Gimme Some Truth

For CP's annual writing contest, it's imperative to honor that silent pact with your reader: I'm not making this up.

by Duane Swierczynski

The first City Paper of 2008 will feature the winners of our 22nd annual Writing Contest. In recent years we've gone the fiction route — genre stories, short-short stories, first chapters of novels. In other words: shit you make up.

But this year, we've decided to hop the fence. What we want is a cold, hard shot of truth.

I love reading fiction and nonfiction; it's my twin nerdly passion. At any given moment, I'm reading a novel and a nonfiction book — usually, a biography or a book about Philly history. What bugs me, though, is when some author tries to mix both.

This happened in the last book I read: The Long Embrace, by Judith Freeman. It's a fun but flawed book, tracing the 30-year marriage of mystery writer Raymond Chandler and his wife, Cissy. Freeman's at her strongest when she takes us on a virtual tour of L.A., and shows us how certain locales left their mark on his groundbreaking novels. But she missteps when she speculates about what Chandler or his wife might be thinking at a certain moment — a novelistic device that nonfiction writers should avoid, unless you've interviewed a source firsthand and pretty much asked, "Is this what you were thinking at the time?"

I understand the temptation; as a storyteller, you want to use everything at your disposal. But if you're writing nonfiction, it's imperative to honor that silent pact with your reader: I'm not making this up.

So that's what we want this year: your best piece of writing and your solemn vow that you didn't make it up.

Your piece, which should run no more than 2,500 words, can be about anything or anybody. A first-person memoir. A profile of your favorite Philadelphian. A walk around your neighborhood. Whatever you like. Just tell an amazing — and true — story.

Send us your entry by noon on Dec. 10, 2007. You can e-mail it (writingcontest@citypaper.net) as a Word document or plain text attachment. If you're old-school, you can mail a manuscript to our offices. No need to follow up; yes, we got it.

As usual, we will assemble a panel of guest judges. I'm going to find a crew of hardcore fiction-haters ... some bad-asses who can sniff out a lie a mile away. (Maybe I'll even tag in a stone-cold fact-checker who will run through some of the contenders and make sure there's no eau de faux in there.)

For more, visit the official 22nd Annual City Paper Writing Contest page at citypaper.net/writingcontest. Good luck, truth-seekers.

Holmes Boy

Seems like I have a new book out every year around the same time, because I'm always dropping a little shameless self-promotion the same exact week I announce the writing contest.

At least it's something different this year. No shoot-'em-ups or psycho blondes or books with The Something as the title. Instead, I offer up The Crimes of Dr. Watson, an interactive Sherlock Holmes mystery and honest-to-God whodunit, complete with pull-out clues.

Local readers may dig this for a few reasons: 1.) despite being a Holmes story, there are a bunch of Philly references; 2.) the opening scene takes place in the City Paper office; and 3.) the publisher is Philly's own Quirk Books, now celebrating their fifth year.

And in keeping with the fiction vs. nonfiction theme from the first part of this column, let me add full disclosure: The bulk of the manuscript was written by Dr. John H. Watson himself, and only discovered after 111 years buried in a wall on South Third Street in Old City. Also, it is completely a work of fiction.

(duane@citypaper.net)