Scandal Proof Your Writing

Plagiarism scandals.

Memoirs that turn out to be a little factually suspect.

Levi Asher on the Guardian blog reckons journalists and publishers

... must must take some of the blame for the lack of clarity regarding truth in authorship ...

and offers the following guidelines to help authors avoid scandal:

1. Do not use the word "memoir" unless you mean it.

2. If you're not sure whether what you're writing is a memoir or not, guess what? It's a novel.

3. No more than half a page of plagiarism per book.

4. Don't make up exact dates that you can't remember. Instead, be general: "The most important day of my life was the day of my son's birth, in the summer of 2005 ..."

5. Just say no to sending a friend out in public with a wig as you.

6. If you're in a flame war and you're about to go sock puppet, take a 10-minute break and go to a coffee shop without a wi-fi facility. Maybe the walk will cool you down.

7. Go ahead and make up dialogue. Everybody except Tom Wolfe does.

8. Pick a name. "Benjamin Black is John Banville" is just not a good look.

Want to know why he chooses these particular tips? Check out the post.

And while we're on the subject of memoirs that don't quite factually check out, the Australian reports that the authenticity of Ishmael Beah's acclaimed but now somewhat discredited A Long Way Gone will be discussed by a panel of academics at a reading festival in Portland, Oregon this week.

Methinks the whole issue has gone cold already.

Does the Truth Matter in Memoir?

More questions are being asked now about the accuracy of Ishmael Beah's A Long Way Gone (now incidentally a best seller here in Malaysia), with the Australian still hot on the case.

Not only does there appear to be a "timeline discrepancy", (and more evidence on this score has been collected by the newspapers European corespondent Peter Wilson who publicly confronted Beah with it) but it seems that the deadly fight that Beah describes in a UNICEF rehabilitation camp (and one of the scenes in the book that most shocked me) may not have taken place - relief workers and international agencies have said that they could find no record of such a thing happening. Enough evidence is in to seriously question the veracity of the book.

Leaving quite aside the question of the morality of passing off something as memoir when it contains fictitious elements, just how does it get past the editor and publisher anyway? (And don't forget, there have been not just one but several cases in past years of memoir fakery and/or embellishment - see here and here which ought to have made publishers jumpy.)

Deborah Hope does the rounds of Australian publishers to see what measures for checking veracity are in place. Not many, it seems.

The paper's New York correspondent quotes Janice Harayda, a former vice-president of the National Book Critics Circle as saying that the US literary establishment gave former Sierra Leone child soldier Ishmael Beah a "free pass" on the accuracy of his international bestselling memoir A Long Way Gone because it wanted to believe his story was true. She adds that she believes that an investigation is long overdue:

The truth matters ... If there are parts of this book that are not based on real events or are not part of the writer's personal experience, then these should be identified somewhere in the book.

When Dan Chaon, Beah's creative writing teacher at Oberon College, Ohio was challenged he said that:

... factual inaccuracies did not necessarily compromise the work because it was a memoir rather than a piece of journalism.

Which isn't I'm afraid my own understanding of "memoir".

And I have to agree with Harayda:

... There is a clear line between fiction and non-fiction ... Readers bring different expectations to non-fiction and they have a right to know whether it is fiction or has been fictionalised.

Brian Appleyard in the Sunday Times discoveres that the scale of a map included in the book is wildly inaccurate and makes Beah's wanderings look more pronounced than they could possibly have been.

In all this, though, I feel extremely sorry for Beah, who has surely gone through enough pain and trauma in his short life, and whether or not always factually accurate, has written an exceptionally powerful book full of strong emotional truth. He was trying to survive a situation that remains beyond our worst nightmares, and he was at times high on drugs. He didn't have a watch or a calendar in the jungle. Memory lapses could be expected. Probably the line between objective fact and just telling the best story was blurred for him.

But does that fully exonerate him, or Chaon, or his publishers?

I think the only honourable way out for all concerned is to admit fault and print a simple disclaimer to go with the book:

Some parts of this story have been fictionalised.

We will still love the book, and Beah has survived much much worse.

A Conflict of Dates

The latest in a list of memoirs to be questioned for their factual accuracy is a book that left a deep impression on me when I read it last year is Ishmael Beah's account of his life as a child soldier in Sierra Leone, A Long Way Gone.

A West Australian couple discovered a discrepancy in the dates in Beah's book who were posted to the mine where Beah's father used to work, the Australian reports. Villagers say that the events in the book took place two years later than they were described in the book, and aid workers agree, which would mean that Beah was a soldier for three months rather than two years.

It might go some way towards accounting for why this portion of the book - clearly the most harrowing part - is not dwelt on at greater length - although I personally interpreted this as being because the material was too painful for Beah to revisit at any length.

Beah and his publisher are standing by the book.

If it turns out that the dates are wrong does it terribly matter? Accuracy is extremely important, but for me, none of this detracts from the book which is incredibly powerful and moving, and offers a unique insight into what these children go through.

Do authors always get their dates right in autobiographies anyway? When Rob was here, we discovered a discrepancy in the dates that Anthony Burgess says that he was teaching in Kuala Kangsar in Little Wilson and Big God (he was still there in Malay College in 1956 as the boys who were there then clearly remember). This means that Burgess' biographers Roger Lewis and Andrew Biswell also got their dates wrong. It strikes me as odd they didn't check!

Authors on the Beeb

Don't know if you've managed to catch Hardtalk Extra on the BBC on Fridays, but the past few weeks have provided a real feast for book lovers.

I missed Barbara Kingsolver, a few weeks back and am still kicking myself.

I caught Zainah Nawawi interviewing Ishmael Beah on Hardtalk. (Though her questions made me scream with frustration as I knew many of the answers before he opened his mouth because they're in the book!)

Our friend Hari Kunzru was interviewed on Gavin Esler about the politics of identity, and perceptions of "multi-culturalism"in Britain, and of course on how freedom of expression is vital to society. On the Rushdie debate he said that he is scared of:

... the certainty that brooks no debate or otherness

and that:

... I don't believe that there is a right not to be offended.

Last Friday I caught the interview with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie who was of course talking about the Western stereotype of Africa as a basket case (and having left a big part of my heart in Nigeria, I have to agree with her) and how she finds herself increasingly forced to become a spokesperson for things African in the media even though she doesn't see herself as political.

I have to say ... I think she is stunningly beautiful ... intelligence on a face is the best cosmetic.

(You can watch the interviews of all the on the BBC website, and Adichie's is also here.)

And there's another treat this week when another of my favourite authors, Pat Barker, is interviewed.

Really a big thank you, BBC.

Once Were Child Soldiers

I have never been so afraid to go anywhere in my life as I was that first day. As we walked into the arms of the forest, tears began to form in my eyes, but I struggled to hide them and gripped my gun for comfort. We exhaled quietly, afraid that our own breathing could cause our deaths. The lieutenant led the line that I was in. He raised his fist in the air, and we stopped moving. Then he slowly brought it down, and we sat on one heel, our eyes surveying the forest. We began to move swiftly among the bushes until we came to the edge of a swamp, where we formed an ambush, aiming our guns into the bog. We lay flat on our stomachs and waited. I was lying next to my friend Josiah. At 11, he was even younger than I was. Musa, a friend my age, 13, was also nearby. I looked around to see if I could catch their eyes, but they were concentrating on the invisible target in the swamp. The tops of my eyes began to ache, and the pain slowly rose up to my head. My ears became warm, and tears were running down my cheeks, even though I wasn’t crying. The veins on my arms stood out, and I could feel them pulsating as if they had begun to breathe of their own accord. We waited in the quiet, as hunters do. The silence tormented me.

Ishmael Beah describes his first battle in harrowing detail in his memoir A Long Way Gone: his closest friends are shot dead, and he kills a man for the first time, a point from which there is no turning back.

I told you that I picked up the book as a bit of an impulse buy in Times the other day because I felt it would give me another perspective on the issue of child soldiers that I could put alongside Beasts of no Nation by Uzodinma Iweala which I was (still am!) in the process of reviewing. That Beah's story parallels Iweala's should come as no surprise as this is the story of hundreds of thousands of children in Africa.

But this is without a doubt the most moving book I've read in some time, much more so than Iweala's fictional version perhaps because of the hybrid language Iweala uses, perhaps because of the deliberate lack of specific detail. (Where are we? What war is this?)

I won't write more about the book here (wait for the review lah) but you can read a condensed version of the memoir archived on the New York Times website and also listen to an interview with Beah here.

Would I recommend it? Most definitely. The story, though harrowing, is beautifully written and I couldn't put it down. Few books move me to tears. This did.

Beah is a pretty incredible young man and if there is one book that deserves to be widely read this year because it will chance hearts and minds, this is it.

Now then, what are you reading?

Teacher's Pet

You have a class of creative writing students, some of them loaded with natural talent turn in beautifully written work, another struggles with his basic grammar but clearly has something to say.

Who deserves the teachers help the most?

And who succeeds in the end?

Ayse Papatya Bucak assistant professor of English at Florida Atlantic University talks about the student he hardly knew, Ishmael Beah (left), whose heartbreaking memoir A Long Way Gone is in all the bookstores now and very well worth reading.

He writes more about teaching Beah on his blog:

But what the memoir made me think about was naturally the workshop in which I knew Ishmael. The writing he was doing then (fiction, drama and poetry) was all grounded in his real experiences (though not the worst of them) and fortunately I had a class that recognized that in workshopping this kind of autobiographical material it was important to be sensitive. At the time, his writing was still full of ESL mistakes and honestly a little rough. But while we talked some about those things, the focus was always on the material--what we thought he could do with the material. And I'm glad of that because we had no idea really the extent of the horror of Ishmael's past. There was no way for us to know that by the time he was fifteen he was a trained military killer and that by the time he was eighteen he was addressing the UN about child soldiers. This was a good reminder to me that while I think I know my students, I really know very little of what their lives are like outside of the classroom, and that I shouldn't assume that I do. I don't think anything would have stopped Ishmael from writing his story, but I'm glad to say that our class was a voice of encouragement, expressing that we wanted to hear more.

Many thanks Jen for forwarding the link.