Reality and Fiction: Are You Saying I Can Never Lie?

Picking up where I left off last week, I’m going to finish up my diatribe on reality and fiction. Today’s topic is what I initially wanted to discuss before I read the article I linked to previously. I covered the negative aspects of intentionality in regards to fact versus fiction (really, focusing on non-fiction); now I want to cover the positive aspects of stretching the truth (in fiction).

So, was I saying last week that you can never lie in a story? NO!

It’s all about intentionality. If you lie in a work of fiction someone is more than likely to call you on it. You may even lose a reader or two. Yet at the same time, I don’t think anyone is going to be devastated by it. If there’s a purpose for your lie that your world and characters need, that’s forgivable.

Of course, this is a circumstantial generalization with a million and one caveats. But I’m going with it because I am going to assume my audience doesn’t have wide-spread malicious intent fueled by greed.

Let me give you an example of a time when stretching the truth was a positive. A few years ago I sat reading the Calgary Herald and came across a short piece by one of my former writing profs. It was a story about the neighobourhood of Hawkwood, where she lives. The next day, reading the editorials, I found a response to her article. It was written by a man who very much wanted to put her in her place for mentioning the howls of coyotes. He’d lived in Hawkwood for forty years, and not once had he ever heard a coyote howl at dusk.

I laughed and rolled my eyes at this response because I was very familiar with my former prof’s style. She’s kind of the epitome of fictive non-fiction. You have to take the truths she tells with a grain of salt because so very many are not-truths. Her article needed the coyote to howl in order to turn the suburb of Hawkwood into a magical place. So she stretched the truth. This man was not at all interested in her whimsy. As far as he was concerned she had flat out lied.

Her intention wasn’t so much to mislead as to make her readers smile as they suspended their beliefs about residential Calgary. Real Hawkwood is boring. It looks like any upper middle class neighbourhood you’d find in what used to be the outskirts of Calgary. Her Hawkwood was a place you’d love to explore with fresh eyes.

By drawing in some readers, like myself, with her description she inevitably booted others out of her world. This one sentence shoved that particular reader right out the story, probably never to return.

As a writer, that’s a chance you’re going to have to take. One of the hard facts of writing is that you can’t please everyone. Seriously. And if you try, you’re going to end up with a mangled heap of a story you yourself won’t recognize as you sit sobbing in a corner.

Source.

Like I said last week, it’s all about intention. If your intention as a storyteller is to provide the best means of entertainment for your audience and the “truth” just won’t cut it, I say lie. Still, this rule only really applies to fiction. If you’re going to intentionally lie in non-fiction, and get caught, you’re going to ruin your credibility.

Again, fiction and non-fiction are vastly different beasts. The rules aren’t as black and white as I’m making them, but I think sticking to the truth in non-fiction to the best of your ability is the way to go. As for fiction, reality -at least your representation of it- can be what you make it.

Take from this what you will. My method has always been to learn as much of the truth about a story as I can –from character backgrounds to setting to culture– because only then do I feel that I can accurately stretch any details that may need stretching in order for my story to work.

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