Never let the facts get in the way of a good story...

... It's an adage we've all heard many times, particularly with regard to the world of journalism. It was, therefore, no surprise to see it referenced in print again yesterday. Ben Macintyre, writing in The Times, has had just about enough of film makers taking artistic licence with the 'based on a true story' oeuvre to the point of seriously endangering credibility. As he says of the recent crop of biopics, they have one thing in common; 'the demands of the 'pic' supersede the basic reality of the 'bio'. The search for drama, romance and tragedy, he states, is allowing the facts of these stories to be distorted; Madonna is 'blithely unconcerned' with the reality of the past in WE, Clint Eastwood has produced a film about J Edgar Hoover 'founded on something that probably never happened' and David Cronenberg's A Dangerous Method is based upon an 'educated guess' about Carl Jung's personal life.


But, while any discussion about the role of truth in storytelling must acknowledge the danger of stretching the facts to meet the demands of the audience (fiction can, after all, become fact forever that way) the horrible 'truth' is that those demands are just that; demands. Demands upon the storyteller to produce a narrative that engages by hitting the right marks throughout the arc of, as Macintyre puts it, 'rise, fall and redemption'. 


Macintyre further acknowledges that, when fiction is inspired by fact, the storytellers 'inevitably compress, elide, make up scenes, dialogue and characters' in order to make the story more interesting, more engaging - in much the same way as the author John Cheever admits to exaggerating the facts of his own life to do the same. 


So, is Macintyre right when he says that 'a history story is only truly good when it is also true'? Maybe. However, as fiction writers, we perhaps have more right to that artistic licence than he allows those writing the biopic. It could be that no writing, fictional or not, is ever entirely without elements of biography and, should this be the case, the choice is surely that of the individual writer; tell the story in spite of the truth or let the truth become the story? 


Link to the full article: http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/opinion/columnists/benmacintyre/article3295738.ece