By: David Dudley

Embellish much?

You’re in good company. The nonfiction bestseller lists are littered with questionable memoirs; a host of unscrupulous scribes have been taken to task lately for stretches, overreaches, and outright fantasies. Most notoriously, there was James Frey—he of A Million Little Pieces, the 2003 memoir that purported to chronicle a spiral into addiction. In 2006, after it was revealed that several episodes in the book were fabricated, Frey earned a televised spanking from Oprah Winfrey and a lead role in the rogue’s gallery of literary fabulists. The incident spawned a national conversation about what constitutes authenticity in autobiography—a discussion that Frey, interviewed this June by Vanity Fair as he flogs his new novel, Bright Shiny Morning—isn’t interested in. “I could care less what they call it. The thing on the side of the book means nothing,” he told writer Evgenia Peretz. “It’s just a story.”

Standing athwart this trend is Patsy Sims, who would say—politely—that what you call your book does indeed mean something. Sims directs Goucher College’s MFA program in creative nonfiction. The “nonfiction” part is fairly straightforward: It’s the “creative” part that gets people in trouble. Sims is something of a fundamentalist on defending the line between “inventive” and “invented.” Her 2001 book, Literary Nonfiction: Learning By Example, picks apart stories by Tom Wolfe, Joan Didion, John McPhee, and other heavyweights, with annotations explaining the devices and techniques that a storyteller can use to animate the bare facts of reporting without resorting to, as Sims says in her decorous Southern accent, “shenanigans.”

It’s a bag of tricks that Sims learned in a long career as a newspaper reporter in cities from Philadelphia to her hometown of New Orleans, where she tried her hand at ambitious storytelling in the early 1970s while reporting on the lives of sugar cane workers in southern Louisiana for the States-Item newspaper. Inspired by the creative liberties taken by James Agee in his poetic, nontraditional account of sharecropper farmers, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, Sims produced a newspaper series written in chapters, like a novel. The serial was published as a book, Cleveland Benjamin’s Dead!, in 1981.

Despite the woes of the newspaper industry, Sims insists we are in a golden age for other forms of narrative nonfiction. “This is the hot genre,” she says. “Look at the popularity of these reality shows. There’s something fascinating to people about things that aren’t made up.”


Q Let’s say I’m a fiction writer who wants to write nonfiction. What can’t I do?

A A nonfiction writer can do anything the fiction writer can do, except make it up. Some writers—memoirists more than literary journalists—think you can fudge. I happen to be a purist; I think you can’t fudge without letting the reader know. You have a contract that, when they start reading your story and it’s labeled nonfiction, they think they’re reading the truth.

But there are things writers can do if they want to play around. You can say things like, “I couldn’t help but imagine what it would be like if this would happen.” Go ahead and play, but let the reader know what you’re doing.


Q Say you’re setting a scene in a historical account, and you want to talk about the weather. How much leeway do you have?

A I don’t think you can rewrite history—you can’t say it was this way if you don’t know. If there were newspapers and weather reports, you can do the research and use that. You’re treading on dangerous territory if you start saying things you really don’t know. I would find ways around recreating things that I couldn’t reconstruct very carefully.


Q Do you find that students now set the bar on this distinction differently than they might have a generation ago?

A Nonfiction writers are being held to higher standards now. I think we’re also talking about it more because so many of these [literary hoaxes] have happened lately. The thing that kind of boggled my mind about [the] James Frey [scandal] was you would have thought that, after all that to-do, people would have shied away from [embellishing their autobiographies]. And then you turn around and people come back and they do it. It’s always the same: “I think I’m not going to get caught and I’ll just fudge a little bit.”

We’ve tried to show students ways they can write a good story without making it up. Your reputation as a journalist is one of the most important things you have. If you take those liberties and you fool the reader, you’re risking your reputation; once you’re found out, I’m not sure you can ever regain that respect.


Q You really do get knocked out of the priesthood if you make stuff up. Although, people do re-emerge …

A I really found it disappointing when Frey came back and got a contract for a novel. It sort of sets a bad example for the students—you try to teach them that crime doesn’t pay.


Q There’s a famous quote regarding Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ’72, which George McGovern’s campaign manager called “the least factual, most accurate” account of the election. Can you ever write something that involves a certain amount of invention but is still legitimately nonfiction?

A The line comes when you start making it up, and then you switch over and say it’s fiction. Look at James Agee, who was, stylistically, one of the most inventive writers that I’m familiar with. I teach him because I like to show students how far you can go without making it up. I don’t think that not being able to make it up hinders you or keeps you from being creative. You might have to work a little harder at pulling things off. But that can be fun. It’s a challenge. To me, when it works—and you can feel it when it’s working—it’s sort of like being up on a high-wire.

But even when it’s going well, it’s not easy. I don’t think there’s anything harder than writing. Sometimes people say to me, “Oh, writing is so easy!” And then you read their stuff and think, well, maybe it ought to be a little bit harder.


Q Have you ever been tempted to use a certain amount of, I don’t want to call it invention … Were there instances that you thought, Boy, if only that person had said that at that moment, or, If only something else had been happening at that time?

A I’m probably a hardliner here. When I did this book on sugar cane workers in south Louisiana, at that point I was deeply affected by and influenced by Agee. Maybe I went a little bit off the deep end. I took an afternoon out under some trees in sugar cane country with a group of workers. They were talking about how bad their lives were, and it became this wonderful dialogue. It struck me that what they were saying was like a play. So I wrote that chapter in the form of a play and did stage direction and set the scene. But it was all true.


Q But was it absolutely verbatim?

A Yes, I had a tape.


Q Now, when I do, for example, a Q&A like this, I’ll talk to someone for an hour or two and edit that down to 1,500 words, which is a lot of compression. Things get cut and rearranged, and at times this process feels a little like playwriting.

A I didn’t use everything that was said—I certainly had to cut—but it wasn’t that I rewrote a quote. I think what you’re asking is an interesting question. I hadn’t really thought of that. It seems to me that the one thing that you have to do is that you don’t change what the person is saying—you’re not putting that quote out of context and making it seem like something else.

I’ve been on both sides of the table. There have been times when somebody interviewed me for a story and totally put words in my mouth. Why did they do that? I didn’t say that. It doesn’t even sound like me.


Q Is it disturbing to be on the other end?

A Yeah, it is. It does bother me when somebody makes up
a quote.


Q Have you ever been called out on doing that to somebody else?

A No. Never been accused of misquoting anybody.



Q What do you think of writers who drift back and forth—journalists who turn into novelists and vice versa? Are you
suspicious of novelists who write nonfiction that seems a little too perfect?

A I think that there’s something to be gained by maybe not making a career of the other genre, but trying your hand at it. A fiction writer can learn something from a nonfiction writer—the reporting and the interviewing. They could use those skills to enhance their fiction. Likewise, I think the nonfiction writer can write better nonfiction by being familiar with the fiction writer’s techniques.

When I was at the University of Pittsburgh, I developed a course called “Fact or Fiction.” I’d have students read writers who worked in both fiction and nonfiction. The point was to show them how one genre might influence another. In the case of Hemingway, you read The Sun Also Rises, and then you read [his memoir] A Moveable Feast, so you see where his stuff came from.

When Hemingway was in the Spanish Civil War, he sent these dispatches back to magazines. And they were sent as nonfiction, as journalism. Then, later, he rewrote them and sold them as fiction. Then he had some that he didn’t rewrite—he just changed the title. And there were at least a few that he didn’t even change the title. He wrote it first as reporting, then sold it again as fiction.


Q There are a lot of conversations these days about what newspapers can do to save themselves, and many say that one thing they can do is make the stories more fiction-like. 

A It seems to me that the better papers are the ones that are investing in this kind of writing. The Portland Oregonian, for example. They do these long series, and take years to do them. I think newspapers are making a mistake by not doing more of that—this is something they can do that the Internet and television can’t.


Q How do you maintain interest over a lengthy series?

A You have to work at drawing the reader in at the beginning. If you don’t have them in the first paragraph, you’re not going to have them at the end of the page. And you have to keep holding back a carrot, to force the reader to keep going. That takes a lot of thought and planning, but it forces you to be creative.

The thing about this kind of nonfiction is that, through the sheer beauty of your language, you get people to read about things they never thought they were interested in. To me, that’s one of the real strengths of the form.

—David Dudley is Urbanite’s editor-in-chief.



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