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Read author andNew Yorkcontributing editor Adam Sternberghs essayhere.
I write crime fiction.
That being the case, Ive researched and written about an extremely violent world.
Ive danced on that line, and perhaps at times Ive crossed it.
My response was always the same: I agree, but thats what really happened.
The research was tough.
Im not soliciting sympathy here journalists in Mexico have beenmurderedtelling this story.
I may leave the War on Drugs, but it will never fully leave me.
This goes beyond the ethics of writing about violence.
It goes into the topic of fiction and truth.
When I take the reader into this world, it has to be a real world.
The characters are fictional although often inspired by real people, or more often a melange of real people.
Their thoughts and feelings are fictional although often drawn from interviews in which real people have expressed them.
And the events are arranged into a dramatic structure, a fictional narrative that I nevertheless hope reveals underlyingtruths.
Their fiction has nothing to do with truth.
The technique is similar; they take real events and then connect the dots to construct a narrative.
The individual components might be accurate, but the composite picture is warped, to say the least.
(You might call it fake news.)
These are all real incidents.
They are tragic and terrible, and the perpetrators should be tried and punished.
The incidents are true but the resulting narrative is false.
The truth is that illegal immigrants commit crimes at a rateone-fifththat of native-born Americans.
[Emphases mine.]
Instead of eschewing exploitation, Trump is precisely and intentionally exploiting victims of horrible crimes for his political purposes.
Ive wrestled with the exploitation issue in my own work.
Have I exploited real victims to create my fiction?
But Trump and his minions never talk about that.
Far from trying to elicit truth from fiction, they make fiction of the truth.
