A few years back, Stephen Colbert coined the word “truthiness,” as in “just how truthful is it?” In writing the story of another, truthiness is one of the issues we face.
It is a good idea to consider just what your attitude toward truthiness will be before you encounter something of doubt in a story you are trying to capture and write. And that has to do with two things: what are you trying to write and whom are you trying to please.
Writing another’s story can be viewed as an effort somewhere on a spectrum bounded by biography on one end and ghostwriting on the other. Biographies are seen as scholarly works, and truthiness standards should be high. In matters of doubt, one person’s hearsay, no matter whom that person is, should be corroborated either by another’s account or through previously published reliable reference material. Essentially, biographies need to be fact checked.
At the other end of the truthiness spectrum, ghostwriting is just what its name implies. You write as another, and naturally what they say or think is what you write. After all, they will be credited with the truthiness, not you.
It is regard for the spectrum of truthiness that caused me to settle on the term “memoir” for the stories I write for hospice patients. Memoir means “from memory” and the truthiness of memoir lies somewhere between biography and ghostwriting. Literary purists object to using “memoir” for the story told by another> Even so, when pressed, they cannot supply a better term for the writing I do.
My rule of thumb on truthiness is this: If something I am told sounds outlandish to the point where it would most likely cast a shadow on my writing partner, I fact-check it. I have researched some things on line, like a woman who claimed to row miners to work across a river when she was in the third grade – before and after school. She said it was over the Cheathaven River in West Virginia. I was able to quickly learn that there is no Cheathaven River in West Virginia… But… The woman was in third grade a little before 1920, almost a hundred years ago.
Well there is a Cheat Lake at the location (near Port Marion, Pennsylvania). And that lake was formed by a dam built in the late ’20s and early ’30s. And a little more research showed the near the lake there is a Cheathaven Hiking Trail. So there it was. The Cheathaven River bed could now be at the bottom of Cheat Lake. I could have continued my research into the history of Cheat Lake, but that hiking trial using the exact name was enough for me. That was enough truthiness. Any reader of the woman’s memoir would be able to easily do the same checking I did. So not much of a shadow of doubt would fall on my writing partner.
Another thing to consider is audience, but I will speak more about that in a forthcoming post. For now, just let me say that the intended reader(s) of your writing should have considerable bearing on just how much truthiness you insist on it having.
So for me, when it comes to putting outlandish words into the mouth of my writing partner, my motto is, “Trust, but but verify – at least to a comfort level”
When you write another’s story, you too will be faced with such issues.
You’ll be well advised to give truthiness some thought before you start.