Lying and Storytelling

A few weeks ago, after the presidential debate, I was inspired to write about the topic of lying. And last night, I couldn't help but thinking about the slickness with which Vice Presidential candidate JD Vance shamelessly delivered lie after lie after lie, complaining when corrected by moderators, that "they weren't supposed to fact-check."

If you didn't have the facts, it would be totally easy to be lured into Vance's narrative, due to his polished, smooth delivery. He delivered his untruths so confidently, it left me wondering whether Vance believed his own narrative.

And this, I think, is a good lesson for fiction writers--even if the "lies" (which I'd prefer to call "stories" in this context) are not intended to do harm or be taken as factual. Writer John Gardener in The Art of Fiction writes about the importance of creating "a continuous unbroken dream" where the reader is totally ensconced in whatever reality the writer has created--kind of like a virtual reality experience that's dependent on words, rather than 3-D classes.

And to do that, you as a writer need--to some extent--to believe in your own narrative, to present it with complete and unshakable confidence.

How do we do that? Here are a couple of things to think about.

DETAILS: In an episode of Young Sheldon, Georgie tells his out-of-sync genius younger brother that lying well involves details. You've got to add enough heft to make the story stand on its own. Take a random subject-verb-object sentence (i.e. The spider crawled on the corn) and let us see, hear, taste, touch and smell the action as you relay it. Note: This involves more than adding adjectives, too many of which can easily weigh a sentence down. It can often involve just adding a couple of well-chosen words, or adding another sentence or two before or after to increase the stakes and add more context.

APPEAL TO EMOTION: Many of Vance's falsehoods last night were clearly designed to arouse anger. And while in this context, this was a manipulative attempt to sway people's votes, for our fiction to be successful, we often need people to engage emotionally by empathizing with our characters and the situations they are facing. This means we need to work hard to create believable and fully developed characters who are sympathetic and realistic, despite whatever flaws they might have.

KNOW WHERE YOUR PLOT IS GOING: I laughed as I typed these words because I'm often not sure where my plot is going until my second or third draft. But once I do know, I cut out the tangents that weigh my stories down. Last night I was both amazed and horrified about how Vance made Kamala Harris, or immigrants, or both, the villains in nearly every lie he told--a move that was clearly plotted in advance.

When I'm in my writing groove, I believe in my own narratives, even as I know they have no factual foundation, and even as, like many politicians, I might flip-flop on the details of their creation. But whatever changes my characters go through can be attributed to my getting to know them better, or their choosing to reveal more of themselves to me. Ultimately, the details, the characters, the plot are all there as props for me to reveal my truth--or my lie, if I choose. But in this context, I always choose my truth.