Artistic License

A friend emailed me yesterday informing me that she had shown my blog to her 10th grade English class as an example in a lesson about blogs (Yikes! Sorry, guys.). She then commented on my post about the empty fridge and asked if Jason and I wanted to come over for dinner since we didn't have any food (Double yikes! Not about coming over to hang out, but about people thinking that we are starving or something). I explained to her that our fridge was not literally "empty" but close and that I had exaggerated a bit for the sake of the post and to better emphasize my point about teacher salaries.

This got me thinking about artistic license and the lines between fiction and non fiction. How much artistic license can a writer take? And, where can I get one of those?

This has been a debated issue in the literary world. We all know about the Oprah/James Frey drama. A Million Little Pieces is released as a memoir, Oprah gives it her stamp of approval, James Frey makes a million little pieces of money. Later we find out, many of his accounts were a million little pieces of bullshit.

Greg Mortenson, author of Three Cups of Tea, tops the non-fiction charts and is touted in humanitarian circles for his amazing work setting up schools in a war torn Middle East. Later we find out many of his accounts were exaggerated to heighten the conflict in the story and perhaps to depict Mortenson as bolder than he really was.

Ishmael Beah, memoirs about about growing up as a child soldier in Sierra Leone in A Long Way Gone, only to have his credibility disputed because some of his stories were not properly corroborated.

And, I could go on, but you get the point. All of the examples beg the questions: Where does artistic license stop and lying begin? Who determines the answer? If literature is another form of art, then who really cares? Isn't art supposed to blur lines and break rules? Memoir: fiction or non-fiction? Can anything ever truly be non-fiction if it's all just someone's account of something that happened?

Sometimes fact can be enhanced with fiction. It's all for the sake of story-telling; hence the saying "spinning a good yarn". If I told you that my fridge was not empty, and that we did in fact have some Food Lion brand spaghetti noodles, tomato sauce, Brussels sprouts and blah blah blah...see you're already bored.

So, yes, actually the fridge was empty AND there was a lion in the freezer.