The Heene balloon hoax -- and what you can learn about writing from Edgar Allan Poe

October 21, 10:30 PMNY Writing Careers ExaminerTad Richards

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Illustration by Tad Richards

The story of the little boy adrift in a balloon tore at heartstrings all across the country, and the anger at the father who apparently perpetrated a hoax has been just as intense. But balloon hoaxes have been perpetrated before, most famously by Edgar Allan Poe, who wrote an article in 1844, for the New York Sun, about a transatlantic balloon flight from England to South Carolina. The hoax sold a lot of copies of the old tabloid, which then had to retract the story a few days later.

Poe's story, of course, was imaginative, and filled with wonderful detail.

We don't always mind being hoaxed. Orson Welles' classic 1938 radio broadcast of H. G. Wells' War of the Worlds (from a script by the great Casablanca screenwriter Howard Koch) is remembered and rebroadcast today -- and hundreds of people were fooled by it into thinking an invasion from Mars was actually happening.

The whole basis of the appeal of magicians from Blackstone to David Copperfield to Criss Angel is the hoax -- we know we're being convinced of something that is not really happening.

Clifford Irving was attacked for his hoaxed autobiography of Howard Hughes, but a lot of people had a sneaking admiration for his ability to pull it off.

And everyone loved Paul Newman and Robert Redford in The Sting

So what can you learn from this, as a writer? If you're going to pull off a hoax, don't make it a stupid, sleazy, tawdry affair, and don't involve children. People may love to be fooled by an artist with style, or even a rogue with flair and admiration. Nobody likes to be fooled by a jerk.