Be Your Own Editor

As the number of fabricated or semi-fabricated memoir scandals has continued to build post–James Frey, I have seen more and more articles, blog posts, comments, etc., work themselves into a frenzy making claims about the complete lack of fact-checking in the book business. Let the ignorance end here.

First, it might help to make some sort of distinction between fact-checking and story-checking. The reason, I think, that aforementioned ignorant essays have proliferated is, in part, is that the people writing them are used to the culture of magazines and newspapers, in which (especially in newspapers) no such distinction is made. In a news article, if you’ve got your facts straight, you’ve pretty much got your story straight.

Books, on the other hand, more closely resemble “feature” articles. (I can think of a few of these that have turned out to be somewhat bogus over the years.) The official fact-checking of a book happens at the copyediting stage, after the book has been acquired, line edited, and transmitted to the production department. At this point, a lot of people have put a lot of faith into the book’s story, argument, whatever.

So the copyeditor and/or production editor are checking names, dates, spellings of proper names, that sort of thing—in both fiction and nonfiction. The big-picture stuff (e.g., whether the author really did run away at age seven to join the circus, fall in love with twin-brother trapeze artists, and learn to converse with elephants) is the domain of the acquiring editor and before that, the agent.

The agent, as you probably know, is the first filter between most authors and the book business. And editors at the major publishing houses usually (though not always) acquire books from agents they know, at least a little. In other words, if an agent you’ve been doing business with for five years brings you a memoir, you’re inclined to trust their judgment that the author’s story is legit. And while I’m sure some agents and editors have suggested to novelists that they turn their fiction into “fact” (it’s inarguably harder to sell fiction these days), it’s certainly possible possible for authors to be effective liars. Agents and editors aren’t trained to be investigative journalists.

I’m not trying to let anyone off the hook who has knowingly passed off lies as truths; I’m only trying to make it easier to understand how the occasional Margaret Seltzer can find herself being marketed by Random House. And it is “occasional”—just guess at the number of memoirs published every year. Then multiply that number by ten, and you might be getting close. The vast majority of them, of course, are honest (too honest, some might say), and the few that are exposed as frauds don’t indicate some kind of epidemic of loose morals within book publishing, no matter the media frenzy or Oprah outrage.

My point, as far as you the aspiring writer are concerned, is that your work will be fact-checked. That’s not an excuse to be lazy, especially if you’re writing historical fiction or, obviously, nonfiction: try your best to verify everything. If you are writing a historical novel (or any fiction based in a real-world setting or involving fictionalized versions of real people), let your agent and editor know if you have taken any creative license. You can do so, but you may have to add a disclaimer or author’s note to the book.

If you’re writing nonfiction? Um, don’t make stuff up.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 28th, 2008 at 4:22 pm and is filed under The Book Business, Writing/Editing Tips: The Big Picture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.