Are All Stories Fictional: Truth of Writing

Introduction

Stories are just that: Stories. It requires characters, a setting, a conflict of some sort, meaning and an end. As my professor, Dr. Morton has taught me, the only real way a “story” can be entirely true is if it is not a story at all but instead, an annal: a record of something that has been witnessed with one's own eyes and recorded exactly as witnessed. I find this to be very true, considering storytellers do in fact have the choice to tell it how they want and, more often than not, they want their story to be interesting to the reader. That is, after all, the purpose of stories: To bring people together, to captivate them, enthral them and teach them something while doing it.

Enhancing Fiction and the Story

A story that goes along the lines of; “The woman smiled at the man, the man smiled back. The man paid the check and they left the restaurant.” While this has characters and setting, there is no conflict and it certainly does not carry any meaning or captivate the reader. It is not even able to be considered a story, but instead, an annal. Now, if the writer took the same record and added some details it would turn into a story; “The woman gazed into the man's eyes, blushing and smiling as they finished up the extravagant dinner the server had set before them and waited for the check. The man gazed back, mirroring her emotions as he reached for the check that had been placed in the middle of the table, before the woman could make an attempt to. The man knew, in this moment he had just had dinner with a woman that had definite dating potential. The woman, on the other hand, was already picking out the colors for their wedding in her head. In blissful silence, they both rose from the table, and left the restaurant to continue their evening behind closed doors”. These small changes turned this into a story: There is now a conflict that the woman and the man are in two different places emotionally towards each other, which yields the meaning that often times people have different intentions. This version is interesting. It is fun, it is captivating and it conveys something to the reader and teaches them something (they may or may not have already known) without the reader truly realising it. Without those details it’s impossible for something to become a story.

Now, the question must be asked, did the storyteller know what was going on in their heads? Or was creativity a key factor in the creation of this story? Does adding these details make it any less true? After all, the man and the woman WERE enjoying a lovely dinner, the man DID pay the check, and they DID leave silently together into the night.

Blurring Truth and Fiction Boundaries

In an article written by Guillermo Erades titled “All Stories Are Fiction”, Erades talks about a time when he was presenting his newest book, “Back to Moscow”. Erades was asked by someone at the event how much of his book was based on the truth, which inspired him to write an article on this very subject. In the article, Erades recounts part of his book where a man is in bed on a winter night watching a woman standing at the window, crying. He then goes on to say:

“I began to work on it, polishing the details, sharpening the dialogue, making it—I hoped—a better story. At some point in the process, it was not just snowing, it was the first snowfall of the season. In a further revision, an empty wine bottle appeared on the coffee table. The bottle, I thought, suggested at once an attempt at romance and a certain degree of drunkenness. It fitted the story. But was that bottle on the coffee table in my flat back then, when I lived in Moscow, a decade before I wrote the book?” (“All Stories are Fiction”)

While the story in itself is true, the small details that were added were not entirely. In doing this, the story has been made more interesting, but its ability to be claimed as 100% truthful is partially diminished. Erades admits to this openly, but also points out that “stories do not serve the facts; their allegiance is entirely to the storyteller…by selecting what to tell and what not to tell, the writers of memoirs and other works of nonfiction are constructing stories”(“All Stories are Fiction”). What Erades means in saying this, is that essentially, the story belongs to the writer: whether or not there was a wine bottle on the table is not something that matters when you look at the bulk of the story, what matters is that the man was watching the woman cry at a window, and it was snowing. To the writer, the important truths have been noted and accounted for, and the rest is inconsequential.

While Erades was able to include these details, does it necessarily mean that his story is no longer valid? Or is it a specific kind of truth that he is writing? in his story “Back to Moscow”, he managed to not receive any backlash from the changes in the details, even though he claims it as a true story. journalist Åsne Seierstad, however, was not so fortunate.

Response to Seierstad's Book

Seierstad’s book, “The Bookseller of Kabul” (2003) received a lot of attention from the media when Shah Muhammed Rais – the man Seierstad referred to as “Sultan Khan” in her book – and other main characters in the book “denounced [it] as inaccurate and invasive by its main characters”(“The Bookseller of Kabul Author Cleared of Invading Afghan Family's Privacy”). Rais declared that “Seierstad betrayed his trust in her exposure of him and his family”. This led people to begin debating whether or not Seierstad’s writings were true.“Journalism is about going out and making choices. It's my book, it's my decision” (“The Bookseller of Kabul Author Cleared of Invading Afghan Family's Privacy”). Both Erades and Seierstad are in agreeance on the fact that the way the story is told, is wholly in the hands of the person that tells it.

Seierstad, however, received backlash from her book for the reason that she was writing about a family that comes from a culture with the belief that One's reputation and wealth is what defines them. Erades wrote of his own personal experience in a place, and while Seierstad did the same, she focused not on her story, but the stories of others as she was there: Erades focused on his story. According to the article “The Bookseller of Kabul and the Anthropologies of Norway”, Seierstad received criticisms from two anthropologists by the names of Signe Howell and Kathinka Froystad, on the fact that she did not include herself directly in the book, therefore “the account is contaminated by Seierstad’s own views and values, and that she confirms Western preconceptions about the oppression of women in Islam, rather than successfully conveying the social and cultural context of the Khan family life”(pp.19-22). Seierstads response on this subject was to explain that her reasoning for removing herself from the book was to avoid “muddying the divide between fact and fiction” and also expressed further explanation:

“ I have written in a literary form, but real histories that I have participated in, or that I have been told by those who participated in them, make up the basis for what I write. When I report what the persons think or feel, it is based on what they have told me that they thought or felt in the situation described.”(pp.19-22)

It was decided in court that Seierstad had in fact invaded the privacy of her “subjects” and was ordered to pay a fee of money to “Sultan Khan’s” second wife, which Seierstad stated she would fight this verdict claiming that “she was there explicitly as a journalist and that her intentions were clear to the family”. Despite these years of stressful court cases and disputes among the public and professional, Seierstad remains one of the top journalists in Norway and “The Bookseller of Kabul” is used all around the world as a scholarly, and accurate depiction of what it was like – for one particular family – during this time.

Ethics: Balancing Truth and Storytelling

Seierstad is not the only writer who has been questioned on their truthfulness in their writings. Many writers have faced the same accusations; John D’agata and Joan Didion are just two examples. This is where the type of truth is most important: when reading published works from authors it is important to take into account what kind of truth they are using. Is it propositional truth? Objective truth? Subjective truth? Existential truth? Or is it metaphorical truth?

Authors like John Fingal –who worked with John D’agata on the book “The Lifespan of a Fact”(2012)– is, in my opinion, a writer of propositional truth, Erades is a writer of subjective truth, and D’agata, a free spirited journalist who claims the title of “artist” and “essayist”, is a writer of existential truth. He does not deny he changes details to make his narrative “better” and is very careful in his interviews to counter any statements that he is a reporter and journalist of the truth:

“D’Agata asserts he didn’t “report” his essay from Vegas; he went to the city and did a little mind-meld with it. This, even though his techniques look suspiciously like those of a reporter: he immersed himself in a place, got to know its people, consulted documents, recorded his impressions, turned his material into a narrative. Not only that, but he loaded his essay with factually verifiable detail — dates, times, dimensions, directions, statistics, names, quotations from actual journalistic sources. He declares that as an essayist he shouldn’t be held to the same standards of correctness as a journalist. So fine, he’s not a journalist. He’s a wolf in journalist’s clothing” (“In the Details”).

The Works Between Fiction and Nonfiction

If you ask me, writers like Erades, D’agata, and Didion are not wrong or dishonest in their writings. These writers meld somewhere in between the worlds of fiction and nonfiction creating the new journalist form of writing called “Creative nonfiction”: Nonfiction works, written with fiction techniques. This form of writing has brought together and blurred the lines between these two writing forms and, according to Lee Gutkind, “offers flexibility and freedom while adhering to the basic tenets of nonfiction writing and/or reporting”

Another writer by the name of Tom Barone expands an explanation of creative nonfiction stating it “seem[s] to signal to the reader the coexistence of two apparently conflicting reasons for reading a text. The first is to secure a proximity to the truth, the ‘essential drift of events as they really happened’; and the second reason is one often associated with the reading of a work of fiction imbued with ‘storytelling liberties’”(p.6).

So what exactly is the problem with creative nonfiction stories, and does the creative aspect that turns it into a story make it any less true? The writers and journalists are covering the basics of the truth after all, and as long as the truth for the majority of information remains as it is, who cares if Erades changes a snowy night to “the first snowfall of the season”? Who cares if D’agata changes the color of a van from “pink” to “purple” because he “needed the two beats in ‘purple’”.

Conclusion

When it comes down to it, literature writing styles are progressing and evolving, and the importance of drawing the reader in on a more creative basis of writing is becoming increasingly more important than making sure every nitpick-y detail is exactly as it happened. It becomes a matter of –As my professor Dr. Morton describes it– “breaking the generic boundary” and creating a narrative that means something and teaches something to the reader by adding creative details that, yes, may not have been present in reality, but that act as a supporting crutch for the truth and meaning that the writer is attempting to convey. It is about keeping the world of reading exciting, while continuing to bring people together on one concept, through one story that is true in many ways, and creative in others. Ultimately, all writing, no matter the style, is a form of art. Although these authors have included embellishments, or excluded certain details, I do not believe it makes their story any less true based on the truth that they are trying to convey to the reader.

Works Cited

1. Barone, Tom. “Creative NonFiction and Social Research.” Handbook of the Arts in Qualitative Research: Perspectives, Methodologies, Examples and Issues, Sage Publication, Inc, 2007, p. 108, books.google.com/books?id=9GleBAAAQBAJ&dq=is+creative+nonfiction+still+truth%3F&lr=.
2. D'agata, John, and Jim Fingal. The Lifespan of a Fact. W.W. Norton & Company, 2012.
3. Erades, Guillermo. “All True Stories Are Fiction.” Work in Progress, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 26 June 2017, fsgworkinprogress.com/2016/04/29/all-true-stories-are-fiction/. fsgworkinprogress.com/2016/04/29/all-true-stories-are-fiction/.
4. Gutkind, Lee. “Creative Nonfiction: A Movement, Not a Moment.” Creative Nonfiction, no. 29, 2006, p. 6. JSTOR,
5. www.jstor.org/stable/44363223.
6. McDonald, Jennifer B. “In the Details.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 21 Feb. 2012, www.nytimes.com/2012/02/26/books/review/the-lifespan-of-a-fact-by-john-dagata-and-jim-fingal.html.
7. Myhre, Knut Christian. “The Bookseller of Kabul and the Anthropologists of Norway.” Anthropology Today, vol. 20, no. 3, June 2004, pp. 19–22., doi:10.1111/j.0268-540x.2004.00269.x.
8. https://s3.amazonaws.com/academia.edu.documents/44752203/AT_2004.pdf?response-content-disposition=inline%3B%20filename%3DThe_Bookseller_of_Kabul_and_the_Anthropo.pdf&X-Amz-Algorithm=AWS4-HMAC-SHA256&X-Amz-Credential=AKIAIWOWYYGZ2Y53UL3A%2F20191115%2Fus-east-1%2Fs3%2Faws4_request&X-Amz-Date=20191115T003825Z&X-Amz-Expires=3600&X-Amz-SignedHeaders=host&X-Amz-Signature=0f8199e617a25836899034a09fd811da5561ffdf6d94908c2bfffe8658b08526
9. Seierstad, Asne. The Bookseller of Kabul. Virago, 2003.
10. Topping, Alexandra. “The Bookseller of Kabul Author Cleared of Invading Afghan Family's Privacy.” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 13 Dec. 2011, www.theguardian.com/world/2011/dec/13/bookseller-of-kabul-author-cleared
11. Yafai, Faisal al. “The Ruling against Bookseller of Kabul Author Asne Seierstad.” The National, The National, 20 Aug. 2010, www.thenational.ae/arts-culture/the-ruling-against-bookseller-of-kabul-author-asne-seierstad-1.518300.