Dont Lie About Your Writing

Dont Lie About Your Writing Its funny that a profession that often prides itself on telling the truth offers so many opportunities to lie. Journalists often claim to pursue the truth at all costs. Fiction writers spout off about finding the truth in their stories. Almost every kind of writer espouses some sort of devotion to the truth. Yet every year, more and more writers are caught lying. Whether its passing off someone elses work as your own (plagiarism) or faking reviews on Amazon, theres a lot of lying going on. It would seem like common sense that you shouldnt lie. Yet in the crowded, competitive, demanding world of writing, too many people take shortcuts in their efforts to get ahead of the pack. But lying in your writing can destroy a career, even if you dont rely on writing to make a living. When I was in graduate school, I knew someone who faked his entire dissertation. All of the interviews, transcripts, and statistics were fake. He couldnt find the data and people to support the ground breaking conclusion he was trying to draw so he made it all up. He got caught and tossed out of school. His future career in that field and all of the teaching and researching he hoped to do were gone because he lied. Granted, thats a pretty spectacular case of career suicide, but there are many others. Remember James Frey who made up a memoir and got taken down by Oprah? Or Jonah Leher who faked quotes attributed to Bob Dylan (among quite a few other infractions). Or Jayson Blair who fabricated almost every aspect of his stories for The New York Times? While some of these notorious liars have gone on to resurrect their careers, dont think for one minute that it would be as easy for the average Joe to return to successful work after such a debacle. So, since it doesnt seem to be obvious to some, what constitutes lying? Take a look. (And dont say that these are genius marketing techniques, or ways to set yourself apart from the crowd. Theyre lies, pure and simple.) Faking statistics and data Its not okay to say that 30% of people agree with your position if there is no hard data to support that conclusion. You dont get to make things up based on gut feelings or because you really want to write a spectacular article. Neither do you get to interview four of your friends and when three of them agree with your premise, report that as a 75% majority. Faking quotes If someone didnt say it, you dont get to put it in their mouth anyway. You also cant take quotes out of context. Just because your point is better made if you leave out the last half of the quote doesnt mean you get to use it that way. You have to report quotes accurately and keep them within the context in which they were uttered. Calling fiction non-fiction If you made it up, its fiction. If its based on your life but not a factual recounting of your life, its fiction and not a memoir. If you write about an event that never happened or things that were never said, its fiction. Never pass something you made up as something that really happened. Passing off old work as new Yes, reporters and magazine writers repurpose old work all the time. They take that parenting article about camping with the kids and re-slant it so that it works for an outdoors magazine. It means that you can reuse research and save some time when writing the article. As long the work and wording is new, this is okay. What isnt okay is repeating the earlier work word for word. Editors pay for new content. Finding out that the piece they just published has already appeared in another publication, verbatim, isnt going to make them happy. Especially if you sold it as original work. Plagiarism This is stealing other peoples work and passing it off as your own. This is never okay and its a lesson that should have been learned in elementary school. If you use someone elses work, you have to give proper credit to the original author. Writing fake reviews of your work This has become a rampant problem on sites like Amazon. Authors create fake accounts to give glowing accounts of their own work. Its an effort to push their book to the top, to make it stand out amidst all the other books. Its harder than you think, though, to craft believable voices for your reviews. They will all end up sounding the same. Worse, if your book is receiving scads of terrible reviews and then youve got these fifty five star reviews, someones going to figure out that youre shilling your own work. Also, dont pay for positive reviews. Its fine to request reviews, but no ethical reviewer will take money in exchange for their opinion. Altering reality We often wish that things had happened more dramatically than they did. Sometimes writers embellish a story to make it seem more dramatic or world-altering than it was. Really theyre just stretching the facts and thats not okay. If it was boring when it happened, then you either need to report it that way or find something more exciting to cover. Youre writing a non-fiction piece, not a screenplay. Adding in explosions, deaths and drama is lying. Pretending to be somewhere you arent You cannot pretend to be filing stories from Iraq if youre in Cleveland. If you want to report from a region, youd better be there. Doctoring photographs Okay, a little Photoshopping isnt a bad thing. Touching up colors, etc. is acceptable. Whats not acceptable is putting people into photos who werent there, or capturing action that never happened so you can report on some unbelievable event. Its not worth the risk to lie. In this day and age its incredibly easy to get caught. Everything can be cross-checked on the Internet or with a quick phone call or Twitter post. No matter what you think youre accomplishing by lying, or how good you feel that youre pulling one over on people, sooner or later it will come to an end and you will end up with no credibility and no career. So just dont do it. (Photo coourtesy of einalem)