“What is Truth?” a man asked and washed his hands.
And because this is not a sermon or a lecture on the New Testament, I’ll merely note that by washing his hands and wishing the result of his actions on generations yet unborn, he was admitting he was unsure of the action he took, and unsure in fact of what was the truth, or even if truth mattered.
What all of this has to do with the price of potatoes or the fall in the production of wheat words.
Yesterday on Twitter we were having one of those “should your stories convey a message, or is it the story that matters.”
Obviously I come down heavily on the side of “the story is what matters.” Because, look, I read philosophical treatises and political articles all the time. They might be stories of a sort, but they’re not the sort of story I relax with while sipping a nice cup of tea. They’re not even the sort of story I read to have an adventure in my mind after a day of trying to figure out just how to unpack my library or just how crazy our politics is.
So– I answered with “The story. Nothing matters but the story.”
One of my friends who is considerably more religious than I then interjected “the truth matters. You should tell the truth.”
He’s right of course, except–
Well, I’m not actually sure if he’s the sort of religious person who finds fiction offensive. I don’t think so, but the question is there, and how slippery is it? “How do I tell the truth with a story? Particularly a non-preachy story?”
My husband loves sewing confusion in discord on panels by asking the audience if they’re aware they just came to listen to a bunch of people who lie for a living.
That is in fact the definition of what I do. I tell lies with style. And I’m good at it.
So, wouldn’t telling the truth be antithetical to it? Wouldn’t it stop me cold, or force me to write only just-so stories that echo what I believe and preach it at people and are as deadly boring as the leftist/Marxist just so stories infesting literally everything?
Well, yes. And No.
First of all let’s establish that when it comes to being an artist — yes, this hurts to admit, and I’ll never forgive M. C. A. Hogarth for making me admit I’m an artist. It’s mean of her — the phrase “your truth” applies.
Not in the sense that the truth is fluid or changes person to person, but in the sense that we are human and limited. Our experience is circumscribed to that voice behind the eyes. And I don’t know about you, but mine is highly individual.
But the point is I don’t know about you. I only know about the voice behind my eyes. That is my truth, my perception of truth and reality and right.
Even if accurate, the truth in my head, is a tiny, minuscule fleck of The Truth, the thing that makes the Universe go round, the animating principle, the light in the dark.
Being an artist is feeling the need to share your truth, your little bit of light, in a world that’s largely dark.
Now where that gets slippery: There are two types of truth. The intellectual ones “These truths we believe” and observed, lived, internalized, and “that’s just not right” truths.
You can put both in fiction, of course. But an excess of the first one, even when there’s nothing wrong with the truths communicated, or even when they’re self evident, and you’ll tip your hand as a writer too strongly towards “pamphlet” “Screed” or “informative documentary.”
I’d say that’s why I’m not particularly fond of most — not all, most — hard science fiction. Because given the lack of understanding of science in the current Anno Domini, the teller of such tales must convey an enormous amount of information which, through no fault of his/her own will short the story. To not do so tends to take more artistry than most people possess. (Certainly than I do.)
So, as for the truths that we know, intellectually, those we can articulate with words, I’d go gently with them, and instead concentrate on the truths we feel. The “This is how it works” the “this is what people are like.”
All of us have a picture of “how things work” that is internalized at a very deep level. To us, this is true.
Does that come out in books? Well, yes. The only way that doesn’t come out is if you’re muzzling yourself, and trying to not tell the truth as you see and know it.
This is most obvious if you’re trad pub because at some point or other your agent or publisher will say “Drop this chapter” and “Put this one in” and “Slant this this way.” And sometimes you go “Oh, cool, that really makes what I was trying to say clearer.” At other times, say ahem randomly when they suggest having a human sacrifice — forced human sacrifice, i.e. the victim doesn’t want to be sacrificed — done by the good guys, and it’s supposed to be good, and the entity demanding it good?
That’s when everything in you rises up and says “No.”
A milder form of this is in brainstorming. Someone is going to suggest, “Hey, why doesn’t your character do x?” and your entire being goes “no.”
If you violate that, your internal version of truth, I think it does damage to your internal ability to create.
And perhaps my friend is right and it does damage to the world too.
So, the truth is important. And sticking to your bit of truth both makes the story work and perhaps added to all of everyone’s little piece of truth it adds to the illumination of the world.
Because what stories are are mechanisms to tell us what the world looks like behind other people’s eyes. What their little bit of reality is.
Besides, you know, being a rollicking good time. Without which you never really internalize it as truth, lie or anything at all, but fling it across the room and at the wall.
Mad Genius Club 
16 responses to “The Truth”
:raises an eyebrow: Should you make the story with letters, or with words?
A story will fall flat if it doesn’t touch on truth. You can still warp the truth, and definitely choose what to focus on — but it still has to be true to hit. We know there’s dragons, tell us they can be beaten. Give an idea how, even if it’s in the form of “don’t surrender.”
Many moons ago, in another life, I was asked by a prisoner how I could possibly believe what I believe. (Yes, this is relevant to ‘your truth’)
I pointed out that the guy he knows as “Petty Officer Lehman” is far different from the guy my wife knows as her husband, who is far different than the person people see when ‘officer Lehman BPD’ arrests or tickets them, and all of those guys are far different from the ‘daddy’ that my kids see, or even still, His Lordship, Squire Morrigan Graham that folks see at historical recreation events. Yet they are all me.
Then I asked “how much more complex is Deity than a human being? Does your book not say that we can not conceive of the Devine?” He allowed that this is so.
“So then” I asked, “How hard is it to conceive that the facet of the gem ‘god’ that you see, is different than the facet I see, and yet they are all parts of the same gem?”
I did not convert him, nor was that my intent. I intended to stop his constant tirades that if I did not change and follow his specific version of his religion I would burn for all eternity, and for at least a while, that I succeeded in.
Indeed – we contain multitudes.
And multitudes of “truth” such as it is.
There are two truths to consider — the truth of our world, and the truth of the story’s world. In the story, there can be elves and wizards, or starships that travel faster than light, or aliens intervening in our past thousands of years ago. We know none of those things are true in our world, and so do the readers.
The trick is to give those obvious fictional constructs the feel of truth; the sense that, if the world held such things, this is how they would appear to us, and how we would react.
It still has to align with the truth as you perceive it, not violate it. You being the writer in this case.
Seriously? (I do believe you.) Good guys don’t *do* human sacrifices. Self sacrifices, sure. Especially if the character has been wavering between good and evil, and throws himself into danger or certain death to save everyone else.
Sarah’s recounted this incident before, and I’ve seen enough of the grimdark baloney coming out of tradpub in the 80/90s and newer to believe it.
Wait, this incident is real? Sarah was not just making up the most ridiculous example she could imagine of an editor forcing her to violate her moral code?
I should know by now that the barrel has no bottom.
No, Sarah wasn’t.
Broadly speaking, one’s values are going to show up in one’s writings in one form or another. My values include monotheism, and a general “work smarter not harder” attitude, and in worldbuilding, that means that my settings tend to have a Supreme Being and a category of good and evil beings, less powerful than God but more so than humans; said category almost never receiving specific names or other forms of individuation. At one level, it’s a decision informed by the religion I belong to, and at another level, it’s informed by me looking at, say, Tolkien trying to figure out what to do with his pantheon of fourteen Valar and going “ugh, so much work.” Another person might find my approach overly bland, I don’t know.
If someone’s values include “test thought experiment to extinction to see if it’s valid,” they’re going to produce a lot of old school scifi whatifs that may come out a bit NOPE for some readers’ tastes while still being, in some sense, artistically valid. I would put some of the old school dystopias here, and the kitten-tree in Cetaganda, and Ellison’s I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream.
Conversely, people whose values state that victimhood is an absolute and positive good, and anything that even accidentally contributes to victimhood is bad, are going to produce stories where the protagonists have no agency and either go down to death and defeat (not a new trope, see Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa. Or don’t) or have victory handed to them on a silver platter.
It’s an observation as old as Aristotle that fiction is more philosophical than history because it can make the principles more clear.
I’ve been reading scads of escapist, genre books. The more unstable and uncertain my life is (not just the world an$ the country in turmoil, but our personal life is hitting some grim, depressing points).
I NEED that opportunity to revel in people whose lives can be brought to a satisfying and neat conclusion within an afternoon.
But, even there, the characters have to interact in reasonable ways, the storyline should wander into ridiculous pathways (No Confederacy of Dunces, for example), and they need to be “people” that I would actually want to spend time with. No Dexters or American Psychos. If someone murders, their act has to have a logical basis, and they must not revel in gore.
Character truth is a necessity. I’m currently working on a story about the former Edward VIII meeting Hitler, and I had everything planned out perfectly…except that Eddie (my version of him at least) would not do what I needed him to do. I could force him to do so, of course; I’m the one at the keyboard, and if I type, “And then the Duke of Windsor sprouted wings and flew to Madagascar,” then that’s what happens. But I’d be lying, and I’d know it even if no one else did, and I’d always hate the story. (Fortunately for the story, even though Eddie can’t do what needs to be done, I think I have another character who can.)
“If you violate that, your internal version of truth, I think it does damage to your internal ability to create. And perhaps my friend is right and it does damage to the world too.”
I once read somewhere (might have been here, even), or maybe I imagine having read it, that if something damages you it damages the world. We are all in the world. Of it. What harms us harms the world.
I must say that when I started doing this writing thing what feels like an age ago but was really 2012/13/14 ish, I had no intentions of telling Great Truths. At all.
What I wanted was the story -I- wanted to read. Good guys win, bad guys lose, lots of shit blows up, there’s giant tanks, nerd gets the girl, and it all turns out.
So I wrote that story. And the next and the next, and now here we are 2024, and I’ve written many. And somehow, through all that, the Great Truths have been creeping in.
Like this one:
“A choir of angels sings to a frog.
The glory of Heaven washes over him, and then he eats a bug.
Because he is a frog.”
(I’m pretty sure I read that somewhere too, if anybody knows I’d appreciate a heads up.)
I don’t know why that one came up in the story, all I needed was a “truth” the MC could toss off as a joke, but there it was.
So the true things seem to show up no matter what you do, by virtue of being true.
Characters have their own integrity as well. You create a character, they are a certain way. They can grow and change through experience, and in fact they almost have to. Somebody cheats death this chapter, next chapter they can’t behave as if all that never happened. It’s going to leave a mark.
One of the things I dislike the most about Western television and books these days is the way they break the characters. One movie, Yoda is invincible, old and wise. Next movie, he runs away from the Sith like a little beeotch. One movie Luke Skywalker is The Man. Next movie, he a busted, bitter loser hiding on some crap island and the reason given is -stupid-.
Pick a lane, people. Either sow the seeds of destruction in Movie One, or have the guy live up to the legend in Movie Two. I saw this constantly in the 2010s in books, and I wrote instead of reading so I could still have a story. Movies, stopped going. Can’t take it.
All I can say is I just write the story. If there’s a Great Truth to be told it’ll rear its head and breath fire no matter if I like it or not.
In one of his interviews, Jordan Peterson advances the idea that as we move higher, truth converges to a pinnacle.
Thomas Merton writes that “We must not use one truth to deny another.”