Word: fictionalized
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When your writing partner, Diana Ossana, first showed you Annie Proulx's short story, is it true you said, "I don't read short fiction"? I've never been able to read short fiction, and I've never been able to write it. It's a blank in my intellectual life, and I don't know why. I guess I'm naturally a novelist. I want a few hundred pages to make my statement. But that resistance only lasted a minute or so. I read it, and we wrote Annie Proulx our letter asking if we could option...
...there's no corresponding willingness on the part of readers to give up the quirky characters and vivid details and sexy twists and pleasing, rounded endings they're used to in fiction. To get those effects in nonfiction, writers sometimes cut corners--the factual kind. "If you want to have something that can be sold as based on a true story," Coffey says, "you're going to run into guys like James Frey who are embellishing with techniques that are considered a gift in fiction writing but apparently a sin in a memoir...
...falsehoods come with the territory of the memoirist; others must be deliberately imported into it. That's a distinction that memoirist Mary Karr, author of The Liars' Club and Cherry, is adamant about. "This is not rocket science," she says. "This is not like sexing a chicken. Is it fiction, is it nonfiction? I think the entire book is horse dookie. This guy has done for memoirs what Jayson Blair [the New York Times reporter who fabricated interviews] did for reporters. What would it have cost him to stick a label of fiction...
...that defense simply invites the question, if it's not factual, why didn't Frey publish A Million Little Pieces as fiction? By claiming that his story was literally true, Frey endowed it with a heightened immediacy and an emotional force that it lacked as a novel-in effect, he borrowed a little extra emotional oomph from his trusting readers, who treated his narrative as 100% lived experience, real dues paid by a real person. That's not trivial. If Frey wasn't entitled to that immediacy and that force-if he stole that oomph rather than borrowed it-well...
...brothers say they’re looking for pieces with “a strong central male role, age 18-30,” not coincidentally the age range in which Sandvoss is usually cast. He says they’re particularly interested in horror, psychological thriller, and science-fiction scripts that can be made for under $5 million. Sandvoss says that Beep Box has already optioned a few scripts and is “shopping around for a psychological thriller with some heat on it.” As for their genre choices, Sandvoss says that they...