Does Fiction Lie?

Many years ago, my friend Daniel, who’s a journalist, said something that’s stayed with me. “Reporters write about facts,” he said. “Novelists write about truth.”

We’re now living in a world where the expression “alternative facts” somehow has inexplicably managed to enter our vocabularies as A Thing, so the facts/truth divide is a question I’ve spent a fair bit of time thinking about.

We all lie sometimes. Social lies, little white lies… my father was a diplomat, and I learned at an early age to listen and interpret when I heard people say things I knew to be false. “Think about the why,” he told me often, and that reminder has stood me in good stead. I’ve always lied when it’s the kinder thing to do; and the few people I know who pride themselves on never lying are often needlessly unkind due to their rigid “moral” stance around it.

But those are everyday social situations. The question here is: does fiction lie?

Well, in a sense, yes. Novelists use lies to communicate true things. We’re creating situations that never happened to people who never existed in a place no one will ever see, and all of it in order to convey truths about love, loyalty, sacrifice, joy, despair… in other words, truths about humanity.

The fact that these truths are wrapped up in a story is what gives them power. It contextualizes them…