How not to be James Frey or Jonah Lehrer.

August 4, 2012 12:08 PM

How careful and upfront do I need to be when writing an alternate history blog if I don't want to be a total asshole?

So I've started a stealth-mode blog (live but unlinked) and I've got a strange moral quandary. The blog is essentially a work of alternate history fiction presented as genuine research.

For example, the blog might claim to have uncovered a personal letter of Jane Austen's in which she admits to having had an affair with George IV. Perhaps some portion or the entirety of the letter would be reproduced in the blog. But of course it would be entirely fictional, just another brick in the building alternate history narrative.

The question I am struggling with here is to what degree I owe it to my audience to make sure they understand it is fiction. The title of the blog hints at it.

Ideally, I would like for someone who stumbled on the blog to be initially taken in and only slowly start to question the reality of what they are reading. A sort of blair witch experience. At the same time, if I ever see one of my posts referenced elsewhere as a reputable source, I want to be secure in saying that the person quoting me did not do their due diligence.

On the one hand, The Onion does just fine despite their subhead of "America's Finest News Source" and a complete lack of disclaimer anywhere on the front page that everything is made up.

On the other hand, James Frey's defence that he was writing fiction under the guise of a memoir does not satisfy.

I would like to just put my email address somewhere prominent with a message for readers to email me if they have any questions about the authenticity or provenance of these documents. Upon receiving such an email, of course, I would promptly let the cat out of the bag.

Is this enough to not be an asshole?

Other options I am considering are some combination of:

1. Explicitly stating in the header (this is a tumblr blog) that this blog is a work of fiction.

2. Placing a "more information" link in the header which goes to an explanatory page.

3. Creating a backdated first entry laying it all out.

4. tagging every post #alternatehistory

What do you think I am morally obligated to do? What do you think I should do?

posted by 256 to writing & language (28 answers total)

The question I am struggling with here is to what degree I owe it to my audience to make sure they understand it is fiction.

Without explicitly stating that the blog is fiction, maybe you could accomplish this but stay "in character" by posting a prominent sidebar or footer disclaimer recommending that readers consult the primary sources directly amid a general caution about conspiracies to suppress information. Smart readers will get the hint.
posted by Inspector.Gadget at 12:30 PM on August 4, 2012

Perhaps set it up so there are clear and easy links to the source - an about the author page - and while it's not stated on that page that it's fiction, the information about the author is impossible. (Maybe his birth-death years indicate he was 300 years old. Or born in the future and travelled through time).

Because this is clearly presented information about the source, it makes a pretty good case for lack of due-diligence if quoted out of context, while at the same time it's subtle and doesn't announce that the work is fiction or break the fourth wall.
posted by -harlequin- at 12:40 PM on August 4, 2012 [1 favorite]

For example :)
posted by -harlequin- at 12:44 PM on August 4, 2012 [2 favorites]

I would like to just put my email address somewhere prominent with a message for readers to email me if they have any questions about the authenticity or provenance of these documents. Upon receiving such an email, of course, I would promptly let the cat out of the bag.

Is this enough to not be an asshole?

No, it is not.

Honestly, that seems annoying & overly precious. Just put up some kind of "about us/more info" page with the truth on it. Most people aren't going to care about the veracity of your posts, but if they do, that's an easy way for you to answer them & enable due diligence.
posted by belladonna at 12:46 PM on August 4, 2012 [6 favorites]

I think it's a dangerous game. Fiction masquerades as fact too often in daily life, in advertising, urban legends passed on as truth, etc. That annoys this reader, even -- especially -- when it's done 'well,' and I seem to be far from alone in that.
You're not asking how to do it well, but whether to do it at all, or how much to do it. FWIW, I would call it fiction and let it stand or fall on your talent, not on readers' amazement at what you've led them to believe is historical fact.
Just my opinion. Good luck.
posted by LonnieK at 12:58 PM on August 4, 2012 [5 favorites]

At a minimum, I'd go with Nos. 2, 3 and 4. For No. 1, maybe instead of explicitly stating that the blog is a work of fiction, state in the header that it's a work of alternative history or imagined history.
posted by croutonsupafreak at 1:05 PM on August 4, 2012

Your about page should say it's fiction. You don't need anything else.
posted by empath at 1:11 PM on August 4, 2012 [12 favorites]

I think you should give more opportunity for somebody to know and understand that this is a fictional work. However, morally, you're not obliged to do anything. The internet is a broad and varied place, and the reader alone is morally obligated to ensure they have the right information. If some high school student screws up by quoting you in an essay, that's a valuable lesson for them. You can't coddle everybody, and you're not doing folk favors if you do. The Onion is often quoted as a serious news source by some idiots, which shows that you'll never escape that outcome.

The exception is if you plan to exploit your work for money, in which case be clearer about what it is you're selling.
posted by Jehan at 1:13 PM on August 4, 2012 [1 favorite]

The thing is if you google the onion you get the Wikipedia page within a few results that identifies it as satire. Presumably it will be a couple more months before this happens with your tumblr. Personally though I kind of disdain the "is it real or not?" thing as an intentional effect (but that's just a matter of personal taste I think) I don't think you have any obligation for it to be obvious: if there is an About link that will appear on any page of your tumblr that links to a page that gives the basic fact s (it is fictional, more background at your option) you have covered it. It is the internet and anybody who assumes anything is true when there is clear additional context offered bears full responsibility with whatever dumb thing they do with their misinterpretation.
posted by nanojath at 1:15 PM on August 4, 2012

(Truly though I don't think you have any moral obligation at all - James Frey allowed his fictional memoir to be explicitly published as non-fiction, he knew his publishers considered it to be non-fiction, he publicly presented it as non-fiction. He was an out-and-out liar. In my book it is preferable to have the answer to the "is this fiction" question easily accessible, but that's a preference. Unless you are explicitly presenting something as non-fiction you are not being immoral in my opinion).
posted by nanojath at 1:19 PM on August 4, 2012

I think it really depends on how obvious you make it that you've written fiction.

I would consider your comparison between the Onion and Frey as a good starting point - You don't need to come out and say "All of the following never happened", but you need to throw in the occasional (I would say at least once per page) "And then I saved Earth from the Vogon constructor fleet on my way to dinner". Of course, you can do it more subtly that that - Ideally, your reader won't think twice about it on first reading, but in hindsight you want to make it such that no sane person could claim to have really read even a single page and taken it as something more-or-less true.

To me, that (and that they strike more-or-less equally along the political spectrum) seems like the key to why the Onion counts as humor rather than just a pack of lies.
posted by pla at 1:27 PM on August 4, 2012

If I were to do this I wouldn't tell. It makes it cooler for those that can figure it out.
posted by cjorgensen at 1:53 PM on August 4, 2012 [2 favorites]

You don't need to worry too much about making it clear your blog is fiction; there are plenty of AH blogs and such which stay in character all the time.
posted by MartinWisse at 1:55 PM on August 4, 2012 [1 favorite]

I don't think Jonathan Swift tipped off readers that he was just kidding around about those babies.
posted by fivesavagepalms at 2:04 PM on August 4, 2012 [4 favorites]

Are you writing Satire? Because that should tip off readers (like the Onion and Swift) if it is well-written (if it doesn't tip them off then satire is not your strong suit), or, if you are writing about yourself, stretching the truth should not harm anyone else (unless you claim a real person did something they did not). But I feel writing about a real person should be truthful as far as you know it or else clearly identified as a work of fiction - especially if you are making up what seems to be corroborating evidence.

Expecting people to figure out your writing is based on false primary sources while hiding behind "it's just a story! The jokes on you for being gullible. Weren't you smart enough to figure out I was lying?" skates a little too close to the arrogance on display in the Gay Girl in Damascus blog. That lie that DID cause various people difficulties before the male American author said it was "just fiction" when the authorities could not locate the kidnapped blogger.

I guess I just feel that on the internet (and in society in general) there is already so much cynicism mixed in with contempt for people that AREN'T jaded that adding to it with yet another "gotcha" is really not something to be proud of. It also seems very easy, compared to the hard work of real scholarship or upfront fiction (where convincing the reader to suspend disblief is 99% of the challenge) Ya know what would be revolutionary? Vulnerability and honesty.
posted by saucysault at 3:05 PM on August 4, 2012

"All content of this blog is a product of my own invented research. Do not cite without consulting your friendly local librarian."
posted by robocop is bleeding at 3:11 PM on August 4, 2012 [2 favorites]

I think people will like it more if they know what they're looking at up front -- that is, if you say something like "from the possibly broken time machine of..." in your sub-header and include something even clearer on your "About this blog" page (eg, "Alternative histories from timelines that might have been").

If I'm offered a fun alt-history story, I enjoy it and might share it with friends under that label.

But if I find a cool seemingly-true anecdote, and it turns out later to be fake, I'm just disappointed. The fun of the story came from the "wow, I can't believe that's true, how cool", so I don't retroactively change my conception of the story as "what a fun alt-history."
posted by LobsterMitten at 3:20 PM on August 4, 2012

I completely agree with saucysault and LobsterMitten. Obviously, reactions will be all over the map—plenty of people will feel it's totally cool to keep a complete poker face, and if people fall for it it's their own damn fault—but I personally think that's a pretty inhuman way of dealing with the world, and people's credulity should not be abused.
posted by languagehat at 3:31 PM on August 4, 2012 [2 favorites]

To be a little clearer on what kind of story I'm telling here, Slenderman/Marble Hornets might have been the better comparison. The narrative is eventually going to reach the point that it is clearly and unambiguously science fiction or horror. And I have no intention to start sharing it around until it has reached that point.

The problem is that, with a blog, you have limited control over how people interact with your work. If someone drops in for an entry or two in the middle or near the beginning, they could easily leave with the feeling that everything they read was true.

Personally, I've always enjoyed the is-it-or-isn't-it in the early stages of things like Marble Hornets, but it's clear from these answers that feeling is far from universal.

So the two aspects of this are:

1. What responsibility do I have to the person who might drop in, internalize one made up fact, and then leave; and;

2. What is the kindest way to treat a reader who dives in and sticks around long enough for the conceit to become clear.

The less useful answer is implying that being interested in trying to tell a story this way makes me an inhumane and arrogant. To reiterate: I don't want to piss people off or 'trick' them. I don't want to actually try to pass this off as truth in any way except for MAYBE for the first few posts that any given person reads, depending on when they dive in.
posted by 256 at 4:11 PM on August 4, 2012

Oh, robocop is bleeding is in here. The Wheel is another great example of how delightful it can be to discover midway through that something isn't what you think it is. Would that post have been as awesome if it had opened with: "The following is a made-up parable about punishing children appropriately."?
posted by 256 at 4:25 PM on August 4, 2012

So if I saw this blog, I would think you were lying and potentially scamming people (maybe you're trying to pull some kind of Tichborne Claimant or Drake Fortune con) unless you said it was alt-hist fiction.

And I love alt-hist fiction.
posted by Sidhedevil at 4:49 PM on August 4, 2012 [1 favorite]

And "email me for more details" just makes it seem more like a con game.
posted by Sidhedevil at 4:50 PM on August 4, 2012

The thing about Marble Hornets and Blair Witch Project is that they're not about actual historical figures.
posted by Sidhedevil at 4:52 PM on August 4, 2012 [1 favorite]

If people are going to tumblr for historical facts, they get what they deserve, in my opinion.
posted by Literaryhero at 5:07 PM on August 4, 2012 [1 favorite]

Meh, it's not so much that I think people are going to Tumblr for historical facts as that anyone who knows anything about history will think this is some kind of a scam rather than fiction.
posted by Sidhedevil at 5:32 PM on August 4, 2012

Ideally, I would like for someone who stumbled on the blog to be initially taken in and only slowly start to question the reality of what they are reading.

I would think you were an ass, no two ways about it. I really hate misleading things about historical fact, so I might not be the best judge. I have enough trouble keeping straight what really happened without someone trying to fool me. I enjoy artistic lying quite a bit in other contexts. I don’t know whether you really have a moral obligation though, I don’t think it’s a sin.

But I think you’re not really seeing the way this would work to other people, at least in my opinion as I’m imagining what you’re saying. I just don’t think it would work the way you think it would.

For example, the blog might claim to have uncovered a personal letter of Jane Austen's in which she admits to having had an affair with George IV

At this point you do not have AH fans reading further, you have people who are interested in Jane Austen. I think the people that would be interested in following would not like where it’s going, and the people who would like where it’s going would not be interested in following (because they don’t know). So the group of people who like the whole endeavor would be a subset of Jane Austen fans looking for more information, who don’t mind being misled while looking for that information, and like alternate history but weren’t looking for it. That seems like a pretty small group. After the truth was revealed people might like it, but in that case why not just reveal the truth in the first place.

I don’t see how this is anything like a Blair Witch experience.
posted by bongo_x at 10:19 PM on August 4, 2012 [3 favorites]

So this is an issue I've given a looooooot of thought to, because this is what I do for a living. I make alternate reality games and pervasive stories and transmedia and blah blah. Marble Hornets and Blair Witch both fit into this spectrum neatly.

You need to be wise to context and risk of harm. The problem a lot of ARG people run into is that they put stuff into the world -- missing girl flyers and whatnot -- and don't consider the case where someone who has no reason to believe it's fiction stumbles across it from Google juice. An ordinary person doesn't see a missing persons poster and think "Wow, how intriguing!" They think "Ugh, I'm going to make sure to lock my doors tonight."

In some cases, that doesn't matter. Making up a website for a fictional restaurant where you don't put an address anywhere isn't going to hurt anyone. But you need to consider risk of harm. Making up a press release about a new treatment for Parkinson's, on the other hand, could seriously hurt people who think it's real and make treatment decisions based on false information.

In your case, if you don't clearly signpost the fiction, the risk of harm is that your stuff is going to creep into real and ongoing scholarly research -- all it takes is one person to cite in Wikipedia, and then a hundred student papers will be perpetuating your fiction without knowing it's fakey-fake.

So how do you signpost that something is fictional? You make it SUPER OVER THE TOP -- like The Onion does, so that a reasonable person wouldn't be misled by it. Or else you explicitly tell people it's fake, with sidebars and footers and about pages. (Though this can be problematic on its own, because people don't look at these things. Sigh.)

But the other thing is to ask yourself as an artist and a creator, why are you invested in not labeling something as fictional? There are few creative purposes that can be served by this. Improv Everywhere is one of the few I can think of, and the point of that is to create a whimsical and incrongruous moment that is not actionable in future. Those events are both over the top and have little risk of harm if someone DID happen to believe them.

But if you're trying to get people into your work because they think it's really real, even for a second, you're in very risky moral territory. I find it more and more difficult to justify passing something off as real these days, because the work simply doesn't benefit from it. You're looking for a sense of realism to add credibility and weight to your work; instead look to adding emotional authenticity, so people care about it even though they totes know it isn't real.

...so yeah, I've thought about this subject SO MUCH that I gave an hour-long talk about the ethics of pervasive fiction at SXSW a couple of years ago. I am not linking the audio because I feel that would be naff, but the Google can fetch it for you.

Kudos to you for grappling with this issue from the get-go. A lot of creators don't even stop to think about this stuff. They just make something without thinking it through, and then they're surprised when the campus police show up on their doorstep (or any of a hundred other horror stories.)
posted by Andrhia at 8:10 AM on August 5, 2012 [13 favorites]

I played with this a bit on my tumblr, and I found that by being direct about it being false seemed to work fine and shut down the questions from readers.

I still really enjoy the idea of a consistent alt-history world. My original plan was to keep telling these ridiculous false microfictions and slowly accumulate a series of rules and facts that while untrue, are internally true. Then, as you might be able to tell, I lost interest. I'll look forward to seeing your thing on projects!
posted by TwelveTwo at 2:50 PM on August 8, 2012