Category Archives: The Writing Life

Posts about writing for fun and profit.

Oprah’s revenge

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Or Frey gets fried.

I wrote about my feelings on the James Frey scandal in a previous post.

Today, I’m spending the day nursing a cold (so I can fly tomorrow without coughing myself out of the sky), and have been surfing the ‘Net all day. I finally tracked down and read the latest on the Frey/Oprah situation. You can read a good article about it by Harriet Frey (no relation) on Salon.com, “Oprah’s revenge.” (If you’re not a Salon.com member, you’ll have to sit through a very short advertisement to read the article; it’s worth it.)

I also read a few of the dozens of comments following the article. The one that seems to echo my sentiments perfectly said, in part:

But maybe an underlying reason this subject has become so controverial is BECAUSE Frey’s story is just more drop in the seemingly endless river of bullshit Americans are compelled to swim through by a media addicted to conflating reality and fiction. Fictionalized truth may have been a groundbreaking, freeing approach for Capote. Several decades later though, the method has clearly reached the viral stage, detached from its original purpose and spread thoughout the culture, where it has become a primary tool of media types on the make, trying to distinguish themselves in a tough, highly competitive industry. As a reader, I want to trust an author. If it is a work of fiction, I can admire the writer’s skill and imagination; if it is non-fiction, I want to be able to rely on the author’s accuracy.

(I added the emphasis.)

Sadly, James Frey’s career is now made. It doesn’t matter if his writing is any good. The math says all. If only 25% of his readers like his book, it isn’t a big deal when he sells only 10,000 copies. But if he sells over a million? That’s 250,000 fans. He can thank Oprah for giving him the million plus readers he needs to assure his future success.

Fifty Writing Tools

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A good resource on the Web.

A few weeks ago, I stumbled across a series of articles on the Web titled “Fifty Writing Tools.” The series was written by Roy Peter Clark. It appears on the Poynter Online Web site, which is subtitled, “Everything You Need to be a Better Journalist.”

If you’re serious about writing, I highly recommend that you check out this series of articles. Although they’re primarily written for journalists, there’s a lot for all writers to learn in these pieces.

Essential Truth

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More on the James Frey fray.

The Unger Report, a regular feature on NPR, talked about the “essential truth” in Jame’s Frey’s “memoir.” You can listen at NPR : ‘Pieces’ of Essential Truth. Or better yet: do what I do and subscribe to the Satire from the Unger Report podcast. It’s usually very funny.

I asked myself the other day why I’m so pissed off about this James Frey thing. I think it’s because, as a writer, I believe that writers owe the public the truth. If a book is a memoir, it’s supposed to be true, at least as you remember the truth. (If this is the way Frey remembers the truth, he really needs to get into therapy.) If a book’s content is so exaggerated that large parts of it are made up, then that book should be sold to readers as fiction.

From what I’ve read about the book, it wasn’t particularly well written and it was turned down by 17 publishers when the author attempted to sell it as fiction. So the only way he could sell it to a publisher — and to the unsuspecting and trustful public — was as a real life story.

And that’s what pisses me off. He abused the reader’s trust. No writer should ever do that.

My Presentation at the Peachpit Booth

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I give a demo on Mac OS X 10.4 Cool Features

I was at Macworld Expo on Thursday and Friday. I’d gone primarily to gather information for a book I’ll be starting next week. But while I was there, I did a quick presentation at the Peachpit Press booth.

Peachpit has one of the nicest booths at the show these days. It’s a big booth with lots of tables full of books. Behind a wall, there’s a small theater where authors give presentations in front of about 20 chairs. I suspect that a lot of people sit in on presentations just to get off their feet for a while, but I’d like to think that some of them come just to see a particular author.

They wired me up with a wireless microphone (huh?) and I plugged my 12″ PowerBook into their projection system. When it appeared that no more than half the seats would be occupied, I started my presentation.

You have to understand that the more I plan for a presentation, the worse it is. So I don’t plan much anymore. Instead, I kind of “wing it.” I’ve been winging it for years now and I haven’t embarrassed myself yet.

My preparation for this presentation consisted of about 45 minutes seated in the Moscone Hall lobby, sucking at the Internet from a free wi-fi “connection” that was floating about the hall. I looked up my articles for Informit, which are also on the Peachpit Press Web site, and chose a few topics from them. What I really wanted to talk about was the article I’d written called “Five Funky Finder Features,” but it hadn’t been published yet. Fortunately, I found a copy of it on my hard drive, so I noted the topics on a steno pad. Then I thought of a few more topics to talk about, jotted them down, and was done.

I started off by introducing myself and telling them the story about how the Mac changed my life. (If you haven’t heard that story, you might want to search these blogs once they’re all online. I’m sure I wrote about it somewhere.) I told them about how the Peachpit Press and Informit.com Web sites are great sources of free information and even showed them my page on the Peachpit site to prove it.

Then I launched into my topics, using the notes I’d jotted down to keep me from forgetting what I’d planned to talk about. I answered questions as they came up — the hardest part was hearing what people were asking. (The hall is so darn loud and my ears were still stuffed from the plane ride.) After telling them about something, I’d ask whether they knew about it and was very surprised to find that I was teaching them new stuff. That was the goal, so I succeeded.

I showed them some of my favorite widgets, too. And how to set up iCal to show birthdays from people in your Address Book. This will be in a future Informit.com article.

The last thing I showed them was how you could connect a Garmin GPS to a Mac using a PC cable and adapter, then show waypoints and routes on the maps and satellite photos using Terrabrowser. The idea was to prove that Mac users could do just as many cool things with their computers as PC users. I think I got the message across.

The seats filled up gradually. Some people left, others took their place. One woman, who was pretty new to Macs, probably didn’t realize that she was my first choice to get a free copy of my Tiger book (heck, I didn’t want to carry them back home). She left before the end and missed out. I gave out that book and the two Visual QuickProjects I’d brought along at the end of my presentation.

It had been fun and I was glad I did it. Peachpit videoed the whole thing and I think they’ll be releasing it as a video podcast on their Web site. When I find out more, I’ll add a link on this Web site.