PrintMay 5, 2012
Obama's Historical Fiction
For the sake of compression, some of the characters that appear are composites of people I've known, and some events appear out of precise chronology.
Devices such as composite characters and shifting times to compress the narrative do not belong to the world of biography and autobiography. Such books are expected to be as long as they need be to tell the author's entire story. With a serious academic work, that can mean thick multiple volumes.
Narrative compression is used when adapting a book for the stage or in a film. There it is both vital to hold the audience's attention and to keep the overall length within the capacity of the average bladder. Readers can skip a section of a book they find uninteresting. An audience falls asleep or exits the theater at intermission. Thus, a writer adapting a book for a play or screenplay will combine salient parts of two or more characters or multiple episodes from the print source into composites in...(Read Full Article)
