The Truth About Fiction

Some say that people who write fiction are just really good liars—but if you ask me, that’s a damned lie.

Because fiction writers don’t lie; they just find new ways of telling the truth. New settings, new characters, new sequences of events. New perspectives on real moments they have absorbed and reimagined, molding them into a narrative that’s unrecognizable, yet rings true.

It’s the closest any of us are ever likely to come to actually rewriting history.

When I write a novel, as I’m doing now, nothing in it actually happened—except for the parts that did, in a different way, at a different time, with different people present and a different outcome. All writing is fueled by some mysterious combination of experience, learned knowledge, and inspiration. Which means all fiction, at its purely emotional, impressionistic core, is true. It’s truth that has been reconfigured and reconstituted in a way that suits the story that the author’s imagination wants to tell.

And then there are those times when the “truth” gets bent and twisted like warmed-up taffy, as when a real-life person who you hadn’t even realized helped to inspire a character begins, with no prompting, to behave exactly like said character. The truth is stranger than fiction, yes, but also, from the author’s unique perspective, can at times grow nearly indistinguishable from it.

So—and this is where we veer dangerously close to getting too far in our heads about all this—what is truth, anyway? As dozens of experiments have shown, if you gather five people together, let them observe a series of events, and then pull them aside one by one and ask them to describe what happened, you will hear five different stories. Each one will be true, in the sense that they reflect that individual observer’s authentic lived experience.

There are objective truths, to be sure, things we for one reason or another know with certainty… the laws of physics, the smell of freshly baked bread, the warmth of the sun on our face. But so much of what we think of as “truth” is actually subjective—as in, subject to the unique filters each individual applies to everything we observe, based on our own history, preferences, and biases.

What that means for our subject here today is this, again: all fiction is true, in its own way. What a novelist does is to load some combination of personal experience and learned knowledge into a blender, add a dash of inspiration, spice it with imagination and intention, hit “Puree,” and pour the resulting mixture into a glass for the reader to drink up.

Cheers in advance!

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P.S. “As for the craft itself, here is what I would say: in order to be good, writing must also be true. Not true as in non-fictional, but in the universal sense. The emotions, the situations, the contradictions, even the lies—they must all ring true, if only in that they are able to find an echo in the reader’s heart.” — The Remembering: Reflections on Love, Art, Faith, Heroes, Grief and Baseball