Lies in the Name of Truth

I apologize for the delay in posting this today, but Blogger was "Unavailable" for the past 24 hours!

I love the women I blog with here at Novel Matters. Really love them. They are all amazing women, amazing writers, and have much wisdom and experience to share on the craft of writing -- and on life in general. Katy's Tell the Whole Truth post on Wednesday was excellent. If you haven't read it yet, I hope you'll take a moment to do so.

Patti has been going through Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird the past few weeks, and most recently covered the chapter on Characters. In that chapter, and in keeping with Katy's topic, Anne gives us this wonderful nugget regarding truth in fiction:

"This brings us to the matter of how we, as writers, tell the truth. A writer paradoxically seeks the truth and tells lies every step of the way. It's a lie if you make something up. But you make it up in the name of truth, and then you give your heart to expressing it clearly. You make up your characters, partly from experience, partly out of the thin air of the subconscious, and you need to feel committed to telling the exact truth about them, even though you are making them up. I suppose the basic moral reason for doing this is the Golden Rule. I don't want to be lied to; I want you to tell me the truth, and I will try to tell it to you."

It's very important that we stay true to our characters in telling their stories. By that I mean they must stay true to themselves under our watchful writer's eye if they're to be believed. We must have their temperaments, their quirks, their fears, their desires, their likes and dislikes firmly in mind in order to assure that we don't misrepresent them or blur the edges of who they are in our readers' minds to help them accomplish that. Ms. Lamott says, "You probably won't know your characters until weeks or months after you've started working with them ... Just don't pretend you know more about your characters than they do, because you don't. Stay open to them." To that I say Amen! The more time we spend with our characters, the better we'll know them and the more of themselves they'll reveal to us. There are all kinds of ways we can jar our readers out of our story world, and having a character act out of character is certainly one of them.

Katy wrote in her post about truth, "Make your darkness dark, but make your brightness bright as well." Absolutely right on. I would add, make the darkness equal to the character's nature and situation, otherwise it will come across as melodramatic. In my early days of writing I had no problem making the brightness bright, but I went to great lengths to keep the darkness at bay, to present my protagonist as upright as possible. Again to quote Anne Lamott, "[characters] shouldn't be too perfect; perfect means shallow and unreal and fatally uninteresting." Thinking back on the first novel I wrote, I can heartily agree with Anne. My protagonist was unreasonably reasonable, much too forgiving, acquiescing to the nth degree, and b-o-r-i-n-g. She had no known vices or foibles, and was too good to be true in the most literal sense.

I don't think that's the case with my latest protagonist. I took her (and myself) into that "white-hot center" Robert Olen Butler talks about in From Where You Dream, as I spent two years writing about the unendurable loss of a child. "I've got lots of ways of staying out of there," Butler says, and so do I. But to write this novel I had to revisit that white-hot place time after time, drawing from my own experience. There were many days I looked for any excuse not to sit down to this story, preferring grout-cleaning to writing. But I'd have been unfaithful to the truth had I diminished the darkness. Any reader would have seen that immediately, and as Anne points out, a reader doesn't want to be lied to.

What have you written that has taken you to that white-hot center? Or have you done your best to avoid it in your writing as I did once upon a time?

A Writer's Journal - On Telling the Truth in Fiction

If, as Latayne said Monday, a fledgling novelist might not do best to hone her craft by writing short stories, then where might our poor would-be author begin? Where to gain the credibility, where to build the credits?

My best advice? Write a novel, and make it good. Write something entertaining and adventurous and rich, and above all, make it the truest work of fiction you can muster. Do that, and you'll have all the credibility you need, and soon enough, you'll have the credits, too.

Oh great, I hear you say. Write a good novel? Never thought of that. Thanks! I'll get right on it.

But I didn't just say to write a good novel. I also said to make it entertaining, adventurous, rich... and above all, true.

Because I can get adventure from a comic book. If I'm going to invest my time reading 300 pages of your novel, I want those pages to leave me nodding my head, saying, yes, yes! That's just the way life is, just the way I feel, though I'd never seen it written before.

That special feeling is literary gold. But how to mine it?

I suggest you journal. You need practice in writing the truth.

I hear you again. I'm not in the habit of writing lies. No, but you may not yet have the habit of writing the real truth, either. It's not easy. Because it can't be the sanitized, accepted truth we tell each other every day. It probably isn't even the truth we tell each other in Sunday School and sing in our praise choruses. "Jesus is the answer for the world today." Yes, true, but working him into our questions is going to take some deep soul work. We're going to have to wrestle our angels and come away limping. It's the hardest work we will ever do, but it sure makes for good stories.

And so the journal: a book of blank pages on which you will write your experiences, observations, and responses with the goal of drilling past the commonplace, the stuff you tell aquaintances, down to the stuff you rarely tell even God. I like the method Robert Olen Butler suggests in From Where You Dream:

"... at the end of the day or beginning of the next day, return to some event of the day that evoked an emotion in you. Record that event in the journal. But do this only - only - moment to moment through the senses. Absolutely never name an emotion; never start explaining or analyzing or interpreting an emotion. Record only through those five ways I mentioned that we feel emotions - signals inside the body, signals outside the body, flashes of the past, flashes of the future, sensual selectivity - which are therefore the best ways to express emotions."

I think the God we worship is pleased with truth in our fiction, in the way he likes it when we offer a glass of water to the least of his children. Consider the story the angel told Hagar in Genesis 16. just after he asked where she was coming from and where she was going. At this juncture in her life, he chose to offer a spoiler for the rest of the tale: Your son Ishmael will be fine. He'll be stubborn and angry and always getting into fights, but he'll be fine. Not the best news, but look what the woman made of it: "Thereafter, Hagar used another name to refer to the Lord, who had spoken to her. She said, 'You are the God who sees me.'"

I love that verse. How many people had ever really seen Hagar, the slave woman forced to bear Abraham's child? How often does your reader truly feel seen and understood?

Give her that gift.

And let us know about your experiences with journaling and with reading true stories. We always love to read what you have to say.