Lede in Esquire: Pushing the bounds of "nonfiction"?

Well, at least we've reached the point where you've completely and utterly lost me. That will make it easier.

Standards are still evolving, eh? So "journalism" was still wrestling with those pesky fact things when In Cold Blood was written?

No it wasn't. Newspapers had their way; "literary journalism" (and maybe part of the problem is using "journalism" in the term) was another. This isn't a new thing.

And just the fact that it didn't occur to you that Wolfe might have taken a few liberties when you first held him up as somebody I should pay attention to concerns me a bit.

 

Rationalize it all you want, but you can't use 1,500 pages of documents to write an investigative story, then stick a made-up lede on it and then tell me, "But it's not journalism!"

And, yes, what is acceptable in literary journalism has evolved. There has been a ton of ink devoted to the topic.

 

I don't understand what you're getting at.

 

You mean like "The Gang Who Wouldn't Write Straight" that's sitting on my bookshelf?

Yeah, I suppose they bent things a lot. But the new ones haven't stopped bending, and won't.

 

What's plausible here?
How do you, me or anyone else know the guy wasn't parading around in his granny's underwear singing show tunes before he left? We don't

No it is not a 100 percent correct. I'd dare say it may not be 30 percent correct. But again we don't know, because no one does. No one was there.

You can say he smoked a cigarette before he left, but just because the cigarette butt is still there doesn't mean it was smoked the morning he left.

SF, you are right there is a difference between magazine and newspaper writing. But the conjuring or facts, mixing them with truth and then passing the whole thing off as nonfiction ain't one of them.
You want to take creative liberties fine. But you don't blur the lines in a story. Either you are on the news path - using fact, interviews and eyewitness accounts - or you're Kitty Kelly.

 

OK...I think we've established my level of disagreement with some of you on this. Fair enough.

 

So, you've never ascertained three facts about a person from various sources, facts that were 100 percent verifiable ... and been able to deduct a fourth fact about that person based on the knowledge you've acquired?

Everything you've ever written was 100 percent verified, documented or observed first-hand? No rational thought going into it whatsoever, only cold, hard facts?

I find that hard to believe.

You make it sound like he's completely bullshitting this stuff out of thin air. Which he may or may not be doing, we don't know. I don't have access to his research or his interviews. But I find it hard to believe that his recreation of a scene is coming from information on which he doesn't have ANY base of knowledge. I mean, that's a pretty harsh standard. All or nothing, black and white? Hardly.

You CAN figure things out about a person's behavior without having been in their presence 24 hours a day. You don't have to have been in that hotel room to be able to have at least a reasonable idea, especially based on however many pages and hours of research and interviews, of how he might have behaved. And then recreate a scene in print, based on what you know.

That doesn't make it fiction. It doesn't make it a court transcript, either. But it certainly doesn't make it Kitty Kelley.

 

buck, there is NO amount of research that will tell you that 45 minutes before going on a rampage he sat on the end of a bed fingering the trigger of a gun. None.

 

As a kind of last word, I really love this stuff, by the way.

 

That's where the recreation comes in, IJAG. Nowhere in that lede is he suggesting -- and judging by this discussion, not a single one of us who read the piece is implying -- that those details are 100 percent, incontrovertible facts that actually happened and they can't be disputed.

It's one writer's interpretation, that's all.

But it's safe to say that it might be reasonable, based on what he might know about the guy. Only a few of you are arguing that the situation he described is not even plausible, not even remotely possible, because you can only know such things if you were actually in the room itself, which no one was-so you can't write about it-end of story-case closed.

That's a little too black and white for me, and maybe that's just where we all agree to disagree. Of course he doesn't know ... but he's closer to the situation than I am, so I'm interested in his interpretation of it. That's all.

 

But it's not written as an interpretation. It's written as a step-by-step of his day. And to me, the fact that we all know that can't be makes it even worse. Because now you're propping something up as fact, in the way its written, that we all know you don't know.

If I wrote "Kevin Harvick raped a monkey last week after winning the Buttfudge 400," shit would hit the fan. I could say I had talked to him enough to know that that's what he likes to do after victories. It still doesn't mean I get to write it as fact. Maybe that day the monkey was sick. Or Kevin had difficulties getting into the mood.

Regardless, it doesn't matter how many times he had done that before. It doesn't mean he did it that day. And presenting it as such does not mean I had done a lot of research...it means I was taking a leap of logic.