The truth is more important than the truth in creative non-fiction. Readers can spot a truth even when they don’t know it. So, the truth is not only imporant, it’s so vital that the writer must know it better than any of the players involved if they hope to write about it. 

Being entertaining is far more important than being honest when writing fiction. That thesis has recently been challenged in a blog written by Diane McKinnon called Writing Authentically. In her blog, Ms. McKinnon suggests that: “It’s better to write it as authentically as possible, and decide not to share it, than to write a sanitized version of it and have it move no one, not even me.”[1] Ms. McKinnon writes that those who have read her “sanitized” versions have found something lacking. “The story’s good, but there’s no emotion in it,” one commenter said. “How did you feel? We want to know,” said another. [2] The insinuation that Ms. McKinnon leaves with these comments is that she wasn’t able to achieve an emotional truth in her piece without, first, writing the total truth of the matter in an original version. She writes that she would never publish the unvarnished truth, for she wouldn’t want to hurt those involved in the truth, but she felt the need to write the truth, so that she could get to the inner core of the matter, before eventually revising the truth out in the final, published, and sanitized version.

How does a fiction, non-fiction, or creative non-fiction writer avoid the truth, is a question I would ask her, even in a sanitized version? For those writers who’ve written for a substantial amount of time and mined their souls to a depth of truth, I don’t know how they avoid the truth. I know my truth, I would argue, and I probably know it better than those who experienced it with me. I feel it incumbent upon me to know the truth, and to study it from every possible angle I can think of, if I ever hope to embellish upon it properly, and I don’t think I need to first create an “authentic” version first to know it better.

My job as a writer, as I see it, is to take the experiences of my life that I’ve found entertaining, and combine them with a degree of creativity to create a fascinating story. As I’ve written in previous blogs, some of the best sentences I’ve ever read were written by the best liars, and for a liar to become a really good liar they have to know the truth. For a really good liar to become a writer they have to know the truth better than anyone else involved. The sentences will reveal if a liar is nothing more than an outrageous liar. We know this, we can read it, and some of us learn to adapt and evolve, until we become so intimate with the truth that we can embellish it and move onto an eventual fabricated story about it. For a liar to become a really good liar, we have to take the truth, combine it with a fabrication, and twist it around so that even those who shared the experience with us begin to question their memory of it. If the liar is going to achieve this optimum level of confusion and believability, they have to eventually reach a point where they twist the truth around so often, and so artfully, and with such conviction, that they accidentally convince themselves of the story about it. After doing this for a significant amount of time, the really good liar learns to channel that gift for lying into something that doesn’t cause embarrassing ramifications or harm to those affected by the lies. They learn that writers tell lies to lead others to true emotions, and a writer can not do that if it’s not true, or truer than true. 

The Lies Inherent in our Character 

When writers write characters we want to write the most entertaining characters that have ever graced an 8 X 11, but for these characters to achieve life-like qualities, we’ve learned that they can never stray so far away from their core that we feel lost within the characterization. Even when we write bad guys, we might achieve some literary distance, but if that character strays too far from our truth, we lose touch with him. That character may be based on that surprisingly uncaring friend we have who is capable of causing some people harm without conscience, and we might even take our characterization of him out to a limb that even he couldn’t contemplate, but for those characters to move us, and others, we need to explore their truth.

Larry David (Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm) states that the show Curb Your Enthusiasm is based upon experiences that have occurred in his life. The difference, says Mr. David, is that the character says and does things that the real Larry David wishes he could’ve said or done. Larry David is writing a character that is the complete opposite of him in these given situations, but that character still has a truth about him with which Larry can identify. He has his character do things that tick people off, he has him do things that are occasionally immoral and spiteful, but he also has this character do things that entertain him, and in doing so he may be saying more about his true character than the real life Larry David that couches his personality to be polite.

A writer who has written at any length, or with any measure of depth, knows the truth. They know the truth better than the truth, and they hope to capture it in the great sentences that are truer than true. I don’t know how a writer can avoid the truth even as they’re disassembling it and recreating it. If it loses its truth, it loses its soul. I don’t know how a writer can write a sanitized version of the truth without complete exploration of it. I don’t know how a writer can write a complete character, a decent setting, or a captivating conflict without exhaustive reflection of the way they see the world, or their truth, and I don’t think they have to write the truth to achieve it.

{1}https://rilaly.com/2012/05/10/how-to-succeed-in-writing-part-ii-the-search-for-the-great-story/

{2} http://nhwn.wordpress.com/2013/01/31/writing-authentically/