Lying to Tell the Truth
I spend a lot of time writing lies.
That, after all, is the very definition of fiction. We can call it literature or narrative or novel, but we all know what we’re really talking about—lies. Fabrications. Falsehoods. Words that, however prettily they are strung together, amount to a bunch of hooey. Fiction is made-up. We know that going in.
Sometimes, the lie is the point. With the planet in crisis and gas at $4.50/gallon—
Wait. Pause just a second to consider the irony of complaining about those two things side by side.
Wow.
Okay. Moving on.
With so many real problems that need our attention, with such overwhelming pain and anxiety all around us, it’s hard not to love a story that we know will turn out okay. Small wonder that the most popular books of the year so far are mostly romance and crime novels, with the occasional apocalyptic fantasy thrown in. These are genres are an escapist paradise, in which the good guys win and the lovers find bliss together.
Lies, then. But helpful lies. Lies that allow us to cope with the messed up world in which we live.
I can’t condemn anyone for gravitating toward such stories. Every now and then, we need to see the Hobbit take down the hosts of Mordor if we’re going to find the courage to get out of bed.
But fiction does a lot more than help us forget the sorry state of our world. It also allows use to see realities we might otherwise not have the courage to confront. It holds up a mirror and forces us to ask, “Is this who we really are?” It dares to give us hope that we can find love or be forgiven or slay whatever dragon may be snarling in our direction.
That’s a lot of power to attribute to mere lies, but it’s true beyond reasonable dispute. We see the impact of fiction everywhere. It may be Harriet Beecher Stowe literally (literarily?) changing the course of history. It may be C.S. Lewis convincing us that the life of faith is more daring and dangerous than a normal church service would suggest, or Fredrik Backman asking us approach the idiocy and cruelty of our natures with understanding rather than judgement.
You can’t do these things in nonfiction. Meeting them head on is like making too much eye contact. Things get weird or painful or scary, and we back away. If we’re going to reach those monsters and deal with them, we’ll have to come at a slant.
This is, at least in part, why I write fiction. Because sometimes the only way to get to a truth is to package it inside a lie.
I began experimenting with writing fiction in my teens and twenties. In my early thirties, I finished my first novel, a stagnant puddle of word mush that reflected who I was at the time—talented with language, but neither mature enough nor widely read enough to create anything meaningful. If a manuscript or digital copy of that book still exists somewhere, it does so in spite of my efforts to erase it from the planet.
Still, that early attempt was fruitful. I gave me a chance to write, as Anne Lamott so eloquently describes it, a “shitty first draft.” My next attempt was a little better. My third was pretty good, enough so that I took it to a pitch conference in New York City to try to sell it to one of the publishing houses there. It got tantalizingly close—six months in the hands of a senior editor who ultimately passed with a very polite, “I love it, but it’s not for us.”
If you think getting rejected after pouring my heart and soul into this project was a crushing disappointment, you’d be 100% correct. Think crying softly with the bathroom door shut, more than once. At the same time, to get so close told me I was on the right track. I just needed to keep going, keep observing the world, keep writing honest stories about what I see. And I’ve done that to the tune of two and a half more novels in the past six years, each a little better than the one before.
But those in the publishing world care only a little for the quality of a writer’s work. It has to be good enough, of course—baseline language skills, a protagonist, a plot. Of vastly more importance, however, is the marketability of the story—will it sell, and will it sell big enough to make real money? Hence the reason so many good manuscripts collect dust while the Twilight saga sold millions.
I used to get angry with the publishing industry for its faults, but I don’t so much any more. It is a long-form entertainment industry struggling to survive in a world dominated by tweets and TikToks. The marketplace moves fast, and there are few guarantees. Even authors who break through often find themselves underpaid and under-supported. Given all the headache it takes to even get your manuscript into the hands of a decision-maker, you have to wonder—why go through the trouble?
Because some of us have a little troll with a little hammer in our brains, and he won’t stop beating the insides of our skulls unless we write the things within us.
And, increasingly for me, that troll has a friend who is hammering away at a different message: It’s time to get these stories out into the daylight, no matter how afraid or selfish you are, no matter how much self-doubt plagues you. You’ve done all the work to set truth into words. So share the words.
Happily, we now live in a world where that is not only possible, but in many ways better than going the traditional agent-to-publisher route. When I first started learning about the industry twenty-five years ago, self-publishing was ridiculed as a “vanity project.” The proliferation of the internet began to change all that, and Kindle Direct Publishing has brought it into the mainstream. Authors are able to send their stories into the world without going through the traditional gatekeepers—and keep a higher percentage of revenues in the process.
This fall, I’m going to take that leap. Today, the manuscript that almost made it in the New York publishing house seven years ago is even better, now that I’ve had a chance to revise it two or three or sixty-seven more times. It may not be a best-selling story—that’s beyond my control, and too much for me to promise.
But I can tell you that it will be an honest story—funny, tense, complicated, ridiculous, and brought forth in love. Everything in it is a lie, of course. But that’s the best way I know to tell the truth about who we are as humans.
More to come.