Great writers are liars, and if you can train yourself to lie better, it will serve you well. A capacity to lie fluently, creatively and convincingly will let you paint stories that your readers will believe and enjoy. If you’re written a story, then you are a liar. Forget what your parents told you, for the moment, about lying being bad. You’re making a story up. I’m giving you permission to tell things that aren’t strictly true. So make the most of it while you can.
You are a liar, and what you’re writing is a lie. It’s a creation, spun from your imagination into sticky threads of semi-truth. You hope that if you weave this well enough, we, your audience, will become enmeshed in it. We’ll gloss over the holes in the web and fill in the blanks from our imagination. If you don’t tell us with conviction, we’ll break free. We’ll say ‘the story didn’t grab me’. We want to get stuck in your story. Make it happen.
I am an accomplished liar.
This is a skill that I’m quite proud of. Many things that I do for fun let me develop my skills at lying. When I play cards, I lie with my face, my body and my words to throw off my opponents. “I’ve got the answer to what you’re doing”, I confidently tell my opponents. I When I fence, I lie with the my sword. I say “Look here while I stab you”. I want you to become a great liar, too.
Believe everything I tell you.
You’re a liar, too.
I know this because a huge barrage of sociological tests tell me so. Lying is a social coping mechanism, a way of us smoothing the way for our relationships to continue. You lie all the time, often unconsciously.
“Have you sent that email to Accounting?”, your boss asks.
“Yup”, you confidently reply.
Crap, I’d better send that email to accounting now.
See? Easy, smooth, no harm done. The email gets sent as soon as the boss isn’t looking. Accounting gets their email. Everyone is happy. Writing a story is simply an extension of this tendency of ours to lie to push the world into a better shape.
Writing is a lie
Writing a story is the best lie you can ever tell. You’re in control of everything. What happens. How it happens. How your audience is going to relax. You can do it free of interruptions, of contrasting views, of arguments. You can rehearse and craft your lie until it’s perfectly indistinguishable from the truth.
And then people will applaud you for it. Think about it. The stories that make your heart sing, the ones that fill you with emotion and keep you coming back for more, are the stellar stories. They are the grand lies that we love being told, being sold on.
Lies can be hard
Anyone who’s watched children’s cartoons on a Saturday morning will know that lying often backfires. It seems simple enough. You tell an easy lie to get out of a hard situation. Then you find yourself needing to tell two more lies to cover the first ones. More people become involved. They aren’t stupid. You build a network of lies, piling them on top of each other, faster and faster.
Then one of two things happen. Either you build your network well enough that everyone accepts your ‘truth’, and you get away with your lies, or the real truth is exposed, and everything comes crashing down around you. In the cartoon, we usually learn a valuable lesson about friendship and listening to adult authority figures. In real life, a crashed pile of lies leaves your friends distancing themselves from you and your relationships suffering.
So don’t think that lying is going to be easy. We’ve all been trained, our entire lives, to accept certain untruths but be suspicious of others. We all want to believe that the vacuum cleaner we buy won’t break down one month after its warranty expires. That it’s OK to tell children that magical faeries exchange money for teeth. That the bus is going to turn up on time today.
The larger lies, though, we’re naturally suspicious of. We want to check out this seemingly amazing apartment before we sign that lease. We intuit that just because something’s ‘fat-free’ doesn’t mean it’s good for us.
The glory of telling a good lie
If you’ve ever told a good lie, an excellent lie, then you’ll know what I’m talking about. People lean in to listen to you. Their eyes gleam with enthusiasm. Maybe you’re telling a favourite story, embellishing a little as you go. Perhaps you’re repeating a bit of slander that neither of you believes is true, but you both want to be.
Your pulse quickens. You speak lowly, earnestly, quickly. You nod, waiting for your audience to nod in agreement with you. Your words fly out of you, searing with the red-hot truths you’re imparting, branding themselves across the consciousness of the recipient.
There are few better feelings in the world.
The best thing about lying is that you can do it, without hurting anyone, and without any ethical concerns, simply by writing.
What is writing?
Writing is a lie that is willingly shared between the writer and the reader. It is part of a secret, unspoken compact that runs like this:
”I will entertain you, and give you a glimpse of something splendid. Another life. Another world. Another time. Trust me.”
“I know that what you’re telling me isn’t true, but I’m going to let go anyway. Take me on this journey.”
When you write a story, what are you doing? You’re pulling something out of your head. The story comes together out of ideas that you have. You put together a plot to glue it all together. Populate the world with characters you’ve imagined. Generally, yo try and make sure everyone has a reason for doing things, somewhere they want to get to, and you think of obstacles to put in their way.
The fact that none of these things are real means nothing at all. For the purposes of storytelling, there’s no difference between you repeating the story of what happened to your mate’s mate’s girlfriend last weekend, and recounting a story of a knight fighting a dragon. Between yourself and whoever’s listening, there’s that same shared experience there.
Practicing lying
Any skill needs a conscious application to improve upon. Writing, and lying, are no exceptions. The better you are at putting your mind into your story, experiencing it as fully as you can, the better you can communicate this to your readers.
Lying for fun and profit
Build worlds in the history of your imagination. Here’s an experiment. Think of a story of an adventure that one of your friends has had. It might be something that happened to them at school, on the way to work, while they were overseas. Recreate the story in your head, except substitute yourself into their shoes.
Imagine you are going to tell the story to someone you’d just met, who doesn’t know that the story is really someone else’s. Try saying it out loud, or running through the story in your head. Rehearse it like the guy from Reservoir Dogs. And what you’ll find is that, with each repetition, small details start to creep into your head.
Your brain is an amazing machine. By taking a story – one that wasn’t yours to begin with -and telling your mind that it actually happened to you, over and over again, your imagination solidifies into something that feels as real as a memory does. This is a fantastic resource for writers.
(Incidentally, this is why so many of us get upset when we see movie adaptations of our favourite books. If you’re read something twenty, thirty, forty times, then you’ve probably got a solid and mostly unchanging view in your head of what’s going on. It’s extremely unlikely that you and the director are going to agree on all the minutiae.)
Convincing yourself
The more you think about your writing like this, the more solid your story will become in your mind. The first, second, third times you run through it in your head, things will still be a little hazy. Motivations might not be clear. The lay of the layout hasn’t occurred to you yet. Some plot holes might prove bigger than you’d thought.
What this rehearsal and revision of the story does is tighten everything up. If you’re telling a story you’ve told an audience a dozen times before, and someone jumps in with an interruption, you answer it easily. You can clarify a point they’re not clear on. Repeat yourself. Focus on a detail that one audience will appreciate more over another.
The same applies to your story. Telling it fluently, as though it’s actually happened, is a matter of convincing yourself so you can then convince others.
Stronger story building
You can see where this exercise is leading. By thinking your stories through repeatedly, you niggle out all the uncertainties. There’s a world of difference between your initial, inspiring idea and the finished product. A good, finished story will be solid, undoubtable. By believing in it yourself, you will add a weight of certainty that will clear away any lingering cobwebs of doubt.
Become an accomplished liar. Tell a story that sells itself to your audience. Convince them, while their eyes dance over your pages, that the world you’ve created for them is as real as the one they’re in.
Go write. And lie consciously.
