The Nonfiction Trade-Off

Nonfiction is harder to write than fiction. Nonfiction writers often receive far less attention than fiction writers despite the former’s more demanding constraints. A quick online search can prove it: The first five writers to appear after searching "famous writers" are Ernest Hemingway, Stephen King, Mark Twain, William Faulkner, and William Shakespeare. Each of these writers is most widely recognized for their fictional works.

Don’t be fooled. My claim is not an example of a credible cause and effect relationship. After all, there’s no evidence to support it. Although it's engaging and probably grabbed your attention, it's also inaccurate. Nonfiction writers are constantly faced with this same situation: sacrificing accuracy for the sake of popularity. Itiis hard to write nonfiction because the narrative doesn't always occur in the most appealing way to readers. On the other hand, fiction writers have complete control over their narratives, choosing and changing any restrictions or constraints they want to place on their writing. Narratives in fiction can occur exactly as the writer wants. The prevailing narrative in a work of nonfiction very well may not occur in the most convenient or appealing way. This is particularly relevant when we look and journalism and current events reporting.

Journalists are caught in the predicament of accuracy, responsible for both engaging their audiences while also maintaining credible evidence, data, and facts. What emerges is a blurred line between opinions and falsehoods, and it's most visible when writers try to speculate unknown information.

Trump created the Fake News Awards to draw attention to inaccurate news stories. The awarded authors and their pieces highlight the thin line nonfiction writers have to walk. Take Paul Krugman's op-ed article in the New York Times, the Fake News Awards’ first place winner. The central point of Krugman's article was this: “If the question is when markets will recover, a first-pass answer is never.” Although an opinion piece, many people took the statement made by a Nobel Prize winner in economics as true. In Krugman’s case, his speculation turned out to be completely wrong: financial markets reached record highs within Trump's first year. That begs the question as to whether journalism should be considered nonfiction writing. Maybe a new category of writing could better clarify the lines between unbiased factual writing and biased speculative writing.

Preconceptions are not accurate. Whether or not it's the writer or audience’s responsibility to make this distinction remains unanswered. When journalist venture into nonfiction book writing, the underlying source of this question becomes apparent: the tradeoff between accuracy and popularity.

Nonfiction books are often subject to controversial inaccuracies, most often seen in quasi-scientific journalistic works. Malcolm Gladwell is perhaps the most notable author whose work faces widespread criticism as a result of inaccurate conclusions. In his book Outliers, Gladwell asserts a “10,000 Hour Rule”, claiming that achieving mastery or expertise in an activity requires 10,000 hours of practice. Yet, the authors of the study in which Gladwell asserts his rule have stated that his interpretation was an inaccurate depiction of their own data. In one of his more recent books, David and Goliath, Gladwell cites a psychology experiment to prove his theory of “desirable difficulties”, being certain serious challenges that are actually advantageous and cause positive outcomes.

The experiment Gladwell cited was a study of forty Princeton students tasked with solving math problems in easy-to-read or hard-to-read fonts, in which those given harder fonts performed better. A conclusion of this sort barely holds scientific merit or credibility with such lackluster and weak sources. Gladwell, however, is not the only nonfiction author with inaccurate assertions.

Steven Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner’s renowned book Freakonomics, which peaked at number two on the new york times’ nonfiction best-sellers list, was heavily criticized upon release for claiming that the legalization of abortion led to a fifty percent reduction in crime rates during the 1990s. Two Federal Reserve bank economists published a paper exposing the Freakonomics authors for the omitted variable bias, which led to their inaccurate conclusion. With the variables accounted for, it turns out that abortion actually led to an increase in the crime rates, the exact opposite of what Dubner and Levitt had originally claimed.

The Economist stated of Freakonomics’ inaccuracies, “for someone of Mr. Levitt's iconoclasm and ingenuity, technical ineptitude is a much graver charge than moral turpitude. To be politically incorrect is one thing; to be simply incorrect quite another." Even highly-regarded economist and journalist authors are subject to nonfiction constraints. The evidence and data told one narrative, but the authors chose inaccuracy in order to tell a “better” narrative. The same question arises as to whether the works similar to those of Gladwell, Levitt, and Dubner should be listed as nonfiction. Gladwell supposes that his work “is not going to be as rigorous and as carefully argued and complete as an academic work, because [it’s] popular non-fiction”. Although aware of his works’ complicated status, Gladwell is illogical to conclude that falsely-supported and inaccurate statements can be the basis of nonfiction.