True Fiction
Just because something is made up doesn’t mean it’s not true.
Lisbon 2017
Desk Notes explores writing, travel, and literature—and is read in more than one hundred countries every week.
Just because something is made up doesn’t mean it’s not true. This basic point is somehow difficult for many people to grasp. What’s imagined, instead, is an artificial divide: fiction and invented worlds in one corner, hard truth and facts in another corner. But the actual boundary between these options is more elusive.
With most writing, in fact, there’s more truth in fiction than in factual reporting. You can test the latter instance yourself quite easily. Write a short paragraph that describes your breakfast today, and notice the endless series of decisions that you must make—on what perspective to take, with vocabulary choice and word connotation, on what to emphasize, with what must be overlooked. You can write about an event as simple as your breakfast in countless ways. And each new way gives the story a slight tilt. A subtle shift in perspective reveals a different aspect. Beyond those problems, you have to consider issues of memory and accuracy, with the knowledge that what you remember even about your own breakfast is almost certainly mistaken.
Imagine, in contrast, inventing a story with a blank sheet of paper, one where you create a character and focus on a particular attribute—courage or vanity or weakness, for instance. You have all of human history as your guide. You can distill one particular trait to its essential details. Won’t your fictional story express more that’s true about courage, for example, than any supposed factual tale?
A Gabriel García Márquez quote from his Paris Review interview comes to mind:
In journalism just one fact that is false prejudices the entire work. In contrast, in fiction one single fact that is true gives legitimacy to the entire work. That’s the only difference, and it lies in the commitment of the writer. A novelist can do anything he wants so long as he makes people believe in it.
Another way to examine this claim is to realize that you could read 100 true crime books and not reach the insight found in the novel Crime and Punishment. Or, you might notice that in the countless studies of empire, in the mass of texts about colonialism that might someday topple many bookcases, few will match the nuances found in a slim novel that’s typically overlooked: Burmese Days. How about an understanding of the changing sexual norms in the 20th Century? You could read dozens of historical accounts and perhaps have a slight understanding of the period, or you could dive into The Price of Salt, in all its complexity and subtlety, as that fictional story is a more truthful account of the atmosphere of the time.
You might have been uncertain about your breakfast earlier today. Eggs sounded good, but you ruminated about some alternatives. You even found yourself stuck in the kitchen, almost frozen, unable to begin. If you wrote your tale of indecision on these events, trying your best to record only facts, your failures of language, memory, and skill would guarantee that your supposedly true story would contain less truth about indecision than the fictional story of Hamlet.
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