Don't tell me it's not true; call it fiction

After gracing the cover of Poets & Writers magazine this summer, James Frey got cashiered out of the nonfiction vanguard by Oprah Winfrey yesterday. Miz O had defended Frey when a blog accused the author of making up parts of his memoir. Turns out it was true that he was being false.

P&W called him "a kinder and gentler James Frey" in the mag's coverline. In the article, he says "I don't particularly care if I'm part of the publishing culture or not." Good thing, James.

Oprah said she felt duped. She dressed down Frey's publisher Doubleday on her show, after Oprah's producers had asked the company if they'd checked on the truth in Frey's "A Million Little Pieces." They said they had, but they hadn't. Apparently that might've gotten in the way of 2 million copies sold.

Frey is a long way from innocent in all this, but said he did submit the book to the editors at his publisher first as a work of fiction. It returned as a memoir. Everything is fiction, really, just our versions of what happened.

But the truth in publishing is that eight books out of 10 printed today are non-fiction. Saying that a story is true seems to get the presses rolling when a well-written tale that's elegantly made up cannot. Now there's lifetime employment for legions of fact-checkers in the offing, according to Mediabistro.com's Galley Cat columnist. The change might slow down the freelance editor business, though:

It's probably impossible to fact-check absolutely everything. One issue that might have contributed to this so-called erosion is the rise in outsourced editing, especially copyediting. Because by saving costs, sometimes you really do get what you pay for...

In my writing group practice, The Writer's Workshop, I follow the tenet of the Amherst Writers and Artists training: We treat everything written in our group as fiction, unless the writer says otherwise. It might be a good practice for Doubleday, too.