Truth in Fiction

Write what you know. This may be the earliest advice a fledgling writer receives, but what does it mean? Joan Didion, I believe it was, once said, "I write to find out what I think." Writing to find out what you think seems at odds with the safety-first concept, "write what you know."

Following this advice would mean never writing something based on research. Or is what you read in a book really what you "know"?

It could be that the advice merely means to locate your fictional character in a time and place with which you are thoroughly comfortable. A graduate student of French literature, steeped in 18^th century France, may feel at home sketching drawing rooms and carriages inhabited by men in powdered wigs.

But, from my perspective, "write what you know" would be better rendered as "write what's true." Sure, sure. There is no Truth (note the capital T). We certainly cannot know Truth. Yet every serious writer of fiction has felt, as she worked, a waxing and waning sense of authenticity. Around page 56, perhaps, your protagonist utters words you just know are wrong, words that would never come from the mouth of the individual you have carefully constructed. Or an entire scene sits on the page like a fixed social smile, acceptable but obviously false. As you read your work aloud, these are the moments that cause you to wince, even more than an infelicitous bit of purple prose.

These instances are the most difficult part of your manuscript to fix. Their tentacles extend forward and backward. When you alter the dialogue on page 56, references to it on page 112 will be incomprehensible. And perhaps you have built up to this dialogue, off-center as it now seems. You've laid groundwork and the reader comes to this as a critical checkpoint leading to your dénouement. Still, each time you come to this scene, you cringe internally, wishing you understood why it doesn't work for you, why it seems so phony.

Phoniness is the opposite of fictional Truth, not falsehoods. All fiction is of necessity a form of "lying." You ask your reader to suspend his disbelief, to come with you into a fantasy that sounds real (unless, of course, you're writing fantasy). When your character says, "I'm hurting," you depend on the reader to believe in that pain—it exists. The best fictional pain reaches off the page and grabs the reader's heart. He too begins to hurt. But if your reader instead clicks his tongue and looks out the window, wondering where on earth you came up with this stuff—you've let your story wander into phoniness. Phoniness, for the perceptive reader, is unmistakable. It will often cause him to close the book and think about fixing the car or taking a walk.

When Didion says she writes to discover what she thinks, she means she comes to her work expecting surprises. It's common for creative writing instructors to suggest an outline. I've even been told it's a mistake to start writing without a clear, defined idea of where your story will go. That's not a journey of discovery.

A character fully realized will leave you and tell her own story, not yours. She will not budge from the chair in which you've placed her when you want her to cross the room or leave the building. She won't slap the face you've thrust into hers, won't feel quite the rage you want her to feel. If your characters never defy you, your writing isn't a journey of discovery. It's an exercise on par with assembling a dress from a pattern. You have the drawing, you know how the dress is supposed to look. It's merely a matter of cutting on the broken lines and sewing up the seams.

But how is a defiant character going to tell you what you think? A therapist once argued that the people in our dreams are all parts of the dreamer. Whether that's true or not, the characters in a novel are each a facet of the novel's creator. If they aren't, she hasn't written "what she knows." But this isn't the kind of knowing that comes out of books and it isn't the kind of knowing that comes out of introspection. It's the kind of knowing that says on page 56, the character turns phony.

Update: The cover has been accepted, the editing is complete, and the manuscript is now being formatted for print. The next stage will be to see a sample chapter, which I hope will happen soon.