STEPHEN D . ROGERS
Tell the Truth and Lie
STEPHEN D. ROGERS is the author of Shot to Death and more than six hundred shorter pieces. His website includes a list of new and upcoming titles as well as other timely information. And that’s no lie.
I must have been somewhere between preverbal and kindergarten age when I answered my mother with a lie.
While I no longer remember the question or the falsehood, I certainly remember the result of my experiment. My mother immediately marched me to the upstairs bathroom where she washed out my mouth with soap.
The soap was white, and the taste was terrible.
I won’t repeat what my mother said to me that day, but only because I can’t remember the exact words and to get them wrong would be to lie. Lying is bad. I know that now.
A mouthful of soap will do that.
The years go by. Somewhere along the way, I decide I’m a writer, and in second grade, I put together a book of logic puzzles and codes. Nonfiction. Truth.
Fast forward to fourth grade. For some reason, our house has horrible television reception, and we can’t get any of the UHF channels, which means that I can’t watch Creature Double Feature on Saturday afternoons.
I decide that if I can’t watch monster movies, I’ll write one, and so I begin a novel where a man is returning from Kmart when he hears on the radio that giant dinosaurs have been sighted. He rushes home to warn his family and finds them relaxing in the living room with its dark wooden paneling and pea-green carpet.
That’s as far as the story went. I hit the pea-green carpet and I stopped. I think it was the truth of that detail that emphasized how much everything else was a lie.
Even then, I realized that successful fiction did not lie but told the truth. I understood that I did not have enough life experience to tell the truth about dinosaurs or the feelings of a father trying to protect his family from said dinosaurs, and so I let the project die.
Fast forward to sixth grade, when I develop the theory that life experience can be figurative as well as literal, and thus start a novel featuring a hit man for the Mafia.
While I’d never killed anybody, I knew the challenge of completing a difficult mission that was frowned upon by society. After all, I was inside writing stories instead of going outside to play ball.
A strange thing about that hit man. No matter how many people he beat up and killed, he never lied about what he did. In fact, he never lied at all.
Nor did my next main character. Nor did the next, or any of the dozens that followed. I wrote about men and women, the young and the old, the good and the bad, and none of them lied.
Fast forward to high school, when I start writing more mysteries. One of the first things I come to understand is that mysteries involve secrets, and secrets are protected by lies.
The killer, obviously, lies in an attempt to get away with murder, but others must lie for a variety of reasons. They lie to hide embarrassments. They lie to impress the investigators. They lie to cover up what they don’t remember. They lie and—as the author finds helpful to complicate the story—they provide red herrings.
The investigators, too, lie. They lie to suspects in order to provoke a confession. They lie to cover up their mistakes. They lie to protect their coworkers and their jobs.
Even the victim lies, once we include lies by omission.
I grit my teeth and train myself to be more forgiving of my characters and their need to be less than perfectly honest. The fault lies not in my characters but in myself.
My perspective changes as I continue to write. Even though my characters may lie, they are honestly motivated to do so, and my stories tell the truth, as all stories should.
I continue to write and then eventually to sell what I write.
The fact that I’m selling changes the value of my opinions. I begin to critique and to teach, and discover that either my mother had traveled from house to house with her bar of soap or that the honest-character problem was more common than I originally believed.
Why it’s a problem becomes more evident.
Characters who never lie aren’t realistic. Characters who never lie fail to produce as much conflict as possible. Characters who never lie remain flat.
The idea that characters can and should always tell the truth is in fact a lie that can render a story unpublishable.
That’s when I polished and codified the following exercise.
EXERCISE
Beginning with your main characters and continuing with others of any import, write the following short scenes in order to determine how each character lies.
1. The character tells a white lie to protect another character’s feelings.
2. The character lies to another character about something trivial.
3. The character lies to another character about a task that should have been done but wasn’t.
4. The character lies to another character in order to hide an embarrassing truth.
5. The character lies to another character to get away with a crime.
Details to consider and reflect upon:
Does the character’s manner of speech change when lying? Does the character’s voice change? Does the character talk less or talk more?
Does the character become defensive, aggressive, evasive?
Does the character lie boldly, lie using half-truths, or lie by omission?
How does the character’s body language change when lying? Think face, hands, and whole body, either in concert or separately.
How are these details affected by the size of the lie, by the probable consequences if the lie is discovered?
How much of the truth does the character manage to include?
How effective a liar is the character?
How good at recognizing lies is the character being lied to? How does that person respond: verbally, emotionally, and physically?
Now think about your characters as a group. Compare and contrast the answers you generated in order to ensure that your characters aren’t all the same. If one character reveals a lie by change in tone, another should do so by looking away, and another by a change in stance.
Be true to your characters and their individual stories.
Tell the truth and lie.