Lying

   by Steve Pease writing as Michael Chandos 

   When I was a working stage actor, and a poor film and radio actor - wait a minute - stage actors are poor too. I digress. When I was a stage actor, people asked if I was lying when on stage. I wasn't being me, I was pretending to be someone else, therefore, I was lying, they said. Writers face that too, I think.

   We can make up stuff for our stories, but it better be the truth!

   There's a saying in acting: "Acting is telling the truth under imaginary circumstances".  As Cassie Greer said in her blog "...this is the theater, where we go to have an experience and to be moved. And, unless we, the actors, tell the truth, there's no way you, the audience, will be able to experience this story at all". Substitute literature for theater, writers for actors and readers for audience, and you'll see my point.

   Not all writers agree. Arthur Conan Doyle was scrupulous with facts and history in his historical novels like "The White Company" and "Sir Nigel". He wanted to mimic the heroic tales his mother used to tell at night when dad was out drinking all the family money away. He did research on historical places and people. He filled his sketchbooks with ink drawings of armor, horses, castles and medieval village life, and carefully annotated the correct term for everything. He copied medieval language styles, antique wording and old romantic tales. It made his histories tough to read sometimes, but they were "authentic", in his opinion. His Sherlock stories were "fantasies," and truth and accuracy weren't so important. Was he lying?

   The author Chris Bohjalian wrote "Lie. Put down on paper the most interesting lies you can imagine...and then make them plausible." Dan Brown follows this maxim in "The Da Vinci Code." Harry Potter is imaginary. Is S.J. Rowling lying?  That's not the point.

   These writers took amazing stories and made them seem Real to the reader. Use imagination, spin a tale, write about places you've never been and people doing things you've never done. Great. But you MUST tell the story like it's the truth. Characters must be consistent. If your detective crawls out of the river after fighting the murderer, he will be wet until your story allows him to dry. And that will affect the events in the story. Chekhov said if you write a rifle on the wall of the house, sooner or later you have to hear it go bang. (He almost said it that way)

   Writing it Real will help the reader believe your story. When the Hero is in a life-threatening bind, they will feel the terror. And the happy ending will be happy for them too.