# Shape Facts Without Distorting Them

The Inkagai Way: 100 Practices for a Writing Life

By Anna Lishman & Brad Lishman

Practice 75 · Part 8: Nonfiction, research, and truth

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> Narrative structure may shape facts, but it must not falsify their relationships.

“After the inspector’s visit in March, the plant closed in June.” If the closing was decided the previous autumn, both clauses are true and the sentence is false. A reader takes adjacency for relationship, assuming that this happened, then that did, and the order means something. The result is a causal splice, in which compression, ordering, omission or juxtaposition suggests a relationship the record does not support.

The editor William Shawn penciled two words on the galley proofs of *The New Yorker*’s serialization of *In Cold Blood*, beside a passage describing what one person did while alone, before being killed: “How know?” Ben Yagoda, who found the proofs in the magazine’s archive while researching his history of it, reports that there was in fact no way to know, and that the passage stayed.

The series had opened with an editor’s note saying that all quotations came from official records or from conversations transcribed verbatim between the author and the principals. The book’s subtitle was *A True Account of a Multiple Murder and Its Consequences*. Yagoda later read the fact-checker’s file, held at the University of Delaware, and found that the checking had concentrated on dates, distances and the spelling of names. The scenes, the dialogue and the interior states appear to have been left to the author, in the magazine’s idiom. Yagoda adds that Capote himself acknowledged before his death that the book’s final scene, a graveyard conversation, was invented. None of this removes *In Cold Blood* from the shelf of landmarks. It leaves a narrower question about what a reader is entitled to assume when sentence follows sentence.

Structure may choose among facts, order them, compress time and open in the middle. It may not falsify their relationships. That does not mean telling events in the order they occurred, and it does not prohibit art. John McPhee, quoted in Norman Sims’s introduction to *The Literary Journalists*, says that arranging and presenting involve a great deal of artistry. His limit is firm: “But you don’t make it up.” Elsewhere in that introduction he rules out invented dialogue and composite characters, since a character built from three real people is, in his view, a fictional character, and he rules out getting inside people’s heads to think for them.

Those positions are not universal. Yagoda notes that in earlier decades *The New Yorker* itself ran work by A. J. Liebling and Joseph Mitchell that used composite characters, Colonel Stingo and Mr. Flood, so the disagreement is real and lives inside one magazine. Underneath it sits a useful test, which is disclosure. The Society of Professional Journalists’ code says never to deliberately distort facts or context, and to label re-enactments clearly. A composite named as a composite in a note makes a different promise from one passed off as a person, and a compressed sequence flagged as compressed (“over the next three weeks, she met him four times”) is a different act from the same sentences left to imply a single evening.

The splice works because readers infer. Narrative teaches them to expect that what comes next matters to what came before (Practice 24 treats the craft side of this). Fiction can exploit that freely. In nonfiction every use of it is a small assertion about the world, and you answer for the assertion, not only for the individual facts.

No one can render a messy year without compressing it, though, and compression is not deceit. Some causes really are tangled, and a writer who refuses every causal sentence for fear of error produces a list. Say what is known, and make the inference visible as an inference: “The records do not say whether the inspector’s visit mattered.”

**Practice.** Take a thousand words of your narrative and underline every word or break that asserts or implies time or cause: then, so, after, soon, by the time, because, and any paragraph break between two events. In the margin, for each, write the source of the relationship (document, witness, your own inference) and its status. Where only adjacency exists, rewrite the transition to say only what is known. After an hour, the annotated passage and the list of changed transitions show which of your claims about time and cause rest on a record and which rest on adjacency alone.

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