FICTION IS FIBBING: HERE’S HOW TO FIB WELL.
February 1989
Fiction is prevarication. The accomplished fictioneer is a very good liar.
And what brought this on?
Reflection, I suppose. Reflection upon good news. Any day now, barring a foul-up in production schedules, I’ll be receiving my author’s copies of the new edition of Telling Lies for Fun and Profit. The book, published by Arbor House in 1981, has been out of print for several years and was hard to find for some years before that. Now the good people of Albuquerque’s CompuPress have arranged to make it available again, and I couldn’t be more pleased.
I was thinking about that, and wondering what the cover might look like, and hoping the text would hold up fairly well, when it struck me how fortunate I’d been to come up with such an eminently serviceable title. From the beginning it had been that rare article, a title that everybody liked. People who hadn’t read the book, even people with no interest in writing, have come up to me over the years to mention the title with approval. While I’d like to think the book’s text may have had something to do with its sales. I know the title has been a strong factor.
Along with being catchy and provocative and irreverent, the title contains a fundamental truth that serves it well. Fiction is indeed untruth in the form of a prose narrative, and the fiction writer is a professional teller of lies. While there are some, I’m sure, who would see this as pointing up the essential immorality of what we do for a living, I can’t say that I see it as a moral problem. It strikes me as more of a technical one. How can we become better liars, so as to produce better fiction?
This has been a busy month. Along with Telling Lies, I’ve had two other books published. Writer’s Digest Books has brought out Spider, Spin Me a Web, a new collection of columns and occasional writings about writing, and Tor Books has published Random Walk, a new novel I’ve mentioned all too frequently of late. This is all very exciting, or it would be but for the fact that I’ve spent the month in residence at a writers’ colony, where I’ve been entirely occupied with writing a new book, so much so that I haven’t even driven to a bookstore to see what the cover of Random Walk looks like.
The book I’m now writing is a detective story, the seventh volume to date chronicling the life and times of a chap named Matthew Scudder. (Regular readers of this space may recall a column within the past year wherein I explained why I would never be able to write more books about Mr. Scudder. That, it turns out, was a lie, albeit not the sort fictioneers deal with. It seemed like the truth at the time.)
One morning, struggling to get a scene right on the page, I thought to myself something along these lines: “Dammit, I know what happened. Why can’t I just tell it?” And I looked up, struck by a thought.
Because what I wanted to get on paper was not something that had happened. It was something I was attempting to fabricate out of whole cloth. As they say in disclaimer notices, neither the events nor the characters portrayed in the book had their counterparts in real life. The whole book, along with the scene I was agonizing over, were solely the products of my admittedly overactive imagination.
Because I am always and forever your faithful servant, because column-writing for WD is a task on which the sun never sets, I took up a pen and wrote down the following:
“The superior fiction writer is the superior liar. When I write a novel, I am trying to report honestly and accurately about an event that did not happen in the lives of people who do not exist.”
Having jotted this down, I heaved a sigh of accomplishment, pushed the sheet of paper aside, and resumed work on my novel. Once or twice over the days that followed I glanced at the sheet of paper, read the two immortal sentences, and told myself that a fine column would eventually spring from them. They seemed to me to embody some important truth.
Well, we’ll see about that. Novel-writing takes place in a slightly altered state, and what looks good in that state doesn’t always hold up later on. Years ago I heard the story of a chap who liked to smoke an unlawful herb in the evening. He would always have these profound thoughts late at night, just as he was drifting off to sleep, and he was sure he had a handle on the meaning of the universe, but the thought was always gone the next day. So he took to keeping a pad and pencil on the bedside table, in the hopes of capturing the next smoke-induced insight and fixing it upon the page like a fly in amber.
Several times he had great brilliant thoughts but nodded off without getting it together to write them down. Then, at last, he caught himself at the last minute, scribbled a few words upon the page, and slithered off into unconsciousness. When he awoke the next day he grabbed for the pad, eager to find out what brilliance had come to him, what distillation of pure knowledge, what rubric from the philosopher’s stone.
What he had written was, “This room smells funny.”
Now, my own novel completed, I can only hope that my kernel of truth is of a little more value than his. It strikes me that it might be useful to look at some of the qualities that make a good liar, and see how they might be employed by a good fiction writer.
1. The ideal liar can lie as easily as he can tell the truth. For most people, lying is more difficult than telling the truth. The greater difficulty of lying is what allows a polygraph to work. The liar experiences more stress than the truthteller, and this stress is physiologically palpable.
Adepts at Neuro-Linguistic Programming employ a nonmechanical means of determining whether a person is lying or telling the truth. They keep track of the subject’s involuntary eye movements. When we are recounting something, we tend to glance to one side to access memory and to the other side to access imagination. If you ask me where I was on the night of October 11th, and if I seek the answer not in memory but in imagination, you can logically suspect me of lying.
There are liars who can routinely beat polygraph tests, and I shouldn’t wonder if they can escape NLP detection as well. It is easy for them to lie. It places them under no greater stress. The lie, which may have come originally from imagination, has become part of their memory. They believe it now.
It seems to me that writing fiction is always hard work, and I’m here to tell you that it doesn’t get any easier over the years. For the most part, though, it’s not the lying that’s hard for me; writing nonfiction is at least as difficult for me, and a good deal more difficult to get right.
When I am writing well, when a book is going smoothly, it is rarely all that hard for me to know what happens next. It is as if the book’s scenes and chapters are a series of darkened rooms already furnished and occupied in my mind; all I have to do is open their doors as I get to them, turn on the lights, and describe what’s going on inside. I know what my characters look like, and how they talk, and where they’re going. I may not see around corners, but I can be confident that more will be revealed when I need to know it.
I don’t always see everything. To belabor the metaphor, some of those rooms are lit in a chiaroscuro fashion, with a slender ray of light falling on one object and everything else shrouded in darkness. So I may know that a character has a broken nose or an uncertain smile without knowing his height or ring size.
2. The liar doesn’t doubt that he’ll be believed. Occasionally, reading a story or novel, I get the feeling that the writer is trying too hard. He doesn’t think the reader is going to buy a particular scene, and so he pushes to make sure it goes over, and that just makes it that much less effective. I’ve done that myself when I lacked confidence in what I was writing.
Adequate research is one way to guard against the fear that your lies in a given area are insufficiently believable, but sometimes research doesn’t do the trick. I’ve read books where the research showed, books where you could tell the author was throwing whole libraries at you to bolster something he still didn’t feel altogether right about.
Similarly, it isn’t always necessary for the author to be informed about a given area, as long as he genuinely believes that the character is sufficiently informed. For example, I’ve written five mystery novels about a burglar, Bernie Rhodenbarr. The fellow is a wizard at getting through locks, and any number of people has understandably assumed a similar knowledge on the author’s part. Well, I have on occasion opened a door without its key, but I’m the furthest thing from an expert. Joe Gores once gave me a set of picks as a present; I was delighted to have them, but I have to admit that I never took the trouble to learn how to use them, and there’s precious little information on locks and lockpicking in my books. What is present is the utter certainty that Bernie knows what he’s doing. Readers believe this of Bernie, and draw their own conclusions about his creator.
3. The liar is flexible. Mozart wrote down the music he heard in his head. Michelangelo looked at the block of marble and cut away the part that wasn’t David.
Similarly, the writer sees the story and its characters whole in his mind, and tells the reader what he sees.
When things go perfectly (and sometimes they do) that’s all there is to it. The artist is given to hear the music in the mind, to see David whole within the stone. But our vision is usually imperfect, or more accurately incomplete, clouded. We have to vamp a little.
A plot idea comes to mind, and I start following it, writing a scene. Then I realize that it will throw off something I’ve already foreseen coming up in a later chapter. For a moment, the intellect has to be brought to bear to see if the two conflicting elements can be reconciled. If not, it weighs them both. Can I think up something better for the later chapter? Or would I be better advised to scrap the new development and devise an alternative?
It is useful to be able to perceive alternatives. Sometimes I’ll write a scene, and I see it so clearly on my field of inner vision, and it writes itself so effortlessly, that I can easily overlook the fact that it’s not a useful scene, that it takes the book in the wrong direction. I can, if I find my way to it carefully, uncover another scene that I will be able to visualize and to write about just as vividly, a scene that will have the added virtue of fitting the book.
Writing—indeed, all art—is a matter of making one choice after another. Sometimes, when everything is clear-cut, when each sentence in a book seems to have a sort of inevitability about it, it merely means that the choices are all being made on an unconscious level. More often we choose constantly—whether to write a scene long or short, whether to summarize an event or illustrate it, whether to reveal certain background facts we know about a character or leave them forever unreported. Even when we are never in the slightest doubt as to who these people are or what they’re doing, we make choices all the time.
The best liar is giving a full and accurate report of something he has managed to let himself believe, but he is keeping one eye all the while upon his listener. If something’s not going over, he shifts gears and finds something that will. Similarly, the writer keeps an ear to the ground, hearing what the reader will hear and seeing how the sound registers. If it sounds off, he looks for another approach.
Blake, who reminded us that
A truth that’s told with bad intent
Beats all the lies you can invent
also advises us, in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, that if a fool would persist in his folly he would become wise. If we persist in our lies, if we pursue them honestly, they lead us to truth.
Go figure.