Truth and Fiction

Story Euphoria is concerned first and finally with fiction, but there is a place where fiction meets reality, a place where real life inhabits fictional characters. Apprentice writers are often told to “write what you know,” and the storytellers we best love are keen observers of life because we expect stories, whether realistic or not, to reflect something true about life—and better yet, about our own lives. Reading a fiction is an experience, and some fictions are real experiences thinly veiled with false names, such as the story in this week’s podcast. Given all of this, why bother with fiction at all?

Real life is full of stories that are no less true than they are fascinating, burgeoning with adventure and strange twists of fate—as evidenced by the popularity of memoirs in today’s book market—and we are all familiar with the old saw, “truth is stranger than fiction.” So what were the first storytellers thinking? Why did they decide to start making stuff up?

To answer this question in a round-about fashion, consider how a person groping to express as accurately as possible a sensation or experience may turn to other languages to find just the right word: “As the French say,” “As the Chinese say,” what have you. Most languages retain a marvelous number of loan words simply to fill in linguistic gaps. Like a foreign language with just the right nuance, fiction is a language of art, and what a language of art provides is the power to express subtle concepts, subconscious understandings that are beyond words, much as spiritual teachers may use a parable to shine light on a mystical concept. The words are not the point: It's what lies behind them.

Much as the myths of the ancients did, modern fiction explores life on a level that goes beyond reporting what happened and how. In other words, fiction allows the storyteller the same versatility of expression enjoyed by the painter or the musician. Instead of pigments or notes, the fiction writer plays with events, emotions, dialogue and images with a kind of freedom that the earnest memoirist can only long for. The deliberate juxtaposition of a fiction’s elements can evoke in the reader a reaction that goes beyond the language itself, and when that reaction reveals something vital, an epiphany of the unseen and subtle world, the power of fiction is apparent.

This is far from saying truth is irrelevant to fiction. Like any art form, the best fiction, no matter how fantastical or outlandish, is infused with the presence of its creator: it flashes with moments of truth. You can’t fake a good story; you can only labor to build a thing with heart, much as Frankenstein toiled over his Monster (though we hope with more felicitous results). So, instead of “write what you know,” a more useful precept may be to “write what you love,” for in passion lives an exulted form of truth.