Right up front, let me just state that I have no intention to make this a political post.\u00a0 I want to talk about lying as it relates to my life and writing, and not talk about Trump.\u00a0 Even though it would be so easy to talk about the Liar in Chief, I want to keep this topic positive and constructive.<\/p>\n
Besides, Trump is a terrible liar.\u00a0 To writers of fiction, you have to be great at lying.<\/p>\n
In Steven King’s\u00a0On Writing,<\/em> one of the major points he makes is that writers should strive to tell the truth.\u00a0 What he means is that what we write should ring true, and we shouldn’t be lazy or cowardly.\u00a0 If in the course of your story your main character would pull the trigger, jump out a window, or set fire to a building, then you must let them shoot, defenestrate, or commit arson.\u00a0 If they would say “shit!” and not “poop!” then you must let them use profanity.\u00a0 The idea of truth in this sense is being true to the spirit of the characters and the story.<\/p>\n But unless you’re writing a memoir or non-fiction, your characters aren’t real.\u00a0 The setting might be based on a real place, but it’s still the land of make believe.\u00a0 Perhaps the events that transpire in your story are drawn from the memory of real life events.\u00a0 But as soon as you started putting them on paper, they became fantasy.<\/p>\n The fiction writer is playing make believe.\u00a0 They’re having wakeful dreams, lucid visions blossoming under the gaze of their mind’s eye.\u00a0 While having such a fit, they flail at a keyboard or scrape a writing instrument across a page, putting their hallucinations into a permanent form.\u00a0 Or maybe they go off in the woods and talk to themselves, recording their ramblings until they can be transposed later.<\/p>\n I can dress it up a hundred different ways, but the truth is that the writer is engaged in artful lying.\u00a0 If they’re really good, their lies will transport the reader to a completely different place, with characters that never existed, except in the shared story between creator and consumer.<\/p>\n Who cares, though, right?\u00a0 What difference does it make?<\/p>\n I care.\u00a0 To me, it’s more than just semantics.\u00a0 I believe that the world is pushed and pulled by the words of writers, and there is value in being aware of what’s going on.<\/p>\n Whether it is a book, a movie, a political speech, or an advertisement, there are writers involved, crafting messages that will sell something.\u00a0 Usually they’re selling an idea.\u00a0 Almost always, that idea is a work of fiction.\u00a0 Perhaps it’s just a small lie, but even an embellishment is still a deviation of the truth.<\/p>\n Our culture is saturated with lies.\u00a0 Marketing.\u00a0 Politics.\u00a0 If I were feeling particularly blasphemous, I might throw in Religion.\u00a0 Behind all of it, there are writers making the lies as believable as possible.<\/p>\n So how does the writer do it?\u00a0 How do writers deceive the whole world in all of these different areas?<\/p>\n Sometimes it starts with a grain of truth.\u00a0 You draw on a memory that is related to the fiction and focus on the details.\u00a0 Maybe you’ve known someone like the character you’re trying to create.\u00a0 Maybe the setting is reminiscent of some place you liked to play as a child.\u00a0 Often, a simple truth can be the snowflake that starts rolling down the hill, growing as it moves, gathering all of the special lies that stick to it until in the end, it is unrecognizable from how it began.<\/p>\n Whether the writer starts with a truth or not, they have to commit.\u00a0 They have to see the vision and believe it.\u00a0 The writer is the first person that must be fooled by the lie.\u00a0 If they do not believe it, no one else will.<\/p>\n Like other forms of lying, the writer’s tale can come apart in the details.\u00a0 It’s important for the writer to keep track of those details that the reader will latch onto and pick at.\u00a0 If you present a character as being left handed and bald as an egg shell, then they better stay left handed and hairless unless you have a reason for the change.\u00a0 Inconsistencies give the game away.<\/p>\n Like a stage magician, the writer may have to use obfuscation or distraction to keep the reader from digging at details you’re unprepared for.\u00a0 If you’re building a space station in your story that relies on centrifugal force for gravity, you either need to do the math and figure it all out in advance, or you need to have an airlock explode as soon as one of the characters start to ask how it all works.<\/p>\n A good writer is a great liar.\u00a0 Without that skill, who would believe that a race of short, furry footed people would trek across a barren land to throw a magical ring into a pit of fire?\u00a0 Who would believe that a farm boy from a desert planet would turn out to be the offspring of the Empire’s chief mass murderer, and that they would face off with swords made of plasma?\u00a0 Without the art of the lie, the stories we embrace fall apart.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Right up front, let me just state that I have no intention to make this a political post.\u00a0 I want to talk about lying as it relates to my life and writing, and not talk about Trump.\u00a0 Even though it would be so easy to talk about the Liar in Chief, I want to keep 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