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Do Fiction and Nonfiction Writers Owe Their Readers Different Things?
How the Nobel laureate Gabriel García Márquez answered the question
Do different responsibilities come with writing fiction and nonfiction, especially journalism?
The answer is more complex than it might seem. Fiction and nonfiction writers alike often sum up their main responsibility to their readers in four words: to tell the truth.
But differences clearly exist between writing fiction and journalism. What are they?
The best short answer I’ve seen came from the Nobel laureate Gabriel García Márquez, who worked as a journalist in his native Columbia before writing such great novels as One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera.
In an interview for the Paris Review, the writer Peter H. Stone asked him, “Do the journalist and the novelist have different responsibilities in balancing truth versus the imagination?” García Márquez’s answer appears in Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews: Sixth Series (Viking, 1984), edited by George Plimpton:
“In journalism just one fact that is false prejudices the entire work. In contrast, in fiction one single fact that is true gives legitimacy to the entire work. That’s the only difference, and it lies in the commitment of the writer. A novelist can do anything he wants so long as he makes people believe it.”
At times factual errors and what García Márquez called “false prejudices” can also undermine fiction. That’s especially true of careless mistakes and of propagandistic novels that seem written to promote the author’s biases rather than to tell a larger truth.
But, broadly speaking, García Márquez is right about what “gives legitimacy” to a work of fiction or nonfiction.
How many times have you read a blog post or newspaper article that had a small — even trivial — error that fatally undermined an otherwise good story? And how many times have you read a novel with a detail so wonderful that you forgave any defects in the book?
Jan Harayda is an award-winning journalist who has written for many major media, including the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. She has taught writing at two large U.S. universities and currently teaches and coaches private students.
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