The Grift of Fiction
By David Corbett | August 11, 2023 |
Permit me a moment of apostasy.
I realize it might seem perverse to pursue this topic in light of Jim Dempsey’s far more sanguine post from just this past Tuesday (“How Books Can Change Lives”), but for some time, I’ve had the uneasy feeling that the merits of storytelling have been oversold. The use of the mercantile metaphor is deliberate. In any ever-increasing number of realms, the “craft of narrative” is being used to justify the unjustifiable—the dishonest, the trivial, the crass, the sanctimonious, the unnecessary, and all manner of other dubious ends.
Tell the story has become the hallmark of the hustle. Give the folks a convincing, compelling tale and they’re yours, facts be damned.
We’re even told that facts are meaningless outside a narrative—an approach that turns scientific theory into a kind of fable.
A particularly compelling example of this appeared in an article from late last year in the open access journal Natural Sciences. The article was titled, “Pseudo-embryology and personhood: How embryological pseudoscience helps structure the American abortion debate.” It opens with this:
Scientists have identified more than one possible point at which an individual life, personhood, with its own identity, and defined in various ways, begins. There is no consensus among biologists as to when an independent human life begins. Those people who invoke the scientific community to justify the idea that fertilization is the unequivocal moment of independent identity for the human embryo are expressing mythological and political ideas, not contemporary scientific facts. These mythologies have deep and powerful roots, and they are hard to leave behind. We often look back on how eugenics distorted American politics a century ago, how women were being sterilized in the name of science, and we congratulate ourselves, thinking that such distortions could not happen again. They have.
Though quite technical, the piece is highly instructive on how embryology does not fit neatly into the stories various camps want to tell about when “life begins”—conception? The quickening? Birth? (Interesting aside: in many traditions, soul and breath are the same word, implying the newborn does not acquire a soul until it draws its first independent breath. And since reading this article, I encountered still another account of when a newborn acquires personhood, this one from Killers of the Flower Moon by David Grann. He recounts that among the Osage Indians, a child is not considered a person until he or she is given a name, which symbolically includes him or her in the social fabric of the tribe.)
The point: stories that masquerade as scientific truth (or any truth) betray the motives of the teller—to persuade without the messy, complicated, often inexplicable evidence that an honest inquiry requires.
It’s not just swindlers and ideologues peddling narrative snake oil, of course. Some genuine heavyweights have opined on the matter.
Camus famously remarked, “Fiction is the lie through which we tell the truth.” And Tim O’Brien, whose “How to Tell a True War Story” should be required reading for anyone who intends to put words on a page, defined the purpose of fiction as “getting at the truth when the truth isn’t sufficient for the truth.”
Back in June, 2019 (four years ago—Holy Moly, where did the time go?), I wrote a post titled, “Narrative as Weapon, Narrative as Poison, and ‘Getting it Right’—Chernobyl.”
It concerned the three-part HBO miniseries about the 1986 nuclear disaster at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant. In that post I noted that the series showrunner, Craig Mazin, suffered many of the same concerns I did.
For the sake of simplicity, let me just repeat here a portion of what I wrote then:
[W]hat I found particularly fascinating was [Mazin’s] discussion of how narrative cannot help but distort what it seeks to portray, and what that means when you’re telling a story based on real events. Does a ripping yarn really absolve the writer’s responsibility to the truth?
It turns out he thought about this long and hard before and during his writing of the script for Chernobyl—especially because he likens humanity’s plight right now given the climate crisis to the technicians working at the reactor.
“Right now, like it or not, we’re unfortunately those guys in the control room going, ‘Well, the one thing we don’t have to worry about is this thing blowing up.’ That’s us, on this planet, right now.
He takes particular note of the use of narrative in advertising—commercials don’t sell products, they sell stories—and notes that “politics is weaponized narrative,” to the point where:
“Everything is a narrative. And we’re suffering. We’re kind of drowning in narrative poison”
And he recognizes the danger in that—the danger in mistaking stories for the truth and the responsibility of writers to never lose track of that when writing.
He therefore became obsessed with recognizing where he made deliberate choices that distorted the known truth for the sake of dramatic effect—so much so that he decided to create a podcast to accompany the miniseries to point out the distortions and to provide the factual record to the best of his ability.
“The last thing I ever wanted to say to people was, ‘Now that you’ve watched this, you know the truth.’ No, you don’t. You know some of the truth, and you know some of the stuff that’s been dramatized.
“And ideally, through this, we start to maybe find a new way to present things to people where we’re not so worried as artists that people are going to question whether or not we, quote-unquote, ‘got it right.’ We can’t get it right; we can only get it sort of right. That’s the best we can do.
But if we can share everything else, including things that challenge or undermine the narrative we presented — because we are dealing with an imperfect process that boils two years down into five hours — then I think they will appreciate what we do more, not less.”
This issue once again came to the forefront of my thinking as I was watching Oppenheimer, an utterly impressive film that nonetheless also plays fast and loose with certain facts. (For example, concerning the worry that the nuclear explosion might trigger a chain reaction that ignited the atmosphere, causing the end of the world. It’s a key dramatic theme in the film; unfortunately it appears the concern was dismissed almost immediately.) This isn’t the only distortion of the facts in the film, per a nuclear historian, though it also got a great deal right. The director, Christopher Nolan, apparently does not share Mazin’s qualms about misrepresenting reality, for as far as I know he’s said nothing about the matter.
Also, in early July, I came across an online New Yorker article by book critic Parul Seghal titled, “The Tyranny of the Tale.” (It was published in the print edition of the July 10 & 17, 2023, issue, with the headline “Tell No Tales.”)
If you have a subscription, you can read the entire article here. The following section was the one that stood out for me, and which I want to share with you:
Much of life is the narrative equivalent of dark matter, and Virginia Woolf had a name for it. “Often when I have been writing one of my so‐called novels,” she recounted, “I have been baffled by this same problem”: That is, how to describe what I call in my private shorthand—“non-being.” Every day includes much more non-being than being. . . . As a child then, my days, just as they do now, contained a large proportion of this cotton wool, this non-being. Week after week passed at St Ives and nothing made any dint upon me. Then, for no reason that I know about, there was a sudden violent shock.
This is what the writer Lorrie Moore refers to as “unsayable life,” when “narrative causality” feels like “a piece of laughable metaphysical colonialism perpetrated upon the wild country of time.” It is what I have experienced from time to time, following the birth of a child, when I feel myself, for months on end, more place than person. That snarl of time, thought, and sensation—uncombed experience—is what theorists call “the unstoried self,” what Annie Ernaux calls “the pure immanence of a moment.”
This discomfort with the “tricks of the trade” i.e., the “laughable metaphysical colonialism perpetrated upon the wild country of time,” has made me more attuned of late to non-fiction, music, the visual arts, poetry—as well as the enigmatic parables of Kafka, which were among the first things that inspired me to want to become a writer.
I’ve also recently picked up a book on number theory, revisiting the joy of an elegant proof—such as Euclid’s that there can be no greatest prime number.
These other forms all seem better at capturing that “pure immanence of moment” than the obligatory arc of “compelling fiction.”
I’m not suffering so much a crisis of conscience (though there is a bit of that) as a “crisis of craft.” I feel a need to point out where stories are being used to obscure evidence or play on emotion, and how easily they can serve to turn off thought, silence doubt, while exploiting cognitive biases and delivering what people want to accept rather than what is demonstrably true.
Not that I’m going to stop writing fiction. I’ve got a new book out, I’m reissuing another novel that fell out of print, and I just submitted a short story that inflicted itself upon me while driving along the fjords of Norway.
I’m just increasingly aware of how I find myself thinking that, given the supposed demands of craft, we’re all writing the same story, just using different words. And I realize how easy it is to give in to the temptation to employ the fabled “essential techniques for a gripping tale,” if only for commercial purposes, rather than hone in on the necessary truth at the core of whatever it is I’m trying to express: the truth about who we are, what’s happening to us and our world, and the non-dramatic aspects of our existence—Virginia Woolf’s “non-being,” Lonnie Moore’s “unsayable life”—the stuff we’re told to cut from our drafts because they “don’t serve the narrative.” They too can be compelling, if we stop to take notice, instead of telling ourselves to get on with the story.
Rather than provide some clumsy prompts hoping to stir discussion, why I don’t just open the floor and let all you respond however you please?
David Corbett (he/him) is the author of seven novels: The Devil’s Redhead, Done for a Dime (a New York Times Notable Book), Blood of Paradise (nominated for numerous awards, including the Edgar, Do They Know I’m Running?, The Mercy of the Night, The Long-Lost Love Letters of Doc Holliday, and The Truth Against the World. He has also published the story collection Thirteen Confessions and the novella The Devil Prayed and Darkness Fell.
David’s short fiction and poetry have appeared in a broad array of magazines and anthologies, with pieces twice selected for Best American Mystery Stories.
His non-fiction has appeared in numerous venues, including the New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Narrative, Zyzzyva, MovieMaker, The Writer, and Writer’s Digest.
He has taught both online and in classroom settings through the UCLA Extension’s Writers’ Program, Book Passage, LitReactor, 826 Valencia, The Grotto in San Francisco, and at numerous writing conferences across the US, Canada, and Mexico. In January 2013 Penguin published his textbook on the craft of characterization, The Art of Character (“A writer’s bible that will lead to your character’s soul.” —Elizabeth Brundage), and Writer’s Digest published his follow-up, The Compass of Character, in October 2019.
Novels are more honest than political lies. Novels admit to being made up. Novels have a point and ask us to think. Political lies obscure the truth and and urge people not to think.
The craft of telling stories can be used for ill, that’s so, but honestly I don’t see much craft in the political lies of our time. They’re artless and demonstrably false and they won’t last. Great novels are artful, show us truths and live longer than their authors.
The point of fiction is not to capture life exactly as it is. We have our real, daily lives for that. The point is to make a point, to show us something about ourselves. I have no qualms about writing fiction. Why feel guilty for offering a truth?
Oops, I once again responded in a Comment rather than a Reply and by the time I was finished two more Comments appeared. Please see below for my response to your Comment, Benjamin.
David, you offer a feast for thought here, but what felt timely to me was your discussion of the Oppenheimer film and of the playing loose with facts. I’ve been a fan of the Netfiix series the Crown from the start, but have struggled with this latest season. All along, where memory didn’t serve, I got into the habit of fact-checking certain episodes and events. In cases where ‘no one was in the room’ save a character with his/her/their thoughts, I assumed the writer was giving us fiction laced with context-based guessing. Last night’s episode involved the Romanov assassination. I knew the story, but seeing the event dramatized was upsetting, and while intimate details were necessarily fictionalized, it delivered an emotional truth. The real devastation, for me, though, was George V’s betrayal of his cousin, which I only knew of as a political maneuver. The writers laid out a scenario other than purely political, which gave me an opportunity to research and learn. All this to say that in our present climate of truthiness and out-and-out lying (which are really nothing new if you take a long look back, but oh so much easier to employ now) I look to fiction not just for escape and entertainment, but for emotional truth. It’s also my goal to express that in my work. Awesome post. Thank you.
Great comment, Susan. I think you make an excellent point, and it echoes what Mazin suggested — that our stories (especially those based on real events) should be a springboard to further inquiry rather than lazily accepted as the final word.
The greater difficulty comes in fiction based solely on our own idea(s). How do we safeguard against caving into to writerly conventions concerning pacing and structure while still maintaining an honest regard for that emotional truth we long for in our reading, and hope for in our writing?
I agree about the greater difficulty, especially with an editor wanting you to deliver something they can sell. I’m on the hunt for the sweet spot!
David, I’ve no idea how to respond to what you wrote, yet I feel compelled to write something. I stopped to read Tim O’Brien’s story/essay and then immediately texted it to my twin nephews who are both captains in the Army. The crisis of craft and the merits of storytelling being oversold – I get it. Not that I’ve tried to put it in any kind of words, nor can I do that in any specific or meaningful way for anyone else, much less myself. Maybe the closest I come arises out of your reference to Virginia Woolf. When I read her novels my mind stops working. All I can do is let go of trying and simply go along for the ride. I think that’s how I do my life and my writing these days. It sure isn’t any recommended path I follow. More of a pathless path, and though I long for certain outcomes, I’ve had to let go of trying to control things to make those happen. Am I expressing what I feel is the necessary truth? I’ve no idea. Sure, I’ve tried, but the necessary truth isn’t exactly a fixed or permanent thing I can point to and say – this is it! It’s as fluid and I am, as my life is, as my understanding is, and all I can do is try to capture the truth of that in the moment that I write. If anyone reads what I’ve written it will be up to them to bring their own understanding and truths to the table and see what they make of it.
Thanks so much for sharing this today, David. You always inspire me to look deeper.
Hiya, Doc. Thanks for the thoughtful comment. As a devotee of Pema Chödrön, I found the phrase “pathless path” especially insightful. It reminded my of something Ursula Le Guin wrote in her introduction to the re-issue of The Left Hand of Darkness. If there was a point she was trying to make, it can only be expressed by the entire book, otherwise she would have written a much shorter explication of what she meant.
And that, I think, is the best response to my hand-wringing: novels are true in the sense they are an experience, not a statement concerning reality outside its pages. To the extent they do make such a statement, the reader is invited to make of that whatever she will — which gets us back to Benjamin’s comment, that novels ask us to think, not demand we agree.
As for this: “You always inspire me to look deeper.” Yeah, I’ve often wondered if I missed my calling as a tour guide for the abyss.
Thanks for the comment, Benjamin. It pretty much aligns with what I expect to hear a lot in response to this post.
I’m not arguing for guilt, however, any more than Virginia Woolf or Lonnie Moore are. And yes, I know we have our real lives for life exactly as it is, but how “true” can fiction be when it deliberately omits so much and instead focuses solely on the dramatic, the thrilling, the poignant, etc. Fiction is then true to what? True to writing conventions. True to reader expectations. True to publishing demands. How “true” is that sort of “truth?”
I don’t know a way out of this but I think recognizing the issue is non-trivial. Flaubert remarked on the same point, how narrative by its very nature distorts. I think Mazin’s response — to admit the unreality without caveats, which echoes your remark that “Novels admit to being made up” — is a decent step in the right direction.
Fiction distorts—yes, that’s the point! It is supposed to focus on the dramatic, thrilling and poignant.
Realism is a high value in literary fiction, the “capture”, and that’s fine but isn’t that just another (and for me, limited) way of showing us ourselves, getting at the “truth of things”?
Sharing what it’s like to be alive is a fine purpose for fiction but it’s not the only one. Fiction that stretches beyond what is likely in reality has work to do too, and not just to entertain.
Well, I disagree that “the point” of fiction is distortion. And I’m not making an unqualified defense of “realism” — as I noted, my recent reading of fiction has largely been a return to the short works of Kafka, which do indeed “stretch beyond what is likely in reality.”
I guess I’m unsettled that you are questioning the giving of your writing advice. Please no! I do agree that any advice designed to shape one’s stories to be more commercial probably is not good advice, but showing writers ways to make their stories more effective is a good thing, isn’t it?
What I’m trying to focus on now is teaching techniques that help writers discover their own stories, or the stories that speak most profoundly to their understanding of themselves and their world, even if the story world they’re presenting belongs to genres as “unrealistic” as fantasy, horror, sci-fi, etc.
I just found myself having some of the same qualms others have had about, in particular, three-act structure, and the narrative straitjacket it can place on the imagination. As profound an influence as The Hero’s Journey has had, especially on writers, I don’t think of all that influence has been benign. It stopped being a useful idea and began being a dictate.
Ah, gotcha, and totally agree, story templates can be taught as law when they are not. Carry on, Mr. Corbett, I’m half way through The Truth Against the World and finding it ever more compelling the deeper I go.
Thank you so very very much.
Interesting stuff. Berthold Brecht tried to inject thought into the theatre experience, but he wasn’t less moralist or political when he did it.
Whether we write fiction or non-fiction we do two things. We select ideas and shape them with words, and we arrange the words and ideas to serve us. The truth in non-fiction, it seems to me, ought to be factual or clearly identified as otherwise. The truth in fiction is the story. If it has an impact on the reader/viewer—provides that experience we crave, in my opinion, it’s ‘true’. Whether it happened or almost happened, or should have happened, etc., is immaterial—it’s fiction and it enriches our emotional life. For whatever it’s worth, that’s my response to your very thoughtful post.
HI, Bob. I think that’s an excellent response, and it conforms pretty much to what everyone’s said so far.
OMG — we are at risk of reaching a consensus. WHAT HAVE WE DONE?!
Ahem. Brecht is a great example of a writer who both accepted and undermined conventions, breaking the fourth wall, inserting historical monologues in the middle of the “action,” and so on, always trying to remind the audience they are not merely passive recipients of the experience.
I guess some of my concern is the fact that, in our current environment, so much of what makes a novel like Moby Dick fascinating would be excised for the sake of pacing or whatnot. The demands of the marketplace tacitly (sometimes not so tacitly) shape what can be said. This isn’t new, I realize, but that simply means no one’s come up with a sound solution to the problem.
Hi David, WHAT IS TRUTH? What is your truth and mine? If all of us are writing the same story, there certainly are variations, because of the human condition. Because of what we choose to see. Morality can often be at the core of fiction…but watching film and theatre today, it is often the writer’s goal to abuse morality, go another way. I’m not asking for the Ten Commandments! I’m eager to read invention as it flows from another’s brain. I can accept or reject with my own free will. But see…your posts always get me thinking, wondering…thanks.
Thanks, Elizabeth.
Coming from a math background, I have a rather specific idea of truth (which is why returning to number theory has been so rewarding). And in the sciences, despite the fact our mortal and time-restricted perspective automatically makes all our observations and measurements provisional, there is still, given honest scrutiny, the ability to justify our belief that much of what we have come to regard as scientific fact is indeed, if not “true,” at least reliable. Whether that will remain the case thousands or millions of years from now …
Now, once we step into the realm of fiction, that solid world of reliable fact becomes decidedly fluid. We instead must rely on the authority of the writer, which reveals itself in many ways, voice especially.
I’ve just been reflecting long and hard of late concerning my teaching of craft, and I’m at that stage where I wonder if I’m really providing the service I think I am, or not buying in to the misleading assumption that there are proper ways to go about things. I use the phrase “tricks of the trade” to remind myself the point isn’t to conform to some conventional list of guidelines that will “make your writing catch fire” or whatever. Rather, it’s to help aspiring writers get a little closer to what good writing does: ask difficult questions about what it means to be a human being and offer some honest answers.
BTW: it turns out I know your cousin, Kate Pfordresher. She’s been a dear friend of mine since high school, and I was there on Martha’s Vineyard when she met her husband-to-be, Jim. (I also took her to the junior cotillion at Smith when Jim couldn’t be there.)
Wow, David, thanks so much for telling me this. I love connections. Kate is brilliant, so I claim someone of that bloodline…cousins…and also Martha’s Vineyard, where my eldest daughter was married. Love it there. And as always, thanks for lighting up my brain with your posts. You help make me a better writer and thinker.
Where to begin, David? It seems a long time ago when I first started hearing the evening talking heads speaking about this narrative or that one, or a weaponized narrative, or a colonialized narratological takeover of something or other. How amazing that an ethical writer for TV (in this case not an oxymoron, Craig Mazin) must resort to a podcast to explain where it is in his documentary he sacrificed truth-telling to storytelling.
It’s always about selling something. Here at Writer Unboxed, some posts seem (to me) to sell themselves by going into “granular detail” to tell a story taken from the writer’s personal life, before the point or message finally swings into view. All of this can be laid at the feet of those who have tapped “brain science.” The objective is to exploit techniques that hold attention and develop belief. None of this would be so serious if a process of diminished capacity for attention and critical thinking weren’t so advanced. This applies to both the storyteller and the reader.
If I sound both overly confident and gloomy in my opinion, so be it. I write novels, and my aim is to try to tell stories in which I do my best to avoid cliche and genre (hate the word) tropes. That’s about the best I can do in the moral fiber department.
Thanks again for taking on another hard topic worthy of your keen ability to make it matter.
Thanks, Barry. Yeah, there’s something creepy and quasi-fascist, imho, about all the neuroscientific psycho-babble going in to why and how people read. It takes the tired old “Ten Ways to Make Your Prose Sizzle” into the realm of electrodes and lab rats. “What brain imaging tells us about Pride and Prejudice!” And at the risk of setting fire to my own house, I find a lot of that stuff generated solely so people who write books or give workshops on the craft of writing can keep on keeping on. I’m having some rather deep and troubling talks with myself on that score lately; this post is an outgrowth of that.
But your comment about avoiding tropes is spot on. I’m reminded of Robert Stone’s simple advice: “Resist the obvious.” Or what Miles Davis told the member of his bands: “I don’t care what you play, as long as it’s not a cliché.” Easy to say, hard to do.
Hi, David. There’s lots to unpack in your post. I’m reminded of Elmore Leonard’s advice to leave out the parts people skip. Fiction writers focus on the most dramatic elements of a story— the conflict and challenges that the protagonist must overcome— not the routine acts of daily life. As a journalist, I adhered to a high standard for truth, accuracy, and fairness. As a fiction writer, I write to gain a better understanding of the world around me. That doesn’t mean accuracy and truth don’t matter. Quite the opposite. We shape the events in our stories in service to the overall “truth” we wish to tell. I don’t know what we do about the other issue raised in your post: the firehose of anti-science, anti-education disinformation that a large percentage of our population seems to believe. It’s a threat to our democracy and we must speak out against it and correct the record whenever we can.
Thanks, Chris. Yeah, my wife was just lamenting that a recent poll showed at least 12% of the US Population thinks climate change is a hoax. I responded that 17% think Joan of Arc was Noah’s wife.
A number of my favorite writers have worked as journalists — Martha Gelhorn and her husband, Ernie somebody, as well as Camus, Robert Stone, Pete Dexter, Laura Lippmann and her husband, David Somebody Else … Simon, right, almost forgot. I think that their respect for facts that can or need to be confirmed, and their respect for real people, animates their writing, and lends their work real authority.
BTW: Elmore Leonard’s famous article on writing is often quoted only in part, or misquoted. Here are the two relevant parts that deal with “leaving out what people tend to skip;” the first concerns prologues and talks about Sweet Thursday by Steinbeck, then second circles back to the same book:
There is a prologue in John Steinbeck’s ”Sweet Thursday,” but it’s O.K. because a character in the book makes the point of what my rules are all about. He says: ”I like a lot of talk in a book and I don’t like to have nobody tell me what the guy that’s talking looks like. I want to figure out what he looks like from the way he talks. . . . figure out what the guy’s thinking from what he says. I like some description but not too much of that. . . . Sometimes I want a book to break loose with a bunch of hooptedoodle. . . . Spin up some pretty words maybe or sing a little song with language. That’s nice. But I wish it was set aside so I don’t have to read it. I don’t want hooptedoodle to get mixed up with the story.”
What Steinbeck did in ”Sweet Thursday” was title his chapters as an indication, though obscure, of what they cover. ”Whom the Gods Love They Drive Nuts” is one, ”Lousy Wednesday” another. The third chapter is titled ”Hooptedoodle 1” and the 38th chapter ”Hooptedoodle 2” as warnings to the reader, as if Steinbeck is saying: ”Here’s where you’ll see me taking flights of fancy with my writing, and it won’t get in the way of the story. Skip them if you want.”
”Sweet Thursday” came out in 1954, when I was just beginning to be published, and I’ve never forgotten that prologue.
Did I read the hooptedoodle chapters? Every word.
“The Land of Green Ginger” by Noel Langley begins:
May Fortune preserve you, gentle reader, may your days be filled with constant joys, and may my story please you, for it has no other purpose.
It’s a children’s story set in fairy-tale world, but isn’t pleasing the reader the only purpose of fiction?
Trouble is, different readers are pleased by different things – cosy niceness, familiarity, exotic unfamiliarity, eroticism, imaginative escapism, validation of their unpleasant experiences…. And some authors write to tell their own experiences, to shock, to amuse, to educate …
I guess the job of publishers is to match them up.
Well said, Hilary. I am reminded of poor Scheherazade, whose stories were indeed intended to please — so she could escape being murdered for another day.
Indeed, different readers are pleased by different things, which is why I find discussions of “what the reader wants” so scathingly stupid. It always says far more about the speaker than the fabled, enigmatic, irascible “reader.”
Thanks for chiming in.
You’ve really made us think today, David! I am not certain it’s possible to define what we mean by “truth” in fiction, though I do believe it exists. Perhaps truth has something to do with the writer effacing herself when necessary so that the narrative can begin to express what it wants to say. That sounds more mystical than I mean it to be. But it seems to me that a story has its own inner logic that is “true” and that I’m always listening hard to try to find it. What I personally don’t like is our modern tendency to cram big clumps of moralism into stories, as if our moral truths are self-evident to the world. In other words, I like there to be competing voices and battling ideas in the stories I read and write. Perhaps this kind of multiplicity can free the narrative from some of the constraints you discussed? Years ago I taught George Bernard Shaw’s “Pygmalion” to high school students. Multiplicity, as I recall, was exactly what Shaw was after in his discussion plays in which everyone is right–and everyone is wrong. Which is why “Pygmalion” emphatically rejects the fairytale romance between Higgins and Eliza (though the romantic film version “My Fair Lady” won out in the public imagination, of course, and screwed up Shaw’s method).
That’s a great point, S.K. Leaving the decision as to what is “true,” or whom or what to believe, to readers is one of the best ways to engage them. Shaw was excellent at that, despite his own somewhat imperious political leanings. Major Barbara is another good example (which was likewise bowdlerized by the film version).
This comment is empty. Another goof on my part. Sorry.
There’s a big part in my last novel about celebrities who have done something which may be interpreted various ways – and their need to get in front of the narrative, to set the parameters, before someone else tells it differently.
Followed by a grand gesture on a world stage.
Followed by a completely different set of events, which are going to be VERY hard to explain after that grand gesture.
It leaves everything in a royal mess before the third volume of my mainstream trilogy – and I don’t want to miss any of the delicious options that provides.
We are, some of us, aware we are being manipulated by the media – and sometimes powerless to fight their ‘narrative’ – which got out first. ‘The real truth’ can take a long time to catch up – and even then isn’t necessarily right. It is rare for things to be so well documented they can’t be tweaked.
In writing fiction, this is part of the author’s fun. In real life it can be terrifying.
Thank you, David! Oh how this needed to be written! In recent years I have been dismayed at the number of articles on popular sites such as ‘10 ways to be a best-selling writer’ and dismayed at the numerous writing coaches who preach they have the key to open the doors to successful publishing. Has writing really been reduced to pumping thumbs-up numbers?
Thanks for the mention of Tim O’Brien. I taught that story for many years in a college English course. I paired the class discussion with another war story (Hemingway, I think) and appreciated the lively reactions. O’Brien’s buffalo scene always made its point in a most significant way.