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thoughts, I was thinking . . .’ ”
Does that mean I’m taking some unforgivable license with the perfect, absolute truth? If I’d had a
camera and was filming the scene, rather than taking notes, would that constitute the perfect absolute
truth? Even a camera wouldn’t capture the absolute “truth,” presuming there is such a thing, and I’d
argue there isn’t. There’d still be questions like: What angle should I use? Which person should I
focus on? What do I leave in, what do I take out, to make it coherent to a viewer? Unless of course
you’re presenting the whole thing unedited. And a camera will never reveal what someone is thinking,
unless they announce it or you ask them.
I try to capture the essence of what took place. The thing about the past is that it is past: it will
never happen again. We can reconstruct it, interpret it, cast it in one light or another. One person’s
version of an event will always differ in detail and often in significance from another’s.
I don’t invent dialogue. I sometimes compress dialogue—even trial testimony—but that’s totally
different from inventing. And if I’m not present, I have to rely on someone else’s recollection of what
was said. If someone has a different version of an event, and the two versions are completely
irreconcilable, then I’ll present it by saying to the reader, “X remembered it differently . . .”
Aren’t you concerned that if you compress trial dialogue then your rendering of the dialogue
will be different from that in the court transcript?
By compression, I don’t mean paraphrasing. If I paraphrase, I wouldn’t use quotation marks. My
goal is to be as faithful as possible, while also making the passage readable. For example, it
sometimes took a dozen questions for a lawyer to get a single answer. In the book I would eliminate
the endless repetition without using ellipses, and get to the answer. Or I might write, “It was a
question to which he couldn’t seem to get an answer, even after trying a dozen times.” If I’m not
allowed that license, then I’m put into the position of simply reprinting the entire trial transcript. And
that’s not writing.
Let’s talk some more about ethics. Do you think it is important to keep a distance from your
characters? If so, how do you do it?
While reporting, I’m always thinking about how something—a scene, a quote, a character—fits into
my “story.” I have to be able to determine if somebody is giving me a lot of bullshit. And the only
way I can do that is by constantly evaluating how well the information fits. Of course, the fact that a
character is full of bullshit, or twists events to reflect his own virtues, might well be part of a story.
Joe McGinnis had a simple but apt line about this. He had to defend himself against the accusation
that his book, Blind Faith, had betrayed the main character, Jeffrey MacDonald. McGinnis had
entered into an arrangement with MacDonald to write about his murder trial, and McGinnis professed
at first to believe that MacDonald was innocent. (This goes back to why arrangements are a bad idea,
by the way.) Anyhow, by the end of the trial, McGinnis was convinced not of MacDonald’s
innocence, but of his guilt. McGinnis defended himself by saying, “When you sit down at the