The Responsibility of the Writer

Truth in Fiction

“Is this all true?”

This question may seem familiar if you’ve ever told a story or written fiction. This can be explained easily with the first option of telling stories, which are often dramatized or adapted for our audiences. Every time you tell a story, it’s likely to change in some way, so repeat that same story again and again, and it’s probably very different from the first time you told it. However, with fiction, I think many readers look for kernels of truth among the fabrications of the novel or short story. Most writers I know (or have seen talk about this kind of phenomenon) have gotten used to personal and sometimes invasive questions from complete strangers about the stories and real experiences behind a passage or chapter.

There are writers who draw from their own lives for their fiction, as lived experiences can be a powerful thing to draw from, but what I’m discussing here is the perception of the writer as documentarian.

I do not claim to be a prolific or well-known author. Even then, these questions of honesty in writing are becoming familiar to me. I attended a reading last year where after the writer had read out a short story, during the Q&A portion of the event, a man asked the writer whether she was still with the boyfriend she had written the short story about (I think this may have been his attempt at asking if she was single? Either way, a strange question). The story had been very fictitious, and the writer explained that in her answer. To me, this signaled a lack of imagination on the part of the audience member. His question was not craft-based, or really related to the writer’s story at all. What he got out of the story and the writer depended on her living through the experience he imagined she had. He wanted to have his insight validated, to be able to see through the fiction to the element of truth hidden within. This woman broke up with her boyfriend and wrote a shorty story about it. That is what I think he took away from the story, and I think that really limits both him and the writer. It denies the side of the writer that exists as a conman, to make you believe something that never happened, or at least didn’t happen quite like that. To exaggerate, to embellish and expand upon, to lie, these are the modes and tools of the fiction writer.

I feel like I should issue a caveat to this whole piece¹. I want to make it clear that I am not dismissing the work of writers who do use moments from their lives, or ground their work in the truth. I am talking about how telling the truth can be a barrier to writers, can make them feel like they have to be honest, even in fiction. There are authors who are comfortable disclosing the real experiences behind a story, but there are also authors who prefer to lead private lives.

Obviously there are exceptions to this principle of dishonesty in writing. I don’t want to read a biography or historical account that presents itself as factual which is lying to me and just making things up. Instead what I am suggesting is that sometimes, certain invasive questions are better left unsaid. Maybe the author did go through a rough breakup, and write a short story about it, or maybe you should think about other interesting questions to ask instead.

“Did this really happen to you?” Well, when something proclaims itself to be fiction, a novel, a short story, whatever it may be, it usually means that at least parts of it are untrue. Maybe more, it could be that the whole thing is fictitious and you are being lied to. Accept that. Make your peace with the fact that you can be moved by something completely untrue. This isn’t to say that readers shouldn’t ask questions(I generally love questions!), shouldn’t delve into what they’re reading, but I do think that to judge a piece of fiction as explicitly representing the world of the author can be simplistic and at times damaging.

This phenomenon also pertains greatly to poetry. Often poets are asked to explain the personal moments behind a poem—what is real, what is fabricated through poetic license. They are asked to lay themselves bare for their readers, to relate the most private details of their own lives or experiences for the satisfaction of their readers.

Again, this can be very invasive, or at least a bit awkward if you’ve never met the person and all of a sudden you’re asking them in depth questions about intense events in their life.

In poetry, the material and metaphorical are both placed on a level of importance that can alienate a reader from the ‘real’ events behind the poem. A metaphor here, a false detail there, and suddenly a poem is no longer the honest truth, but instead a version of events presented by the poet as a story. Poets weave tales, even when confessional in nature they obscure and use literary devices to try and fabricate a whole new version of events. These things are done not to obfuscate reality and trick the reader, but instead to just write a good poem. After all, that should be the goal, not necessarily to be honest and relatable to a fault, but instead to write good stories, to use your voice as an author to tell the stories you want to tell.

I am not a perfect person, or writer. I have lied when I shouldn’t have, told the truth when it might have hurt someone. Deception and honesty can be tricky things in life, and that’s definitely true for fiction and poetry as well.

1. A second caveat: this probably isn’t a big problem in the writer community. It’s just something that I’ve noticed recently and wanted to talk about. I doubt it’s a very serious issue, and it certainly doesn’t have the impact that some of the problems writers are facing right now have (book banning and censorship for example).