opposite. I would say hooray for Steinbeck. If
you want to get at the spirit of something, sometimes it’s important to use the
techniques of a fiction writer”.
And Bill
Barich, who wrote Long Way Home: On the Trail of Steinbeck’s
America, a retracing of Steinbeck’s footsteps, said: “I’m fairly certain
that Steinbeck made up most of the book. The dialogue is so wooden. Steinbeck
was extremely depressed, in really bad health, and was discouraged by everyone
from making the trip. He was trying to recapture his youth, the spirit of the
knight-errant. But at that point he was probably incapable of interviewing
ordinary people. He’d become a celebrity and was more interested in talking to
Dag Hammarskjold and Adlai Stevenson. The die was probably cast long before he
hit the road, and a lot of what he wrote was colored by the fact that he was so
ill. But I still take seriously a lot of what he said about the country. His
perceptions were right on the money about the death of localism, the growing
homogeneity of America, the trashing of the environment. He was prescient about
all that.”
From these comments it would seem
that it doesn’t really matter if a writer of an ostensible nonfiction book makes
things up, or invents, events, so long as he or she gets to the spirit of
the enterprise.
Much of what Steinbeck
said about the America he found was true: the centre of cities were dying,
suburbia was spreading at an alarming way, often wiping out places of scenic
beauty. American was becoming much-of-a-muchness, the same stores, the same
fast-food joints, the same has-stations, in state after state after state.
The differences that had been present in America of Steinbeck’s youth were
levelling themselves out, speech patterns were the same everywhere, the
influence of radio and television was making itself
felt.
But did he have to spend 72 days on the
road to come to that conclusion?
Most nights
Steinbeck stayed in hotels or boarding-houses or motels, rather than camping
with other travellers. The conversations he had were either invented, or put
together from a variety of sources. It’s probable that he started with his
conclusions and then sought evidence to support
them.
By using the angle of a journey around
the US, though, he lent verisimilitude to his account, he cloaked it with the
semblance of truth, and he presented it as something that came as a result of
his research.
Steigerwald’s researches and
the resulting book seem hardly to have impinged on Steinbeck’s reputation. The
publisher of Travels With Charley, Penguin Books, inserted a slip into
the book pointing out that much of the book might have been recreated by
Steinbeck, but his standing as a writer seems
intact.
But Steinbeck also published two books
compiled from reports he sent from the frontline to the newspaper he represented
in the US. What would be the result if those reports, too, proved to be
semi-fictional, that they had been recreated by Steinbeck going over things in
his own mind, and that much of them were composed of things he might think
would happen rather than those that
did?
Would that have reflected more
badly on his reputation? Would it have destroyed
it?
It’s curious that many of those who think
Steinbeck’s making-up of things in Travels With Charley is
only moderately wrong are from the academic world, scholars, tutors and
teachers. Anyone who has been into academia learns very quickly that the way
garner high marks for an essay is to take a point of view quickly and put it
over as forcefully as possible.
When I was
studying history at University I had in my class two Marxists, and a
Conservative of very right-wing views. The rest of the class were apolitical. It
was notable that the Marxists and the Conservative consistently got higher marks
for their written work than anyone else in the class. It didn’t matter what the
subject was – the causes of the French Revolution, the failure of Japan to
industrialise at the same time as the rest of the world, the impact of the
railway to American agriculture – they seemed to be able to dash off a
well-argued polemic. Of course, the secret was that while everybody was spending
all their time reading up the subject from every point of view, and then trying
to write something that reflected those points of view, the three extremists
started out with a prejudice and sought the evidence to support it – and, as
every historian knows, there is evidence aplenty to shore-up any point of
view.
To an academic, then, the facts can be
pliable, especially if they are used to exhibit a writer’s virtuosity – her or
her art.
A
Second Case Study – John D’Agata
John
D’Agata is an American writer who holds Master of Fine Art qualifications in
both poetry and nonfiction. He has received fellowships from prestigious
American foundations. He teaches creative writing at the University of
Iowa.
In 2003, D’Agata submitted an article to
Harper’s. The story was about a teenager who had committed suicide in Las Vegas
by throwing himself from a building. D’Agata used the event on which to hand a
meditation about Las Vegas and the despair that the city can induce in residents
and visitors.
Harper’s rejected the piece
because it could not verify all the facts that it contained. D’Agata then
submitted it to The Believer, a magazine of interviews, essays and reviews.
There then ensued a seven-year long correspondence between D’Agata and the
fact-checker assigned to the piece by the magazine, Jim
Fingall.
The article was never published by a
periodical; instead, it was printed in one of D’Agata’s books, “About a
Mountain”, together with Fingal’s scrupulous
annotations.
This is part of the email
exchange between D’Agata and Fingal:
JIM FINGAL: Hi, John. I’m the intern who’s been assigned
to fact-check your article. I was hoping you could clarify how you determined
that there are thirty-four strip clubs in the city while the source you’re using
says thirty-one.
JOHN
D’AGATA: Hi, Jim. I think maybe there’s some sort of
miscommunication, because the “article,” as you call it, is fine. It shouldn’t
need a fact-checker. I have taken some liberties in the essay here and there,
but none of them are harmful. I’m not sure it’s going to be worth your time to
fact-check this.
FINGAL: I hear you. But I think it’s just policy to
fact-check all the nonfiction pieces the magazine publishes. So could you help
me out with that number?
D’AGATA: All right. Well, from what I can remember, I got
that number by counting up the number of strip clubs that were listed in the
local yellow pages. However, since that issue of the phone book was long gone by
the time I started writing this, I found that porn article that I gave the
magazine so that they could check up on my
estimate.
FINGAL: I
guess that’s where the discrepancy is, because the number that’s mentioned in
the article is different from the number you’re using in your
piece.
D’AGATA: Well, I
guess that’s because the rhythm of “thirty-four” works better in that sentence
than the rhythm of “thirty-one,” so I changed
it.
*
* *
FINGAL: Hey, John. . . again =). I was wondering
if you could weigh in on this tic-tac-toe game with the chicken. It looks like
it happened after Levi Presley died. Also, the woman who won it wasn’t really
from Mississippi. I think she was a local resident. Does this
matter?
D’AGATA: I
realize that, but I need her to be from a place other than Las Vegas in order to
underscore the transient nature of the city—that nearly everyone in Vegas is
from someplace else. And since she did in fact originally come from Mississippi,
I think the claim is fine as it is.
FINGAL: What about that fact that this didn’t occur on the
day Presley died? It’s not accurate to say that it
did.
D’AGATA: It was
part of the atmosphere of that particular
summer.
FINGAL: Then
isn’t that how it should be framed?
D’AGATA: No, because being more precise would be less
dramatic. I don’t think readers will care whether the events that I’m discussing
happened on the same day, a few days apart, or a few months apart. What most
readers will care about, I think, is the meaning that’s suggested in the
confluence of these events—no matter how far apart they occurred. The facts that
are being employed here aren’t meant to function baldly as “facts.” Nobody is
going to read this, in other words, in order to get a survey of the demographics
of Las Vegas or what’s scheduled on the community calendar. Readers can get that
kind of information elsewhere.
FINGAL: There’s no mention of this accident in the
archives of either the Las Vegas Review-Journal or
the Las Vegas Sun, the two major papers in the city. John, do you
have a source for this?
D’AGATA: I heard about this from a woman I interviewed at
the Aztec Inn, which is across the street from the
Stratosphere.
FINGAL: Can you send me a copy of your notes from this
interview?
D’AGATA: I
didn’t keep notes from the interview. I just relied on my memory of what she
told me. Besides, this wasn’t a formal interview. I was just wandering around
the Stratosphere trying to gather information.
FINGAL: To be honest, I suspect your casual interviewing
strategy is going to be a problem.
D’AGATA: Well it might be a problem, but with all due
respect, it’s your problem, Jim, not mine. I’m not a reporter, and I have no
interest in pretending to be a reporter or in producing journalism. Also, even
if this had been a formal interview, I still wouldn’t have taken extensive
notes, because I tend to be casual whenever I’m interviewing people so that they
feel more comfortable with me. The minute you take out a tape recorder or a
notebook during an interview people get self-conscious and start “performing”
for you, watching what they say and how they say
it.
FINGAL: Well,
OK. . . I guess. . . but this still seems to violate about
ten different rules of journalistic integrity.
D’AGATA: I’m not sure that matters, Jim. This is an essay,
so journalistic rules don’t belong here.
* *
*
FINGAL: “. . . his answers to the questions on
the last pop quiz he took in school. . .” These questions are taken
from an “Art Pretest” rather than a “pop quiz.” And the test is dated August 25,
1999, and Levi’s death was on July 12, 2002, so even if this were a “pop quiz,”
it’s very unlikely that it was “the last pop quiz he took in school,” unless he
was one lucky kid.
D’AGATA: OK, you’re probably right that this wasn’t his
“last” quiz. But it’s more dramatic to say that it was, and I don’t think it’s
harming anyone to do that. It’s not like there’s a quiz out there that’ll get
jealous if we claim that this was Levi’s last quiz. Really, Jim, respectfully,
you’re worrying about very stupid shit. (By the way, also very stupid would be
calling this quiz a “pretest,” because I kind of suspect that half the readers
out there wouldn’t even know what the fuck that
was.)
FINGAL: Unfortunately I don’t get to decide which facts
are stupid; I have to check all of them.
* *
*
FINGAL: Can’t find any
reference to this Zurich ordinance anywhere.
Source?
D’AGATA: I’m
sure I could find it if nailing down this tiny little fact is that
important.
FINGAL: “Important” is relative at this point. But I’d
like to have it for the sake of thoroughness.
D’AGATA: OK, will hunt
around.
FINGAL: Awesome,
thank you.
D’AGATA: Sorry, can’t find
it.
*
* *
FINGAL: “There was, for a long time, when construction on
it began, the rumor of an anomaly that locals called a ‘kink,’ a bend in one of
the tower’s three 800-foot-high legs.” I can’t find evidence of this.
John?
D’AGATA: The
“rumor” about the Stratosphere kink is entirely anecdotal, which is why it’s
called a “rumor.” I took my first trip to Las Vegas in the summer of 1994. On a
bus tour I took from Las Vegas to Hoover Dam, we sat briefly in traffic at the
foot of the tower, and the bus driver—who doubled as our tour guide—told us that
one of the three legs on the tower’s tripod was crooked and that because the
sight of it so unnerved local residents (even though it was supposedly safe),
the building’s contractor filled in the leg’s crooked angle with
Styrofoam.
FINGAL: Do
you have any documentation of that, like notes from your
trip?
D’AGATA: You’re
asking for evidence of a rumor?
FINGAL: If you’re saying that there was a rumor, I have to
find out whether there was in fact a rumor, even if I ignore the truth value of
the rumor. Do you remember the name of the company that ran the
tour?
D’AGATA: Are you
serious? No, I don’t remember the name of a tour company from more than fifteen
years ago. Sorry, readers are going to have to feel factually unfulfilled
here.
FINGAL: Then what
about the notes you took during that trip?
D’AGATA: In 1994 I was a sophomore in college, studying
Latin and Greek—not writing—and on vacation with my grandparents. We were going
to Hoover Dam on a thousand-hour bus trip through the desert without any
air-conditioning. No notes were being taken, Jim.
[CITATIONS]
It’s difficult to
believe that it took seven years to shape D’Agata’s article so that it was
suitable for publication, but that is what we are told. There was a mixed
response to the book and to what it revealed about truth in writing and
fact-checking. Josh Dzieza, in The Daily Beast, suggested that D’Agata
wanted to go further in bending the truth than a journalist would feel
comfortable doing – he combined quotations, formed composites of the people who
uttered them, and changed dates. Why? Because D’Agata doesn’t think of himself
as a journalist. He sees himself as an essayist, working a seam of literature
that – according to D’Agata – has historically had a looser relationship with
the facts than that of journalism. Dzieza asserts that no-one recognises the
category as D’Agata describes i, - “For man, an essay or report or article are
interchangeable; f it isn’t labelled ‘fiction’, readers assume it’s telling the
truth”.
Jennifer B. MacDonald, in The New
York Times, accuses D’Agata of using ‘facts’ “that aren’t facts to make a
statement about a ‘reality’ that is real for no-one but himself, and relies on
‘coincidences’ that aren’t coincidences to reveal something ‘profound’ about Las
Vegas, or the cosmos, that is not profound but rather an accidental accumulation
of detail and event”.
[CITE]
She lists the
exchanges D’Agata made with the truth to achieve a more ‘literary’ result with
his article: he states that there are 34 licenses strip clubs in Vegas – in fact
there were only 31 at the time; the name of a saloon is changed; the name of the
protagonist’s school is changed, because D’Agata felt the real name was too
“clunky”; the name of a nail bar was changed; and a fleet of dog-grooming vans
that were coloured pink became purple, because D’Agata needed the two beats in
the word ‘purple’ for his sentence.
Does any
of that matter? Does it make any difference if Vegas has 34 strip clubs instead
of thirty-one? Probably not. And does it diminish the article if vans are
described as one colour when, in reality, they are another?
Doubtful.
But where do you draw the line?
Fact-checking is taken very seriously, in the United States, at least, and most
large magazines have departments devoted to nothing else except ensuring the
veracity of the article submitted for
publication.
This is what one fact-checker,
Hannah Goldfield, of The New Yorker, wrote online about
D’Agata’s book and the ‘liberties’ he tried to take in his article about Las
Vegas: [CITE]
What
D’Agata fails to realize is that not only are these liberties indeed
harmful—even if only to the reader, who is trusting the writer to be accurate in
his or her description of what exists or took place in reality—they are also
completely unnecessary to creating a piece of great nonfiction. The conceit that
one must choose facts or beauty—even if it’s beauty in the
name of “Truth” or a true “idea”—is preposterous. A good writer—with the help of
a fact-checker and an editor, perhaps—should be able to marry the two, and a
writer who refuses to even try is, simply, a hack. If I’ve learned one thing at
this job, it’s that facts can be quite
astonishing.
This is not to
say that truth cannot be found in fiction. As E. M. Forster famously wrote,
“Fiction is truer than history, because it goes beyond the evidence, and each of
us knows from our own experience that there is something beyond the evidence.”
But fiction does not lie to us—it creates other worlds, with other rules, that,
if rendered well, can tell us something true about our own world. The reader
understands this, just as the reader (well, most readers, anyway)
understands when reading, say, David Sedaris, that comedy inherently allows room
for exaggeration, and even fabrication. (It should be noted that,
at The New Yorker, when a fictional world intersects with the real
world, or when comedic exaggeration seems poised to do damage, the details are
fact-checked. Even in cartoons.)
And not all nonfiction must be journalistic; there is great worth in
“experimental” or narrative nonfiction, too, but the leading lights of that art
form, such as Susan Orlean, Joan Didion, or John Jeremiah Sullivan, don’t
doctor the facts; where they experiment is in deciding how to use and interpret
them. D’Agata, in his attempt to “reconstruct details in a way that makes them
feel significant,” in the name of “art” and “a good experience,” is neither
going beyond the evidence, nor experimenting with it stylistically; he’s simply
ignoring it, and abusing the reader by doing
so.
Fingal gives him a run
for his money on this point, but seems to cave in the end, judging by his very
last fact-checking note. “Even if I could definitively determine to a fraction
of a second exactly when it was that Levi left his house,” he writes, “and from
how high it was that he jumped and what direction the wind happened to be
blowing—and how hard, and at what temperature, and whether there was dust or
not—when he dove off the tower at 6:01:53 PM and plummeted for a total of 8
seconds onto a sidewalk of brown-brick herringbone…well, then…I don’t know. I’d
have done my job. But wouldn’t he still be
dead?”
This question, no
matter how it’s interpreted—as a nihilistic sigh, or as an argument that all
that matters are the broad strokes—is a royal cop-out. Altering and
cherry-picking details is an easy, hollow game for a writer. The challenge, and
the art, lies in confronting the facts—all of them, whether you like them or
not—and shaping them into something
beautiful.
It’s difficult to argue
with that point of view. Put simply: If the facts don’t fit the story, change
the story, not the facts (with apologies to Albert
Einstein).
A Third
Case Study – Jayson Blair
This is
what happens when you go off the rails
entirely.
Jayson Blair was born in Maryland in
1976 and studied at the University of Maryland, College Park. While at college
he was editor-in-chief of the student newspaper. In 1998 he spent the summer as
an intern at The New York Times and returned to the newspaper in June 1999 to
become an ‘intermediate reporter’. To all intents and purposes he worked
diligently at the newspaper for the next four years. Then his world came to
pieces.
In April 2003, the NYT was contacted
by the senior editor at the San Antonio Express-News who questioned the
similarities between a story Blair had written for the NYT and one that had been
published in the Express-News and written by their reporter, Macarena
Hernandez.
The NYT held an inquiry and
discovered that since at least 2002 Blair had been fabricating some articles and
plagiarising others. For example, in 2002, Blair had written a piece about the
interrogation of John Muhammad, who was known as the ‘Washington Sniper’ and who
was later convicted several counts of murder. In his piece, Blair claimed that a
dispute between the police authorities involved in the case had ruined the
questioning of Muhammad. This was denied by everyone who had taken part in the
interrogation process. Blair had also named as witnessing the questioning
present several lawyers who had not been present – the following year, Blair
wrote another piece about Muhammad’s crimes, in which he claimed to be in
Washington, when he was not; he plagiarised quotations from a Washington Post
story, invented others from a person he had not interviewed, and used material
that he had promised his sources would be ‘off the record’ – In another
piece about the same case later, Blair claimed to be in Fairfax in Virginia,
when he was not; he described a videotape of the co-accused in the case, Lee
Malvo, being interviewed by police: no such take existed; and claimed that a
detective had noticed blood on Malvo’s jeans, which led the youth to confess to
murder: no such confession occurred – A few days later, Blair wrote another
piece for the NYT, entitled ‘ Relatives of Missing Soldiers Dread Hearing Worse
News’, about the fighting in Iraq, in which he claimed, again, to be in West
Virginia, when he was not; spoke to a relative of one of the US soldiers listed
as missing in Iraq, who had no recollection of meeting Blair; described the view
from the house of the parents of another of the missing soldiers, Jessica Lynch,
which could not be visible from the house; wrongly stated that Lynch’s brother
was a member of the National Guard; misspelled Lynch’s mother’s name, and
fabricated a dream that he claimed she had had – A week later, Blair was
claiming to be covering the rescue of Jessica Lynch from her home town of
Palestine, West Virginia, a town he had never visited. His entire contribution
to the NYT’s coverage of the rescue story consisted of rearranged details from
Associated Press’ stories – Four days after that, Blair wrote an account of a
church service in Cleveland, Ohio, and an interview with the minister who
conducted the service: Blair never went to Cleveland; he only spoke to the
minister on the telephone; he copied most of the article from an earlier
Washington Post piece; he plagiarised quotations from The Plain Dealer and New
York Daily News; he made up a detail about the minister keeping a picture of his
son inside his bible, and he got the name of the church wrong – On April 19, the
NYT published a piece by Blair in which he described interviewing four injured
soldiers in a naval hospital: he never went to the hospital, and only spoke to
one of the soldiers on the telephone, to whom he attributed fabricated
quotes.
Blair resigned from the NYT, and in
April 2003 the newspaper published a front-page story reporting on the events,
and describing the affair as ‘a low point in the 152-year history of the
newspaper’.
How did Blair respond to what had
happened? He stated that his main motivations was a fear that he would not live
up to the expectations that he and others had had for his
career.
Pressure of the job, in other words.
And one can see how it might happen – you are a young reporter working for a
prestigious newspaper which expects the best from its staff, you have the
example of previous writers to live up to, and you inhabit a world where
everyone wants to know everything immediately, and your paper wants to be the
organ that imparts the best news the earliest. Why shouldn’t you take
short-cuts? And what difference did it really make? No-one questioned you, until
someone noticed similarities between your work and that of another writer. And
if you are Blair, don’t you want to see the NYT examine every story
from everyone with the same rigour that it is approaching your work?
Isn’t everyone else doing the same as you, on the
sly?
Possibly. But probably not.
It didn’t help that Blair had a history with
the fabrication of stories. When he was working for his student newspaper he
made four serious errors as a reporter and editor that brought his integrity
into question, according to a letter signed by 30 staff members of the paper.
Those members of staff claimed that Blair’s mistakes had been brought to the
attention of the board that owned the newspaper, which chose to ignore the
matter.
So what do we have? A young man in a
hurry who padded some of his stories with untruths. And a newspaper that didn’t
do quite as much checking as it could have, either into Blair’s record, or the
veracity of his stories. The NYT is a newspaper, though, and fact-checking is a
luxury it cannot afford if it is to keep abreast of the competition. But perhaps
some retrospective story checking could have been – should be being – done.
Blair was thrown to the wolves, of course.
His career as a writer continues, though his success is doubtful, and certainly
very few people take him at all seriously.
* *
*
I could go on with case studies. There have
been other cases similar to Jayson Blair’s in the last few years. Why is this?
Laziness on the part of the writer? People who have not been able to make it as
fiction writers applying what talent for fiction they do have to nonfiction? The
almost insatiable demand of publishers for ‘creative fiction’ books, even if
most of their editors don’t quite know how to define the
genre?
All of the above,
I would say and
more.
Submissions for the first edition of thesnailmagazine are coming in in slowly but steadily. I am surprised at the
consistently high quality of most of them – perhaps this has something to do
with the demographic profile of the people I have been canvassing for material.
I joined Linkedin and so far have links to 3,500 people. Almost without
exception they are college professors, writing instructors, publishers, literary
agents, magazine and book editors, experienced writers. I have avoided the flood
of badly-written or poorly-though out pieces from writers who might have year or
so to go before they can produce professional
work.
The material covers a wide spectrum of subjects, from an account
attempts, after the Bay of Pigs fiasco, to mount new attacks on Cuba, to sexual
harassment at a University in Morocco; from a brief profile of a murderer turned
trucker, to an account of the new phenomenon of Mechanical Turks (no, I had
never heard of the expression either), and a review of a long-out-of-print book
that reveals (again) Victorian man’s disinterest in the life of other creatures
except as paid-for specimens for the natural history museums that were
taking-off in 19th-century Britain. There is also a considered
examination of the decline of the American newspaper industry over the last
twenty or so years.
The magazine is about half-full now, but I am still looking for
more material. So if you, or any of your friends, have something you think might
be worth a look at, please send it to submissions@thesnailmagazine.com, either
as an attachment or within the body of the
e-mail.
I am also looking for book reviews. If you have recently read a
new book that you think falls into the category of ‘creative nonfiction’, why
not take some time, sit down and write six hundred words about the book, and
give it anything from 0 to 5 stars.
There are web-sites that show how to structure a book review. No
harm in trying.
Added 19 May 2013
These are two of the hardest things to do for a writer:
1. Find a subject that interests you enough to write about it.
2. Write about the subject in such a way that it draws the interest of the reader.
Some writers can do 1, but not 2. And some can to 2, but not 1. Advocates of creative nonfiction suggest that what distinguishes one of their practitioners from the role of reporter is that they bring a heightened sense of the subject to the reader, whereas the reporter ‘just’ brings the facts. Any trained reporter can be put on to any story: a sports-writer could cover a fire. A police-reporter could cover a council meeting, and a business reporter could cover a state funeral. The ability for one is relevant to all. What happened? Where did it happen? Who did it happen to? How did it happen?
Sometimes ‘why did it happen’ might be apparent and can be reported:
‘A man was killed last night at the junction of Fourth Street and Seventh Avenue after two drivers fought over a parking space. The victim, 27-year old Lee Tuck of Regentsville, was stabbed to death. A man has been arrested by the police in connection with the incident and will appear in court tomorrow. Police are appealing for witnesses to come forward.’
The above is a squid that might appear in the pages of any regional or national newspaper in the US or the UK. Two men argued over a parking space – the fight escalated – one of them had a knife and used it – someone died. The next story would be about the appearance in court of the alleged perpetrator. The victim’s family might be interviewed.
How would feature writers approach the same story? They would know the facts of the case. They would do some research to see if anything similar had occurred in the past, either in the same location or in other locations involving the same set of circumstances.
Let’s say it hasn’t happened before in their town. Now the ‘why’ of the story seems more important. The ‘why’ was that two men fought over a parking space. Why should they have to? The features writer digs deeper. He or she spends time in the area, talks to people who live and work there, interviews the victim’s and the alleged culprit’s family and friends. Builds up a bigger picture. Eventually, the reporter will have enough material to construct a feature. It might go like this:
There never used to be problems over parking spaces at Fourth and Seven. Until a few months ago there was enough room for everyone who wanted to stop their car or truck and get out and do some shopping in the area. Then the Jets came to town. They shut down their field out on Brandon Road and built a state of the art stadium over on Second Street where the old ice-skating rink used to be – the rink where our mothers and fathers and grandparents learned to skate, but where we were never able to after it went out of business thirty years ago.
What used to be a derelict lot, attracting all kinds of unsavoury activity, is now a gleaming monument to post-modern architecture where the City Jets, some would say, ply their own brand of post-modern baseball.
The stadium was welcomed by almost everyone in town when it was built. But some people had their doubts. Especially those who live and work in the vicinity, on Third, Fourth and Fifth Street, and on Seventh Avenue.
“We knew there would be trouble,” said Denzel Jackson, a grizzled, thirty-year resident of the area, and proprietor of a mom-and-pop store on the corner of Fourth and Seventh. “What’s going to happen on games’ nights when people come to a game and find there is no place to park outside the stadium?” He waved his hands at the street, hands that bore the scars that evidenced his nearly fifty years work in Neely & Smith’s metal-working plant, before it closed down and pushed Jackson and his wife into the grocery trade. “There’s hardly room to swing a cat out there on games' night. Cars on the sidewalk, cars blocking the alleys and delivery gates. Darned cars everywhere. We knew this kind of thing would happen eventually.” He nodded sagely for a moment. “Except we expected someone would use a gun and more people would be killed.”
The difference between the two pieces above goes a little way to illustrating the techniques the creative nonfiction writer would use to put his or her story together. There is almost a template most advocates of the genre use, and since they seem to like bullet-points we, too, will employ them:
· The piece must be fact-based. It must be based on something that happened, something that is happening, or something that will happen.
· Show, don’t tell. Use scenes that indicate something happening that will serve to move the story forward. Remember, even when you start the piece you should have an end in view – work towards it.
· Use dialogue. Positively seek it out. Don’t put words in people’s mouths, though – simply report what they said.
· Try and put yourself into the story. Use the first person singular where possible. Sometimes the story is better when it is a story about someone trying to get to the bottom of the story.
· It should lead from the specific to the general. That is, the smaller truth of the story should allow you to reveal the larger, more universal truth that the story illustrates.
To be Continued…