To Tell The Truth

Lying: It’s a great way to ruin your life. It’s also a pretty good way to ruin your writing.

Sounds a bit hypocritical for a fiction writer to caution against lying, doesn’t it?  After all, we make things up for a living. We create people in our heads, name them, imagine what they look like and what they eat for breakfast, what their worst fears and deepest desires are, and then we try to convince readers that they’re real. And yet, in the midst of all this make believe, our job is to get at the truth.

What does that mean for a writer? It means that even though our characters are imaginary, their experiences, their human nature, must at the core be true and real.

A writing teacher of mine once called me out in his class because my character was too…I don’t remember what. Noble? Selfless? Whatever it was, the character was lying to himself and to the reader, and as a result, the piece just didn’t work. “You’re not telling the truth,” my teacher said. And he was right.

Sometimes in real life, we don’t want to tell the truth because it’s painful. Admitting how we really feel or what we’ve really done can be humiliating for us or devastating for someone we’ve hurt. Same thing in writing. There are places I’ve not wanted to go, boxes I’ve wanted to leave unopened because it’s true that the truth hurts. When you allow your characters to have embarrassing flaws or do something that scares them (and you!), that’s when they become vulnerable.  And vulnerability makes them interesting…and real.

I once told a 12th-grade AP English class that the greatest characters in the greatest literature were people who were flawed and that it was their imperfection that made them relatable and interesting because whether we want to admit it or not, we’re like them. I asked them to try to name a perfect character who was still interesting and likable, and a hand immediately shot up.  “What about Jesus?”

*mic drop*

OK, so maybe I was wrong. But hey, nobody’s perfect. Except, of course, Jesus.