The True Story

The true story is immensely popular. It occurs in print in magazines, at live storytelling events, and broadcast over the radio. It is always told in the first person as something the narrator did, a page torn from their life. It is always positive, upbeat, and life-affirming. The true story is often short and funny. But is it true in the sense we assign to truth as verifiable facts and events that really happened?

Motivational speakers Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen produced Chicken Soup for the Soul in 1993, an anthology of true stories. A series of Chicken Soup books followed. You can submit a story for a future anthology. The guidelines include these points:

• A Chicken Soup for the Soul story is an inspirational, true story about ordinary people having extraordinary experiences.
• Stories are written in the first person and have a beginning, middle and an end. Stories often close with a punch.
• Your story must be true. No fiction, no creative writing.

Inspirational stories are not neutral accounts. Some are didactic, some are openly religious. They all teach a lesson on how to live. The parable is a model for the true story. The fairy tale, set in a nebulous past, is another model. The miracle, which is always a story and never a verifiable fact, is yet another.

The technique is to cut away all real-world details that detract from the message. That’s why the true story is short. The narrator, who is the hero or heroine, gains insight, or learns from experience, or sees things in a new light. He or she wins against the odds. The lesson grows out of experience, or it comes from above.

The true story is an example of magical thinking, a mindset that promises good results. If you wish hard enough, you get what you want. In this light, the enterprise looks childish, but the true story is big business. Plenty of adults have an appetite for fiction aimed at young readers.

The term “flash nonfiction” arose about forty years ago. Brevity online magazine, which started in 1982, is a pioneer in this form of short prose. The Brevity masthead lists a “craft editor” and twenty-seven “assistant editors,” some of whom may be fact checkers. But the magazine does not explicitly claim that all its contents are true.

Creative Nonfiction is a print magazine, first published in 1994. Under the slogan “true stories, well told,” it presents “essays that blend style with substance.” The staff lists “editorial interns” and “readers and volunteers.” Do these people research the contents? Submission guidelines say in part:

“Essays accepted for publication in Creative Nonfiction undergo a fairly rigorous fact-checking process. To the extent your essay draws on research and/or reportage (and ideally, it should, to some degree), CNF editors will ask you to send documentation of your sources and to help with the fact-checking process.”

The process described above marks the difference between creative nonfiction and a news story or a magazine article. The standard practice in journalism and academic writing is to compare accounts, cite published references, and reveal sources. Editors and their assistants check facts, and they reject statements that are false, misleading, or cannot be confirmed. By contrast, Brevity, Creative Nonfiction, and literary magazines that publish similar material stress “craft,” by which they mean the artistic side of writing.

Memoir, autobiography, and personal essays can be strongly slanted. A recent example is “Each Is Me” by Pamela Macfie published in Sewanee Review, Fall 2020. Macfie alleges that a senior faculty member, identified only as X, sexually harassed her as a graduate student. Macfie asks the reader to sympathize with her as a victim, but she does not allow any room for doubt. The essay presents no rebuttal from X, and no way to verify the facts.

As a rule, the memoir writer presents his or her point of view and no other. The narrator engages in internal reflection but rarely cites external evidence. For a century, however, since the discoveries of psychoanalysis, we have known that memory is a mixture of what happened, what is wished for, and the human instinct for storytelling. How to separate the true coin from the counterfeit?

William Lychak in his short story “The Ghostwriter” reveals the story behind the true story. The narrator is in New York City, dealing with a man who says the Lord told him to give away all he has and go to Peoria:

“The story was sent to the magazine where I work, a religious-minded monthly where my job is to rewrite these true stories of hope and inspiration. Each story needs its all-walks-of-life beginning, its crisis of faith, its turnaround and ultimate triumph of spirit, its upswing of happy and positive and purpose-to-it-all ending. I make all the narratives fit this template.”

Live stage performance billed as storytelling has caught on during the past few decades. Stories are told aloud in the first person. They resemble short fiction, at least when they are to the point, not the shaggy-dog type. Garrison Keillor’s News from Lake Wobegon series of tall tales broadcast on public radio helped to create an audience for these events. Promoters invite you to try your skill. Like the true stories in magazines, performed stories owe their effect to radical selection of details and narrative skips in time. They also benefit from the acting ability of the storyteller.

Stories recorded for The Moth Radio Hour are rehearsed. Some have been written out and memorized. “True as remembered and affirmed by the storyteller,” they last a few minutes, which correspond to a few pages of text. A collection was published as a book in 2013 as The Moth: 50 True Stories. Well-known authors wrote many of these stories. David Sedaris came to fame on the radio and went on to publish several books of episodes drawn from his life. Retold for laughs, these stories are often shelved in bookstores as essays.

The long walk is a popular book-length true story. Three recent American examples are A Walk Cross America, 1979, by Peter Jenkins; Worldwalk, 1989, by Steven M. Newman; and Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail, 2012, by Cheryl Strayed.

The long walk relates a unique adventure, yet it follows a pattern or structure, a template. Jenkins, Newman, and Strayed each describe a personal crisis. The narrator reaches the end of youth and the start of adulthood, with considerable anxiety and no clear path. They decide a long walk or hike will help, a journey on foot over hundreds or thousands of miles, lasting weeks or months. They exercise to get in shape, assemble food and equipment, trace a route on a map, and set off under a heavy burden, a backpack.

Sometimes a dog accompanies the walker. The dog provides emotional support and help in a dicey situation. In the book The Places in Between by Rory Stewart, about his walk across Afghanistan in 2002, Stewart rescues the dog Babur from abuse, bonds with him on route, and loses him at the end to stupidity by the Afghans. The dog resembles the helpful cat, bear, or gazelle in a fairy tale, a spirit in the shape of an animal guide. In the fairy tale, the animal can talk. In the true story, the dog is loyal but still a dog.

The walker endures bad weather, blisters, swollen toes, muscle cramps, insects, dangerous trails, and creepy fellow hikers. They keep a notebook or journal, take photographs, and send letters home. There are stops for rest, bouts of illness, moments of self-doubt, gifts of food, and encounters with strangers and saints. A major crisis: the walker feels they can’t go on. Then they discover some essential truth about human nature and themselves. They are strong, capable, even lovable. The end of the walk comes as a letdown. The goal all along was to learn this truth.

The walker never acknowledges a precedent. Yet these books follow the plot of The Pilgrim’s Progress, by John Bunyan, published in 1678. Bunyan was a lay preacher in Bedford, England. His pilgrim is named Christian, and the narrative is a relentless allegory. Places are called the Slough of Despond, Vanity Fair, and the Delectable Mountains. Christian meets people such as Mr. Worldly Wiseman, Evangelist, and Obstinate. They engage in dialogue, like scenes in a play.

As Christian sets out he says, “I fear that this burden that is upon my back will sink me lower than the grave.” For Bunyan, the burden is sin, which is a name for bad behavior in the past. The burden recalls the walker’s backpack, and the backpack is a symbol the walker fails to recognize. The suffering is self-imposed: the sore feet, the cold and wet, the loneliness. The triumph is over obstacles they went out of their way to find.

Christian’s goal is salvation. The modern pilgrim is also saved. The proof is that they wrote the book. Did all the events on the trail really happen? At the start of her book, footsore and frustrated, Cheryl Strayed takes off her hiking boots while resting on a precipice. One boot slips over the edge. She throws the other boot after it. Symbolically barefoot, Strayed does not say how she got down the mountain. Instead, she challenges the reader to believe.

In the true story, events are chosen and scripted, as in a reality television show. The narrative unfolds in the real world, as the writer takes notes. But the quest is not a person, place, or thing. The true story unfolds within.