Should Writers be Liars?
There are two camps of people in fiction. Which one are you?
Yes, it’s an oxymoron to debate how real fiction should be, but since fiction does its best when it mirrors reality, I figured it was time to weigh-in on a topic that bothers me a lot.
Similar to the vein of the grammar police, there’s a group of fanatical readers who want their fiction to be as close to 100% accurate to reality as possible. We’ve got medical, legal, firearms (these folks — don’t ever call a magazine a clip), police procedures, animal behavior, psychology, physics, chemistry, biology, and anything to do with space. I’m sure I missed a dozen others, but you get the idea.
Where do we draw the line?
Where does this obsessions with getting reality correct get in the way of writing FICTION. Because, remember, fiction is one, big, voluntary lie to the reader. The fiction author lies for a living. We package the best lie our minds can build, we put a cover on it, and readers knowingly volunteer and pay money to be lied to.
Yet, there’s this large group of folks who insist on facts within fiction.
To be clear, I’m playing the Devil’s Advocate here. For a writer to do her job well, she’s got to put the reader into the story — to make the writing invisible. If she adds details that make the reader go hmmmm…
