Fiction Writing II Truth and Lies

04/04/2020 Fiction Writing II Online | Blackboard - Week 1: Truth and Lies
TRUTH AND LIES

It has often been said that fiction is a lie that is true. But where is the lie? And where the
truth? Let us explore these elusive concepts.
The Lie
When writing fiction, you must lie. By that we mean you must fabricate, imagine, make
stuff up.
True, over the years the line separating fiction and nonfiction has blurred. Many forms of
nonfiction have become increasingly creative (and sometimes loose with fact) to the point
that some memoirs, essays, and works of narrative nonfiction closely resemble novels and
short stories. And, perhaps more than ever, many works of fiction are derived straight
from real-life events.
However blurry, though, a line does exist between fiction and nonfiction, and it will serve
you well to know which side of the line you’re writing on.
If you’re on the fiction side of the line, make it fiction. A work of fiction that sticks too
religiously to the facts as they happened in real life usually doesn’t quite make it as good
fiction. We sense that the writer is being a bit lazy, not taking us as far as we want to go.
Dropping us off in Tulsa when we were hoping to make it all the way to San Antonio.
You should never rely on the fallback, “But that’s how it really happened.” That’s not good
enough for a real fictioneer.
Why is this? Because with real life events the writer knows too much. Or doesn’t know
enough. Or refuses to bend the story into a shape that is more dramatically insightful or
satisfying. Or is imbuing the story with unmistakable scent of indulgence (meaning the
writer comes off as more important than the tale itself).
Venture deeper into your fictional territory. The act of fabricating will lead you to a better
story. It will push you toward something good, something you probably didn’t know when
you began writing. As Aldous Huxley says:
An unexciting truth may be eclipsed by a thrilling lie.
Many writers of fiction base their main characters on themselves and write about
circumstances and events that really happened. This is especially true of writers in the
early stages of their development, and that’s why so many first novels are very much
https://classes-new.writingclasses.com/FC283a20-10W-1-X/blackboard/1 1/10
autobiographical. There’s nothing wrong with working this way. You’re writing about
things you know—you and your own life—and no doubt you’ve got lots of great raw
material already at hand. By all means, use it.
But…even if you are writing about yourself and your own life, you must lie. You must
distort, veer from reality, fictionalize.
If you’re writing about your own life, you must make yourself into a character, one who is
perhaps very much like you, but not really you. This gives you some much-needed
objectivity.
You need to think of the You character as if it’s a doll, something you can move around and
manipulate at will. You need to be free to make that character do something you wouldn’t
have the nerve do, or make that character afraid of something you might not actually fear.
And you can’t worry too much about making that doll look ridiculous or feel unbearable
pain, things that will serve your story well. (Sorry, doll.)
Rob, the protagonist of Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity shares some traits with the author,
most notably his taste in music and confusion about relationships, both key ingredients of
Rob’s personality. But the author never owned a second-hand record shop, nor did he
experience many other things that are part of Rob’s life. He made Rob a character. He even
determined that he was a little smarter than Rob in some respects, as Hornby here reveals:
There were times I found myself writing something that maybe would be too
smart for him, or something where he'd gotten too much insight into
something too quickly. When I wrote stuff that made complete sense to me,
that meant that I'd gone a bit too far.
If nothing else, alter one significant detail about characters based on you (or someone close
to you). Changing even that one detail will start to make the character feel like a fictional
creation. Some writers even like to merge characteristics of two or more people to create a
fictional composite character.
As Eudora Welty says:
It was not my intention—it never was—to invent a character who should speak
for me, the author, the person. A character is in a story to fill a role there, and
the character’s life is defined by that surrounding—indeed is created by his
own story.
And there’s another reason you can’t stay confined within yourself. Not all of your
characters can be variations of you.
Say, for example, you are young woman who has recently gotten married and you want to
write a story about a young bride, and all the trauma that entails. Great. But you’ll still
need other characters—the groom, the mother, the ex-boyfriend, the grandfather who
watched the wedding after the recent death of his wife of 51 years. You may or may not
actually enter the point of view of these characters, but you should know them as well. If
you do, it will make the story infinitely richer. Here you can get to the core of these people
through a combination of observation and imagination and finding the feelings in them
that you do understand.
Even if you’re writing about something that happened to someone else, you still need to
fictionalize rather then just duplicating what occurred in real life.
Nikolai Gogol heard an anecdote at a party about a man who saved money for years to buy
a hunting rifle and then the rifle was stolen before he had a chance to hunt with it even
once. Something struck Gogol about the incident, and he used it for the basis of his story
“The Overcoat.”
But he knew the anecdote alone wasn’t enough for his story. He turned the rifle into an
overcoat, turned the man into a low-level government official, and arranged for the coat to
be stolen halfway through the story, using the anecdote as a springboard to a humorous
and haunting tale of social climbing. He took us all the way to San Antonio. Or perhaps we
should say St. Petersburg.
Many writing teachers like to use the adage “Write what you know.” There is indeed value
to the statement. For example, if you live in Seattle and have not left the state of
Washington your whole life, your stories set in Seattle are bound to read more authentic
than your stories set in New York City or Savannah or Munich. You’ve experienced Seattle,
but not the other places.
But let’s not interpret “write what you know” too literally. It doesn’t mean that you can
only write about what you have experienced or even where you’ve been. You can look at
this adage in a much more open way. You can write what you want to know. Or need to
know. Or can imagine your way into knowing. And you will still find something you already
know in it.
Maybe you want to write a story about a woman coping with her sister’s death. Can you not
write such a story because you have not experienced the death of a sister? No, you just
have to lie a little. And you can easily draw upon things you know to summon the
appropriate feelings.
Maybe you draw from the loss of a beloved pet. Maybe you draw from the loss you felt after
a divorce. Or after your father left the family with no word. You are drawing on something
that you do know—that sense of loss.
Therefore, let’s amend the adage to read: Write what you know and reach to what you
don’t know.
That “reaching” will often require you to draw upon imagination and research, but this is
part of what makes fiction so fun to compose.
Let’s say you’re intrigued by Wall Street or the music industry or police work. You may
know very little about these milieus but it’s easy enough to discover what you need—
talking to people, visiting places, reading books and articles. And then you fill in the blanks
with your imagination.
Ann Patchett’s novel Bel Canto deals with opera and her novel The Magician’s
Assistant deals with magic. The author knew very little about either of these things before
she began writing. We can almost imagine how much fun she had exploring these worlds.
Lou Matthews wrote a short story called “Crazy Life,” about a teenage Latina girl living in
the barrio of Los Angeles who is trying to help her gang member boyfriend beat a murder
rap. Lou Matthews does indeed live in Los Angeles.
But, in fact, Lou Matthews is a middle-aged middle-class white man. He did, however, grow
up in the kind of community described in the story and so knew enough to inhabit those
characters and that setting. (On occasion, Mathews has visited high schools in the barrio
where the students have read this story. They can believe that he is not a young and
Latino, but they find it impossible to believe that he is a not a she, so convincingly did he
get inside his female protagonist.)
Here’s a passage:
Chuey called me from the jail. He said it was all a big mistake. I said, Sure
Chuey, like always, que no? What is it this time, weed or wine? He said it was
something different this time. I said, You mean like reds, angel dust, what?
Chuey says, No Dulcie, something worse.
I said, So? Why call me? Why don’t you call that Brenda who was so nice to
you at the party. He said Dulcie. Listen. It’s a lot worse. I got to get a lawyer.
Then he like started to cry or something. Not crying—Chuey wouldn’t cry—but
it was like he had a hard time breathing, like he was scared. I couldn’t believe
it. I didn’t do it, Dulcie, he told me. I didn’t do nothing. I was just in the car.
Inspirations are all around us and we don’t have to (and shouldn’t) limit our stories to
ourselves and the worlds we move in. There are so many sources of good “lies” out there.
Everyone you know well or just a little, from anytime in your life, can serve. And there is
the newspaper, TV, the Internet, and all of history to steal from.
And don’t overlook the musings of your mind—vague memories, daydreams, night dreams,
crazy games you’ve played with yourself of “what if?”
In fact, there’s no reason your stories need to be bound by what is realistic. Maybe you
want to venture into the realm of nightmares, as in Stephen King, or visions of the future,
as in Philip K. Dick, or mythical lands that never were, as in J.R.R. Tolkien, or a twilight
world where the real seamlessly blends with the surreal, as in the magic realism of Gabriel
Garcia Marquez. Such flights of imagination are one of fiction’s most wondrous powers.
Robert Olen Butler wrote an entire collection of short stories, Tabloid Dreams, in which
every story was based on a headline from a tabloid newspaper. He uses titles such as
“Titanic Survivors Found in Bermuda Triangle” and “Doomsday Meteor Is Coming.” In
“Jealous Husband Returns in the Form of a Parrot,” a man is reincarnated as a parrot after
his death and, by chance, he is bought and taken home by his former wife, with whom he
had a problematic marriage.
Here’s a passage:
I sidestep down to the opposite end of the cage and I look out the big sliding
glass doors to the back yard. It’s a pretty yard. There are great placid maple
trees with good places to roost. There’s a blue sky that plucks at the feathers
of my chest. There are clouds. Other birds. Fly away. I could just fly away.
I tried once and I learned a lesson. She forgot and left the door to my cage
open and I climbed beak and foot, beak and foot, along the bars and curled
around to stretch sideways out the door and the vast scene of peace was there
at the other end of the room. I flew.
And a pain flared through my head and I fell straight down and the room
whirled around and the only good thing was she held me. She put her hands
under my wings and lifted me and clutched me to her breast and I wish there
hadn’t been bees in my head at the time so I could have enjoyed that, but she
put me back in the cage and wept awhile. That touched me, her tears.
Anton Chekhov, when asked how he came up with stories, replied that many of his ideas
came from simple objects. He picked up the first thing he saw on the table, an ashtray, and
told the questioner that he would have a story written tomorrow called “The Ashtray.”
Really, you can lie about practically anything. And that’s the art of the fiction writer. To lie
so well that the story casts a perfect illusion of reality, regardless if the story is grittily
realistic or wildly far-fetched.
And perhaps John Cheever gives the best argument for why we should lie in fiction:
The telling of lies is a sort of sleight of hand that displays our deepest feelings
about life.
Which brings us to…
The Truth
In a work of fiction, no matter how much you lie, you should also be telling the truth.
Truth is a big word, with a myriad of meanings, and we don’t want to get lost in an endless
parsing of the word. For now, let’s say that truth in fiction is related to an inherent
honesty in the story.
We’re not talking about theme here. Yes, if you are telling your story honestly, some kind
of larger meaning will probably emerge. But a quick way to write a story that rings false is
to start by trying to impose some kind of meaning on the story that may or may not want
to be there. So don’t worry about the meaning—the larger truth—until the time is right.
Another way to ring false is to write a story that is simply duplicating what you’ve seen in
other stories, or going to a place that you think is “clever” or “dramatic,” or writing what
you think has the best chance of getting published. Your story will feel overly slick or
manufactured or derivative. It won’t have the essence of life that the best fiction seems to
have.
Push yourself to look beyond preconceptions and all the stories you’ve seen (in whatever
medium) and to draw your material from what you see around you (and, yes, experience)
in life.
How will you know if what you have is honest? Ernest Hemingway says:
The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shock-proof shit
detector. This is the writer's radar and all good writers have it.
Get yourself one of those. And what that really means is that you should keep pushing for
the most honest actions and emotions in your story rather than settling for something a
little short of that. The best way to reach this kind of honesty is to know your characters,
inside and out, and follow what happens to them in a way that is true to who they are and
what they would do.
Drawing upon what you already know (emotionally) will help. Use your own feelings as an
emotional touchstone for that of your characters, even if the characters are not that much
like you. Sort through your journals and your thoughts and your past, and don’t be afraid
to pull out your deepest secrets and biggest flaws and most embarrassing moments and the
very worst of your hurts. This is great material for fiction. Fascinating material. Honest
material.
Amy Hempel’s “In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson Is Buried” began as a writing assignment
where the students were told to write about their worst secret. The story tells of a young
woman afraid to stick around the hospital to watch a close friend die. It doesn’t matter
how close the story is to what actually happened in her life. What matters is that she used
her worst secret as the starting point for a brutally honest story.
Here’s a passage:
“I have to go home,” I said when she woke up.
She thought I meant home to her house in the Canyon, and I had to say
No, home home. I twisted my hands in the time-honored fashion of people
pain. I was supposed to offer something. The Best Friend. I could not even
offer to come back.
I felt weak and small and failed.
Also exhilarated.
I had a convertible in the parking lot. Once out of that room, I would drive it
too fast down the Coast highway through the crab-smelling air. A stop in
Malibu for sangria. The music in the place would be sexy and loud. They’d
serve papaya and shrimp and watermelon ice. After dinner I would shimmer
with lust, buzz with heat, vibrate with life, and stay up all night.
You might even try it—basing a story on your worst secret. If you want to peek at some
secrets, check out Post Secret, a website where people share their deepest secrets on
postcards: www.postsecret.com (https://postsecret.com/)
Once you start poking around into honest territory, you’ll find things that aren’t always so
pretty. You’ll find things that are selfish, greedy, lazy, duplicitous, etc. Don’t shy away
from this stuff. What’s bad in life is often what’s best in fiction. To be human means to be
flawed, and you want your fiction to capture the flaws that real people have.
And you want to portray these flawed people without judging or censoring them. It’s
enough just to show them. As Anton Chekhov says:
To a chemist, nothing on earth is unclean. A writer must be as objective as a

chemist.
Nelsen Algren’s The Man With the Golden Arm takes us into the underworld of petty
thieves and gamblers in Chicago. The protagonist, Frankie Machine, is a card dealer/
heroine addict who cheats on and mistreats his wheelchair-bound wife. The author doesn’t
judge or censor; he merely shows us how these people live.
In ZZ Packer’s “Brownies,” a group of black Brownies at camp want to beat the crap out of
a group of white Brownies because one of the black girls thought she heard one of the
white girls say the N word. It’s not a nice set of circumstances, but it’s human. (It’s also
surprisingly humorous.)
One of the characters in Richard Russo’s Empire Falls is Max, an old man with questionable
hygiene and morals and a drinking problem. In real life, you’d probably cross the street to
avoid Max, as do many people in the fictional town, including his own son. The author
doesn’t bother to pretty this guy up, but he also allows us to understand him and even feel
a little sympathy toward him.
Here’s Max figuring out how he can get to the Florida Keys for free:
After Horace left, Max downed the last swallow of beer in the other man’s
glass and then gave himself over to the problem of whom he might entice to
accompany him southward. The ideal candidate would own a car and not
expect much in the way of gas money from Max. Once in Florida, things would
be easier. Once he found a place to stay, he’d get somebody at the Empire
Towers to send him his government check at the first of each month. It
worried Max a little, the way money evaporated in the Keys. Sun, Max
supposed—shining all the while, making you sweat, and it was the sweating
made you thirsty. Beer was more expensive down in Florida, but Max much
preferred how they served it, with a fresh slice of lime wedged right into the
mouth of the sweating bottle. If a man wasn’t careful, he could drink the
bottom right out of a Social Security check by mid-month, and then he’d have
to scam like mad till the first.
Some writers take it further and present us with characters who are truly reprehensible—
Humbert Humbert, the child molester of Lolita, Patrick Bateman, the serial killer in Bret
Easton Ellis’s American Psycho, the homicidal madmen in the stories of Edgar Allan Poe.
These writers weren’t judging or censoring their characters. They were simply following
these people where they wanted to go, where they needed to go, where they insisted on
going. The same will be true when you are writing about people who are not threats to
society, but simply human beings with a mixture of flawed and favorable qualities, as is
true of most people.
Don’t ask yourself: What are things like in fiction? Ask yourself: What are things really
like? Not factually, but emotionally.
Honesty will often lead you away from the predictable into territory that is uncharted and
surprising. Let’s say, for example, you’re writing a story where a husband reveals to his
wife that he’s been cheating on her for years. How does the woman react? Perhaps jaw-
dropping shock or seething anger. The woman rushes away to cry or throws cutlery at the
man.
Well, maybe. We’ve certainly seen such reactions dramatized before. But if you’re really
inside that moment, inside that woman, inside the honesty of the situation, you may find
something else. Maybe she laughs. Or feels relief. Or gets turned on. Or calmly slits the
husband’s throat.
In “Berna’s Place,” this very scenario occurs—a woman discovers that her husband of many
years has carried on numerous affairs behind her back. How does she react? She wants to
know all about each of the women he’s had an affair with. In detail.
Here’s a passage:
I took it girl by girl. I made columns for the following categories: duration of
affair, age, hair color, height, weight, breast size, intelligence, family
background, hobbies. This was beneath me, embarrassing even at the time. I
was driven by an old fury finally coming to life.
The affairs had happened before Anita Defranz, most of them when Jude was
in his thirties. Only Lily had been recent.
“We can start there,” I said. “We can start with Lily. You tell me the story, and
I’ll listen up.”
I spoke with calm authority.
“Lily is nobody you’d ever want to meet,” he said.
“But I need the story, Jude.”
“It will mortify me to tell you.”
“So be it.”
Yes, the truth is often surprising. And you should be surprised as you write. If you are not
making discoveries about your story and characters, then your readers probably won’t be
making discoveries either.
It’s fine if you start writing a story already having a sense of where it’s going, but don’t be
too locked into the way events will play out. Leave room for the characters to improvise
and take unexpected turns. Part way through, you might discover that a different action is
more appropriate in a certain scene or that the story wants to flow in an entirely new
direction. You have to allow room for the honesty to seep in.
You might follow the advice of E.L. Doctorow who says:
Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You never see further than your
headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.
When you climb in that metaphorical car, let the characters drive. You sit in the back seat
and see where things lead.
Often the most memorable ideas come to us when we’re not trying too hard to find them.
When we’re thinking of something else, or practicing yoga, or fly fishing, or drifting off to
sleep, or even while we’re in dreamland. This is because we are then connected to a deeper
part of ourselves.
As Walter Mosley says:
The most important thing I’ve found about writing is that it is primarily an
unconscious activity. What do I mean by this? I mean that a story is larger
than your head (or conscious mind). The connections, moods, metaphors, and
experiences that you call up while writing will come from a place deep inside
you. Sometimes you will wonder who wrote those words. Sometimes you will
be swept up by a fevered passion relating a convoluted journey through your
protagonist’s ragged heart. These moments are when you have connected to
some deep place within you, a place that harbors the zeal that made you want
to write in the first place.
Or as Joyce Carol Oates says:
Write your heart out.
The heart is reckless, fickle, impractical, unpredictable—but always honest in its own way.
Dare to write from that wild heart.

Fiction Writing II Truth and Lies

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04/04/2020 Fiction Writing II Online | Blackboard - Week 1: Truth and Lies

TRUTH AND LIES

An unexciting truth may be eclipsed by a thrilling lie.

As Eudora Welty says:

Which brings us to…

“I have to go home,” I said when she woke up.

I felt weak and small and failed.

To a chemist, nothing on earth is unclean. A writer must be as objective as a

I spoke with calm authority.

“Lily is nobody you’d ever want to meet,” he said.

“But I need the story, Jude.”

“It will mortify me to tell you.”

You might follow the advice of E.L. Doctorow who says:

As Walter Mosley says:

Or as Joyce Carol Oates says:

Write your heart out.

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