In her article “A Fine, Fine Line: Truth in Nonfiction,” children’s and young readers’ author Tanya Lee Stone tackles the question what is gained or lost by blurring the lines between fiction and nonfiction? As genres like narrative nonfiction and historical fiction by definition have one foot in each territory, why might it be important to either withhold or divulge to the reader what is true and what is not?
Stone uses the analogy of a box of chocolates to illustrate her point: when we open up a box of assorted chocolates—just like Forrest Gump said—we never know what we are going to get. What purports to be chocolate might in fact be a thin shell of chocolate covering a mostly fruit-laden sweet. What is missing here, says Stone, is labeling: if a thing does not identify itself accurately, then the experience of the user (the consumer—eater or reader) may be—pardon the pun—bittersweet. When we expect fiction, deliver fiction and label yourself as so. When we expect nonfiction, deliver truth and label yourself as so. And whatever you do thereafter, stick to your label: we want what we bought to be the thing that was advertised. Our horizons of expectation, as literary critics Wolfgang Iser and Hans-Robert Jauss might say, begin even before we crack open a book: we begin to form visions and versions of a work based on our initial perception of it, whether that perception is created through word of mouth, back- or front-cover book “branding,” or any other method of familiarization. We cannot rely on books that “look” like nonfiction but that are at best only based on nonfiction, says Stone. She offers up another helpful example from personal experience to illustrate the importance of transparently delineating fiction and nonfiction differences:
I grew up voraciously reading those orange-covered Childhood of Famous Americans biographies. When I discovered, years later, that they were fictionalized (now stated on the back covers, quite rightly), I was furious. I felt duped. Do you know how many facts are embedded in my knowledge base that are not, in truth, facts? I don’t. This may contribute to my zealous fact-checking and research habits. But before someone comments that I should see that as a gift, I have already considered that angle. It was not a gift. I was misled. Worse, those books didn’t need truthiness to be engaging. I loved them. But ultimately, they let me down. I can’t rely on what I learned from them.
Lest she be labeled as cranky and up-tight, Stone goes on to say that she is all for “interesting packaging and cool concepts that will engage and entice young readers,” but that—as she knows from personal experience—clarity in identifying genre is important. “Keep the line between historical fiction and nonfiction crystal clear,” she says.
I sympathize with Stone’s thesis, and I fully understand why she writes as she does. At the same time, two things immediately came to mind as I read her piece.
First of all: the tantalizingly blurry line between fiction and nonfiction is something that I celebrate in my classroom each year (and hope that my students celebrate along with me. Usually, they do. Sometimes—in a fashion something akin to Stone’s lament—they don’t). In the spirit of great Canadian First Nations author Thomas King, whose 2003 Massey Lecture Series titled “The Truth About Stories” dives into the delicious way in which Truth can often be found by examining different versions of the truth, we analyze such works as Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything Is Illuminated and ask ourselves: “How might we as readers be seeing a clearer version of the Truth by following Foer’s loops and leaps through various blurrings of the truth (and many outright and outlandish non-truths)? And if we conclude that such authorial meanderings are only obfuscating the truth, then why are we bothering—why did Foer bother—with a 400 page novel that states a Truth that could perhaps be stated in five pages? We do enter into our classroom discussions with a clear understanding of the genre and of what the author is “up to”—a clearly labeled box of chocolates. So in this way, Stone and I absolutely operate on the same level. My only word on this topic would be: while truth in advertising is important, so is reveling in the ambiguity that is the line between fiction and nonfiction, and the constant playfulness inherent in trying to discover and define just where that line lives.
Secondly: Stone also notes in her article that another reason she is wary of blurring fiction and nonfiction is that there are “unending creative ways to tell a true story.” There is, she would likely say, plenty of richness and intrigue inherent in the everyday stories of real, live people that are passed through the generations—no need for adding extra spice. And this idea caused me to realize: our students do this—tell creative stories that are (mostly) true—everyday with social media.
Social media tools like blogs and Facebook in the lives of youth today have created a divide between person and persona, a situation where marketing the online self—the persona—becomes a nearly full time job. The notion of marketing the online self via social media branding is an idea that has for years been not only noticed but written about, analyzed, and packaged as a blend of science and art that—when done deftly—results in positive outcomes for both the person and the persona. A quick search online reveals the numerous websites that are dedicated to discussing the topic: The Social Media Examiner (“How to Boost Your Personal Brand with Social Media”), consultant and blogger Chris Brogan’s “100 Personal Branding Tactics Using Social Media,” and Personal Branding Blog: Navigating YOU to Future Success! just to name a few. So we know that our students are familiar—on a personal, experiential level—with the basic idea of telling stories that are true with the end goal of entertaining or impressing an audience. And sometimes, I am very willing to bet, those stories that are told—those blog posts, those Facebook posts, those exclamatory Tweets—are not entirely true. They may be building toward or pointing toward a Truth, but they are (I am being exceedingly kind here...) likely not entirely true. Is this OK? Is social media creating a generation of split personality, bipolar humans whose lives exist as some sort of synthesis of person and persona, human and 01101010110001101? Or is it creating savvy story tellers in the “first person predominant” that are “networking” (remember in the 90’s when that term meant “handshaking” and “let me give you my card”?) nearly 24-7? And what will be the results of all this?
Just so you know, I generally detest clichés, but: time will tell.
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