Tolkien Was No Hobbit!

You might think the only difference between Frey and Tolkein is that Frey got caught, but that is just the beginning of the story.

I followed the Rabbit down the Alice Hole to learn of a conspiracy that would make the geeks at The Smoking Gun swallow their staplers. Too slow, smokers, you saw the trees but were barking in the wrong forest.

How did Tolkien get off while Frey fried? It’s a little legal loophole that publishers, in coordination with bookstores, have been using to scam readers for years. What’s the loophole? Wrap your lips round these rather technical vocabuli…..fiction and non-fiction, baby. Trust me, these are terms you are going to start hearing all over the place, on the news, in newspapers, probably in magazines and on I-pods, on the computer web, the whole bit.

I don’t mean to be arrogant, but whose gun is smoking now?

How does the scam work? Apparently, in a book, publishers allow a writer to say anything they want as long as the author claims immunity by dropping the “non” from the “non-fiction” label. The system, designed specifically to confuse book buyers (consider how much the word fiction sounds like faction, which has the word “fact” in it, and non-fiction sounds like non-faction, which can be broken down to the Latin root “non fact” which sounds like it means not true, which is the opposite of what it actually means in publisher speak, because fiction is, apparently, the true one, and the other one is the one that’s made up) is a way to ramp up sales by tricking the reader to believe the unbelievable. What does this mean to you?

All those marginalized hobbits who “found themselves” in the pages of Tolkein’s book are about to feel really, really alone. And there’s nothing they can do about it.

And it’s not just Tolkein, folks. Plenty of writers have made stuff up and are getting away with it. My research dug up this little tidbit. Brace yourself.

Holden Caufield was never a thirteen-year-old equipment manager for a hockey team. In real life he’s an eighty-year old crotchety pervert living by a river in upstate New York writing unpublished books under the pen name “J.D. Salinger.”

Put that in your gun and smoke it.

Now, since we at The Burnside Writers Collective are bringing the legal loopholes out of the closet, Oprah is going to go ballistic. And let’s face it, the day of the bookstore is done. This bombshell is going to be felt in every segment of society.

But before I dropped the bombshell, I wanted to see if I could manipulate the system myself. I wanted to see if I could market my memoir filled with lies and promise it was all true if I used the legal loophole “non fiction.”

I went back to Kinko’s and explained the book again, using the exact same language, to which they responded exactly the same, asking me to leave. But then I winked and said the magical words “Non-Fiction.” They still asked me to leave, and later I found out the slightly less scandalous fact that a lot of other people know about this conspiracy and, apparently, don’t care. This story was a great deal bigger than I thought, though not as interesting.

I would have done more research and really cracked it open but I got pretty tired. That night, when I was lying in bed, I started to wonder about this whole confusing world of genre. What does this mean to me as a writer?

I was perplexed. I could continue to lie in books as long as I used the loophole “non-fiction” but if I did use that loophole then, apparently, bookstore people would place my book on a shelf with other liars. And that might affect sales.

The truth is, apart from my memoir “Sing Lee Runs for President” my other books have been pretty much true. I didn’t want to be labeled as a liar when most of my books were mostly true. I called down to Powell’s Bookstore and asked if they had a category that fit between fiction and non-fiction, but they said they didn’t. They had some shelves for blank journals, but that was the only thing the guy could think of that might work.

And then I was stuck. I write books that basically tell the truth but not really.

Before anybody gets unsettled, let me explain. To recreate a conversation in a book, you can’t recreate the exact conversation, because, as mentioned above, that conversation would be incredibly boring. In a book, you do not have facial expressions and hand gestures and this sort of thing. Record your next dinner conversation, then write it up as a transcript, and you will see what I mean.

I think there is artistic freedom when writing anything, even history or memoir.

In a way, then, the legal loopholes publishers are using to deceive readers don’t mean a whole lot. At best, the genre fiction is a way of helping the reader suspend disbelief. Everybody has to make things up and recreate things inaccurately in order to reduce flesh and blood reality into type-set words. There are no exceptions.

And let’s be honest for a second. People are not upset at James Frey because James Frey lied. They are mad at him because they believed him, and now feel conned.

But the James Frey incident brings up an even bigger discussion. Are the categories people divide books into good for books? Are they good for readers? Are they good for writers?

The interesting thing that is happening in bookdom may not be about fiction and non-fiction, and the seemingly criminal invasion of one into the other, it may be, rather, the breakdown of the categories all together.

Posted on February 15, 2006 12:00 AM