The news today carries a story about an American man supposedly caught posing as a gay Damascus girl.  Her blog caught attention because of persecution.  Now the man says that all facts in the blog posts are true ‘on the ground’ and that he doesn’t believe he’s hurt anyone.  We’ve seen this sort of thing before, where people tell a story and pass it off as true.  In this case the man has done nothing in my opinion, but hurt a cause.  How much more impact would his words have had if he’d been up front with who he was, what his job was, and shared true stories? 

One of my stories has a character I based loosely on my mother.  I killed the character off early in the story, and the writer’s group had a collective fit because they said, rightly so, that she was a huge source of conflict for the protagonist.  I rewrote her back to life, and she ended up having a major role in the story, and a huge influence on the protagonist’s growth.  If any of my siblings ever read this story, they will see mom in the words.  But will they see that fact is woven through fiction, or will they think that the protagonist’s problems with her mother were mine?  Either way, I’m not making changes out of fear of what the family will say.  My siblings and I have strong relationships and I trust them to be know where the boundaries blur.  But it reminds me of a friend who won’t try to publish a story until her parents have passed away.  Or the interview I read with an author who ended up being estranged from his father because of a memoir. 

Authors know they are writing fiction, even if bits and pieces are pulled from life, and they trust their readers to understand that.  We aren’t labeling our work as fact, as this author of the blog did.  We build a bridge of trust to our readers, and that bridge must stay stable.  This man will now have a hard time getting anyone to believe what he says.  For instance, when he said in the article that the ‘facts’ underlying the deception were true, my first thought was, ‘sure they are, buddy’. 

If there is a gay girl in Damascus somewhere who is struggling with life, how will she now tell her story to the world?  Who will believe her?  How many people will say, ‘oh, here’s that guy from Georgia again’?  His fiction has potentially caused outflowing ripples of harm that he cannot fathom.  He has broken that contract of trust between a writer and a reader.

Recently I received a creepy email at my work, that ended up forwarded to Homeland Security.  My son, who is much more computer literate than I, said ‘oh mom, it’s probably a troll’.  Can you picture the rolling of a teenager’s eyes as he said that?  He explained a troll is someone who goes into the internet world creating falsehoods to stir things up and get people upset.  I said, ‘the guy has a Facebook page!’ and my son’s response was to show me how easy it is to fake a Facebook page.  My internet innocence was lost. 

But it points back to fiction posing as fact and how the internet world has dramatically changed the relationship of trust between a writer and a reader.  I believe we writers now have an even stronger obligation to make sure the words we lay down on our blankets of writing have the story threads colored honestly.  To carry the analogy further, a blanket of fiction will have threads of fact and fiction interwoven.  A blanket of non-fiction should be woven very differently, and labeled very clearly.

This past week a friend and I debated e-publishing vs. traditional publishing.  As all writers are probably now aware, the publishing world is in upheaval.  Publishers and agents struggle to find reasons for their existence in this new world of hand-held readers and the ability for authors to be their own agent and publisher.  In all the changes there is still some stigma attached to self-publishing, and writers as well as publishers still feel self-publishing is done only when no one else wants your manuscript.  I have seen printed books that have been self-published that are full of typos and other errors, and I have seen books published through the e-publishing process that are professional.  But the pros and cons isn’t what I wanted to talk about here, because my friend said something that made me come to a complete stop in the conversation (during a writer’s group) in order to pause and let her words sink in.

My wise friend talked about how many writers have their egos tied up in belonging to a publisher.  In other words, most writers don’t feel professional or ‘published’ if they cannot say that they have a contract with a large publishing entity.  Her question was, shouldn’t a writer’s success be tied up in the readers, not the publisher?  Think about that for a minute.  Does a writer judge themselves a success because of one contract rather than by the number of books sold?  I know writers want lots of books to sell, but which makes you feel more of a success?  Let’s be honest here.  If I say that I have an agent and that Random House has given me an advance and a contract for a series, I’m going to feel like a ‘real writer’, compared to how I would feel if I told friends and family that I’d just posted my manuscript with Kindle and had sold fifty books.  Why is that?  Probably because of how long I’ve been writing and marketing.  Hate to say it, but if I was younger, more internet-savy, maybe I would find e-books just as thrilling and exciting as a paper copy on a shelf. 

Which raises a topic for another day in how messed up writers are when it comes to defining success as a writer.

But my friend is right.  Our egos, our need to feel like ‘real’ writers, our desire to call ourselves ‘authors’ rather than just ‘writers’ is tied up in the idea of publishing rather than in the more ephemeral concept of readers.  And wow, what kind of over inflated ego is that?  I want readers who love my stories, who want to live in those story worlds with me, and who want to sit back and talk stories and books and writing.  Not for ego, but for the love of the story. 

Of course, making money and having a contract wouldn’t be all bad, either.