"being more precise would be less dramatic"

How negotiable is a fact in nonfiction? In 2003, an essay by John D’Agata was rejected by the magazine that commissioned it due to factual inaccuracies. That essay—which eventually became the foundation of D’Agata’s critically acclaimed About a Mountain—was accepted by another magazine, The Believer, but not before they handed it to their own fact-checker, Jim Fingal. What resulted from that assignment was seven years of arguments, negotiations, and revisions as D’Agata and Fingal struggled to navigate the boundaries of literary nonfiction.

This excerpt from their correspondence got me surprisingly riled up.

I don't know how the dialogue ended, but IMHO, D'Agata's protests portray him as just the kind of writer I don't want to read. And I wouldn't want to read him because he's being lazy, shallow, and self-serving. The idea that being precise would be "less dramatic" is one of those things that turns good writing into crap. 

Truth matters, and it matters a lot, even in its tiniest details. A commitment to truth enriches writing in ways that the author could never anticipate. Being "dramatic" or "sounding good" is a petty, small way to make the writing superficially more palatable while inflating the author's ego. Which is fine - particularly for writers that aren't very skilled - just don't call it nonfiction anymore.

Whether you're writing an essay, taking a photograph, or running a particle accelerator, it seems to me that the appropriate attitude for the artist is surrender. Stop arranging facts for your own convenience, stop creating "drama", and let the world speak for itself. Because the world is infinitely fascinating, while you're just plain boring. Sorry, but it's the truth. The highest achievement for an artist is to become a messenger from the gods - which is why the ones that we really admire so often report that their creativity is more akin to taking dictation, that they are merely pulling down great truths from on high and delivering them at ground level.

High fidelity data sources are fantastically richer than they appear on the surface - which is why convincingly "faking" information ranges from very hard to impossible. A truthful transcription of the world, whether in prose or in numbers, has a kind of holographic depth that makes it more than the sum of its parts. It's something that entrusts the viewer with the right and privilege of drawing his own observations, ones which might be unimaginable at the time its recorded. 

I demand truth, also, from fiction. Fiction is the art of saying something that is superficially untrue to achieve something that is profoundly true. The un-truth is a necessary evil whose boundaries should be obvious. If the un-truth is not superficial and the truth is not profound, then it's just wankery. One might say the same thing of non-representational painting and sculpture, even the most abstract. 

I don’t think readers will care whether the events that I’m discussing happened on the same day, a few days apart, or a few months apart... The facts that are being employed here aren’t meant to function baldly as “facts.” Nobody is going to read this, in other words, in order to get a survey of the demographics of Las Vegas..."

Stop, you're making the baby Jesus cry. Some of us read essays with the computer right at our side, and when we come across something surprising or new - no matter how trivial - we follow it up with a little hunting trip on Google or Wikipedia. I might do this as often as two or three times per page. So of course I'm going to care about the "demographics of Las Vegas". You have NO IDEA what tiny little factoid we will pivot off of. And if you fill your writing with shit, we will KNOW. 

Rant over!