Recently I stumbled onto an article from The New York Times about literary fakes. I couldn't help but post it here, since it highlights a serious problem: Those who can write well don't always have interesting lives. In the industry, though, writers face enormous pressure to write what sells, and, let's face it, true stories sell. Non-fiction sells 51% of books. Writers need to sell books to live and keep writing.
Naturally these creative minds will write a novel and try to pass it off as "true." James Frey tried to sell A Million Little Pieces as fiction. No one would buy it, since memoir-mania was in full swing. So he said, "Oh, yeah, it's true." Big mistake, right? But literary faking goes way, way back, at least to 1839. Probably as far back as Plato's Socratic dialogue. Do you really think Plato had his tape recorder out when Socrates was talking?
Experience is not good writing (Henry James points this out, too). Since Hemingway's novels, readers have wrongly assumed that great experiences mean great writing. And with the release of Hemingway's A Movable Feast, modern-day bookstores had a new genre to pedal: Memoir.
That's a stupid word. It means an official note or report, or a narrative about one's life, from the Latin memoria, you know, memory, but what it really means is based on a true story (or FICTION). The facts have been changed to protect the guilty. Memoir is a fake genre, actually. Things are either non-fiction or fiction. And memoir is based on a true story - but ultimately it's fiction. Which is fine. I don't have a problem with that. It can still be poignant, moving, compassionate, hilarious, heartbreaking, and so on.
But I do have a problem when people are shocked to learn their literary heroes don't exist. What the hell? Are you telling me Dr. Watson is not a real person?!?! Conan Doyle was such a fake! I feel particularly bad for Laura Albert (J.T. LeRoy), who people thought was a male ex-prostitute. The poor woman has been lumped in with fakers like James Frey. She published her work as fiction and had an impersonator tour as the "author," or narrator, of the novels. Then a film company sued her and she was ordered to "pay $116,000 in damages and $350,000 in legal fees." That's $466,000.
In the introduction to A Movable Feast, Ernest Hemingway even warns that his memoir is partly invented, that characters have been rearranged and blended together, and the storytelling streamlined. He says, in so many words, that the memoir is fiction in places and can be read as such throughout. So take his advice to heart the next time you pick up the heartbreaking, hilarious memoir in Barnes and Noble; remember that memoir is another word for fiction. And be happy that the writing is good, that it touches you.
Naturally these creative minds will write a novel and try to pass it off as "true." James Frey tried to sell A Million Little Pieces as fiction. No one would buy it, since memoir-mania was in full swing. So he said, "Oh, yeah, it's true." Big mistake, right? But literary faking goes way, way back, at least to 1839. Probably as far back as Plato's Socratic dialogue. Do you really think Plato had his tape recorder out when Socrates was talking?
Experience is not good writing (Henry James points this out, too). Since Hemingway's novels, readers have wrongly assumed that great experiences mean great writing. And with the release of Hemingway's A Movable Feast, modern-day bookstores had a new genre to pedal: Memoir.
That's a stupid word. It means an official note or report, or a narrative about one's life, from the Latin memoria, you know, memory, but what it really means is based on a true story (or FICTION). The facts have been changed to protect the guilty. Memoir is a fake genre, actually. Things are either non-fiction or fiction. And memoir is based on a true story - but ultimately it's fiction. Which is fine. I don't have a problem with that. It can still be poignant, moving, compassionate, hilarious, heartbreaking, and so on.
But I do have a problem when people are shocked to learn their literary heroes don't exist. What the hell? Are you telling me Dr. Watson is not a real person?!?! Conan Doyle was such a fake! I feel particularly bad for Laura Albert (J.T. LeRoy), who people thought was a male ex-prostitute. The poor woman has been lumped in with fakers like James Frey. She published her work as fiction and had an impersonator tour as the "author," or narrator, of the novels. Then a film company sued her and she was ordered to "pay $116,000 in damages and $350,000 in legal fees." That's $466,000.
In the introduction to A Movable Feast, Ernest Hemingway even warns that his memoir is partly invented, that characters have been rearranged and blended together, and the storytelling streamlined. He says, in so many words, that the memoir is fiction in places and can be read as such throughout. So take his advice to heart the next time you pick up the heartbreaking, hilarious memoir in Barnes and Noble; remember that memoir is another word for fiction. And be happy that the writing is good, that it touches you.
I agree with your thoughts on the recent outcry over "fake" memoirs. Memoir is just another name for story, as far as I'm concerned. I really don't think people should be so outraged when they find that memoirists (ugh, I hate that word) fudge details in their memoirs to make them a better read. If they didn't, they just be abject naturalism. We'd be reading lists, more or less, and then people would be angry about that. Go figure. I actually find the overwhelming taste in "true stories" kind of distressing, personally, especially since a lot of people don't realize those stories aren't as "true" as they think they are. It makes me think that they can't stomach anything with an imagination. In fact, I'd argue that there's a severe distrust of the human imagination in many readers of popular writing at the moment.
As for your comments on my last blog, I figured I'd reply. I never actually explicitly stated my views about the assignment in its original intent, for being used in conjunction with teaching ENG 110. I saw the assignment as a way for us to show our students the importance of revision, hence the multiple drafts. I definitely saw it as being more useful for our students than for us, though. If the intent of the assignment was to help me understand my students' writing processes, the fact is that I already understand that, because I read my students' papers and see their rough drafts; I already see how they think about their topics and I already hear their questions about what to do. If the intent of the assignment was to help me become a better writer, then the assignment might have defeated its purpose because I actually had to drastically change my usual writing process to complete this paper. My revision process is actually quite different than the process that was assigned for this paper (on that note, I'm very curious to see how these will be graded, considering that a lot of the other TAs had to go through similar measures). I also agree that the concept of writing what we teach is a bit of a "well, of course!" idea, especially for creative writing teachers. In both of our cases, we're constantly writing stories while we're teaching our students to do the same. Heck, we're teaching this stuff because of our writing.
On that note, I actually believe that a "Writing What We Teach"-type assignment would work more naturally in a creative writing course than a composition course. The bewilderment factor wouldn't be as high in a creative writing class, specifically. If our students can handle reading and discussing stories by Chekhov or Faulkner, then they should have no problems seeing our material (and I actually think it's a really good idea to show students our stories to begin with). Meanwhile, what if we showed our ENG 110 students our 600-level textual analysis of, say, one of the articles we read in ENG 620, or even in our ENG 526 class? If we didn't alter our usual writing processes, then the exercise would go over students' heads. If we did, then we would be forcing ourselves, and hence our writing, into an unnatural state, possibly dooming our writing, which is certainly not a good thing since we're still students ourselves. Meanwhile, we don't exactly bring in the articles we read in ENG 620, which I would say are the closest parallels comp/rhet has to those stories by Chekhov and Faulkner, for our students to read and use as models, for obvious reasons. I actually think this raises "authenticity" issues for those of us who teach ENG 110: are we actually teaching what we write? Maybe not.
Overall, I still recognize potential virtues of the Writing What We Teach assignment, especially within my own chosen field, but I also agree that there are some possible issues with it as well. Perhaps it would work a lot better in future classes if the TAs were allowed to choose the kind of assignment they wrote from several options (say, choosing between a Memoir, Textual Analysis, and Research Paper). There could even be an option for people who specialize in creative writing (although literature studies people would probably be left in the dust, considering the embargo on literature in composition classes). I just wonder if adding flexibility to the assignment would make it more relevant and "authentic."