Make-believe is the new real-life (and vice versa)
Maud's got this wicked little segment today on the smearing of the lines between fiction and non-fiction:
I can read forever about journalists who like creative stirred into their non-fiction, especially if they come from my neighbourhood. In fact, I see nothing wrong with decent fact-fudging in the service of a great story. But take the same question perceived from the other end of the looking glass, and I start fanning myself out of heated opinions--the seemingly endless North American appetite for the "real" at the expense of the fictional. Not real-real but real parsed and packaged, Astroturf passing itself off as grass. Also from Maud: A.L. Kennedy talks about the "de-fictionalisation" of our culture, plus Dubravka Ugresic's "soapified reality" in Thank You for Not Reading.
At Moby Lives, Paul Maliszewski talks with Michael Finkel, a former New York Times Magazine writer who was fired for using "improper narrative techniques" in his article "Is Youssouf Mal� A Slave?" The piece ostensibly focused on a West African boy who worked in the cocoa fields, but when writing and revising, Finkel "blended details from the life of Mal�, a real boy, with the experiences of others in similar straits."
I can read forever about journalists who like creative stirred into their non-fiction, especially if they come from my neighbourhood. In fact, I see nothing wrong with decent fact-fudging in the service of a great story. But take the same question perceived from the other end of the looking glass, and I start fanning myself out of heated opinions--the seemingly endless North American appetite for the "real" at the expense of the fictional. Not real-real but real parsed and packaged, Astroturf passing itself off as grass. Also from Maud: A.L. Kennedy talks about the "de-fictionalisation" of our culture, plus Dubravka Ugresic's "soapified reality" in Thank You for Not Reading.
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