Thread: What is the term used to describe this?

Say i'm talking to someone writing a book about me. At one point I say to him:

"When I was 5 I used to enjoy going down the street to buy an ice cream cone."

And when the book comes out, the author "storytells" it with something along the lines of

"He trotted out of his mothers house, one shoe untied, excited to buy his favorite ice cream cone down the street. He approaches the road and stops abruptly, looks both ways, and crosses the street. The little boy begins to run faster and faster until finally he's at his favorite ice cream seller. Out of breath, he orders his cone and happily licks it as he walks home."

What is the term used to describe this act of writing and adding details like that, even though it's impossible the author was there?

Embellishment or exercising some artistic license both come to mind. There may be some other terms out there. Artistic license probably applies more to a work of fiction than to non-fiction.

Verbose, long-winded maybe?

Originally Posted by C.M. Aaron

Embellishment or exercising some artistic license both come to mind. There may be some other terms out there. Artistic license probably applies more to a work of fiction than to non-fiction.

Yeah, I think Embellishment might be it. Wasn't sure if there was another term out there though.

C.M. Aaron's right. It's embellishment.

No it's not. It's lying. I've authored a dozen ghost books, telling the stories of people's lives as honestly as possible, never 'embelishing' what they tell me. If the book is supposed to be an accurate autobiography, either 'as told to' or fully ghost-written, such creative 'poetic licence' is dishonest.

I'm sorry to disagree with you garza, but embelishment is a guarantee in biographies. If it is an autobiography (the term you used), it was written by the person themselves, in which case they're telling it as they see fit. If an author of a biography chooses to expand on someone's interview or other materials by putting in extra details to sell the emotion in the scene, it's still basically sound unless it directly contradicts what the subject or other witnesses said. In many cases, the person has passed away and there is no one to say that their added detail couldn't have happened that way. Who can really say in any biography that they know exactly what the person was thinking or doing at an exact time and place? Biographies always have some gaps to fill in through speculation or supposition. Even a person's recollection of what happened to them ten or twenty years ago can never be one hundred percent reliable.

I agree with powerskris and I would also add that the subject of the biography will be signing off on the manuscript, too (if it's an authorized biography, anyway) so the author can't just run wild, if the embellishment is wrong it'll be changed.

Some may tend to call it as "dramatization," I think.

Though yeah, embellishment is the word you're looking for.

It is not the job of the ghost to judge whether the recollection of an event by the subject is accurate or not, and it is not the job of the ghost to make up details out of thin air. Let the subject do that if he so wishes. The ghost is there only to make a readable text from what the subject supplies and to tell the subject's story in a style that suits the personality of the subject..

Many well know autobiographies by famous people, quite often best sellers, have been ghost-written. A parallel can be found in the speeches made by national leaders. The speeches are rarely written by the leader, but they embody his thoughts using the words of the speech writer. The leader is skilled in devising policy, and the speech writer is skilled at finding the turn of phrase that best explains the meaning of that policy to the public. Just as the Prime Minister's speech writer is not at liberty to create a policy, a ghost writer of an autobiography is not at liberty to add his own 'embellishments' to what the subject has provided.

We're not really talking about ghostwriters, here Garza. If a person has their biography ghost written by someone else than it really isn't an autobiography is it? What biographies did you write, by the way? I'd be interested in looking them up.

My mistake. I must have misread the OP because it looked to me as though the reference was to ghost writing.

In the OP Argh! says he tells the writer a simple childhood memory. The writer then adds details never mentioned by Argh!. This should not be done that way. What the writer should have done was to say, or write, to Argh!, 'Tell me more about going for ice cream'. Now the details, or embellishments, would be part of Argh!'s story. Those details may be accurate recollections of childhood, they may be memories distorted by the passage of time, or they may be outright fabrications. It's not for the ghost to judge. His job is to tell Argh!'s story using the information Argh! has provided so that when the book is published it will be My Story, by Argh!, an autobiography. This is far more common than is realised by the public, and there is nothing dishonest about it.

A ghost-written autobiography is still an autobiography, not a biography. Once the book is published the ghost disappears. The author of the book is the subject of the book. Consider the parallel I drew before with the speech writer. When the pm reads his budget speech to the House, do the news reporters refer to the speech as that of the speech writer, or as that of the Prime Minister? Should a reporter say, 'In the budget speech read to the House today, speech writer Joe Jones explained the need for a seven percent cut in recurrent expenses...'? I think not. The budget cut was a decision taken by Cabinet and brought to the House by the pm, who then relied on his speech writer to find the right words to explain the need for such a cut.

If the additions to the story agree with Argh!'s memory of childhood, they are legitimate embellishments. Otherwise they are not.

I've never written a biography.

If a person has their biography ghost written by someone else than it really isn't an autobiography is it?

Kerry Katona - Too Much Too Young - My Story of Love, Survival, and Celebrity
Katie Price - You Only Live Once
David Beckham - My Side: The Autobiography

Three autobiographies, and if any of them were even half-written by these half-witted, fame-happy, role models for todays youth, then every last one of us on these here forums may as well give up now. No, these books weren't written by the 'authors', and, yes, they are still autobiographies, because that's just the way it is.

Or, the embellishments are merely "colour" added to the scene to make it read differently to a recounted factual list of events. The facts remain accurate but they're told in a way that makes the reader actually enjoy the reading of them.

Bilston Blue: I looked it up and you're right. There are a TON of people who released autobiographies and didn't write a single word of them! Now that's scary! They also go on to say that some of them never even read their autobiographies!

Ghost stories - Telegraph