Week 5 Prompt: Nothing but the Truth

 

In your post with Week 5: (title of your choice), please add the following content:

Step 1: Read over "Nothing but the Truth" in this week's media resources. Discuss in your community post the idea about "fluidity" and how it affects the craft of writing a memoir.

Step 2: Add a link to one of your favorite memoirs (can be a book or a blog post).  Write a summary, offer a few quotes, and note the catharsis that takes place for you as reader (what did you learn from text). Would it change the reading experience for you if you found out the writer blurred the lines between fact and fiction? Can you tie anything from Step 1?

Step 3: Indicate how this memoir would/could transfer to a blog. 

Step 4: Respond to two other posters throughout the week about their memoir choices and ideas about blurring the lines. 

The fluidity between fact and fiction in writing is something that you may have thought very little about until now. Most of us understand nonfiction to mean the absolute truth and for fiction to mean fake or made up. However, blurring the line between fact and fiction is really easy to do when you aren’t sure of certain details, and this holds true for a memoir. People forget things, and sometimes certain details are just too boring to be written about.

This leads people to start fictionalizing certain aspects of their work, which then begs the question: if this work doesn’t contain the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, can it really and truly be considered a work of nonfiction?

According to The Huffington Post’s article, “There is...a clear-cut difference between embellishing memories for the sake of emotional honesty, and, well, just making stuff up for the heck of it. ‘Truth may have become a foggy, fuzzy nether area,’ she writes. ‘But untruth is simple: making up events with the intention to deceive...’”