The Ethics of Nonfiction, Part 2: Creating “Novelistic Scenes”

As I mentioned in my previous post, the “New Journalism” style of writing is extremely popular and widespread. Not so long ago, I encountered a version of this in my editing practice. 

The book was written as a series of letters for the author’s unborn son. While this has nothing to do with the point I am going to make—a continuation of my ideas from the previous post—like the scene described in the last one, this manuscript was also about race in America. It concerned the murder of a young Black man, Raymond, a distant relative of the author. The book was made up of open-letters written to various players in the story of murder, so that the author’s son could understand what race-relations were like in the United States in the year it was written.

I received the manuscript through a service and thus was going into the editing process “cold.” Essentially, I received the Word document, opened it, and got to work. The book was so suffused with novelistic flourishes that I did not realize it was nonfiction until about five pages in, when I flippantly searched the name of the recipient of the first open letter, Former San Francisco District Attorney Chess Boudin, the public official who presided over the case.

I didn’t mention this to the client, but upon finding that this was a true story, I was bowled over.

The problem wasn’t that I couldn’t believe the tragedy of the tale the author was describing. Rather, it was that the manner in which the author was describing the events gave the reader no sense that this was not a fiction. Throughout the opening pages, and indeed the entire manuscript, the author would write, “Raymond thought X,” and “Carlos [R' killer] thought Y, etc.” In one concrete example, the author wrote, “They both wanted the attention of the father they loved.” 

In other words the author, a professor at a prestigious university, attempted to go into the minds of Raymond and Carlos throughout the book, and infer what they were thinking.

In other words the author, a professor at a prestigious university, attempted to go into the minds of Raymond and Carlos throughout the book, and infer what they were thinking. This threw me. In retrospect, one aspect that should have clued me in that these pages were nonfiction was that, in the opening leaves, the author took pains to note that he and Raymond did not know each other at all well.

I wrote the following note in my responding editorial letter, “I wonder if you, as a Professor at X, should include a section where you consider your own prejudices, or in other words, how you interpret the world. When you infer Raymond’s interiority, invariably Raymond’s motivations mimic a kind of encompassing, seemingly anthropological or sociological, theory of the world. I suppose the question I have for you is, was Raymond considering these issues in these terms, or have you projected that level of understanding onto him? My point here is not to debate whether or not your understanding is accurate, but rather, to situate yourself in the writing.” As with the story I wrote earlier, this also concerns the ethics of writing narrative non-fiction, which is a different genre than Historical Fiction. 

“When you infer Raymond’s interiority, invariably Raymond’s motivations mimic a kind of encompassing, seemingly anthropological or sociological, theory of the world. I suppose the question I have for you is, was Raymond considering these issues in these terms, or have you projected that level of understanding onto him?”

In another example, this time from the biography of a prisoner of war in Vietnam, the author wrote, “Tom, like the others, thought about his life back home in Brooklyn.” Disregard the fact that this is a confusing sentence (obviously, the other American G.I.'s in the prison camp were surely not each thinking about their life back home in Brooklyn; the town wasn’t that popular yet). More deeply, how did the author know what Tom was thinking? Did he tell the author this directly? Or is it a detail, or a flourish, that was added later?

These novelistic flourishes are precisely the parts that often need to be sourced better in order to make the books read as nonfiction. Situating oneself in the writing is a simple enough task, technically speaking. In the case of the stories above, all that is really required is a slight modification of the verb. Thus, the text might become, “Raymond probably thought X,” or “Tom likely thought Y.” Or, when describing a conversation between Raymond and Carlos, for example, the professor should have written, “I learned this from speaking to Neto later.” Or anything along those lines. 

I would even go so far to suggest that authors describe the circumstances in which they received their information. The more important shift is the one that authors must make internally. It’s a shift of perspective. It’s about putting yourself in the pages, however discreetly. As I mentioned in another post, it’s about grounding your text in reality. You can do this by triangulating the story. The reader should learn from the text where all of the information in the book has come from.

Sometimes the process of triangulation can lead a researcher down horrific rabbit holes. I’ve spent seemingly countless hours rifling through old newspaper articles for the proper quote. These searches can be fruitless; they often are. But, when you do find the quotation that you have been looking for for hours, the sheer joy is staggering.

But then, it’s also happened to me that, when I found the quote, one that matches what I wanted perfectly, it struck me that it wasn’t really necessary in the first place. Generally, it’s best to develop your scenes from what you have, instead of trying to force florid scenes from scant material.