Have you been frequenting deadly dietary indulgences (a little alliteration never hurt anyone, thank you very much) like me of late? If you have, this pandemic certainly has done that to the best of us so there is no need to apologize, at least to me, anyhow. For me, my main course has been relatively healthy: Netflix. It’s the far-too-constant side dish that’s the “deadly dietary” part, which, quite frankly, happens to be dill pickle chips (I call them my weapon of choice).
Darn if I can get enough of those salt-lathered little critters. They’re just so tasty. And dilly. And . . . and . . . yes, salty. It makes my heart get all aflutter just thinking about them. (I have no doubt it’s doing other things to my heart too, but those things I try not to think about.)
And so, yes, I refuse to apologize as well.
If you’re shaking your head in disgust, thinking, Ick, dill pickle chips? What a sad, sad lad that Mark is, I’d agree, but come on, nobody’s perfect; we all have our weaknesses. After all, lots of people adore sardines!
But don’t get me wrong; I can’t get enough of the healthy part of my diet either. I’m referring to those true crime documentaries on Netflix. If you’re like me you’ve watched a lot of them lately too. The one common thing I found–thankfully–that rings true in pretty much all of them, especially the shows that lead to actual footage of the bad guy on camera simply doing his thing or being interrogated by police; invariably they turn out to be bad liars. I mean really bad liars.
Yay for the good guys (police)! And maybe those bad liars (criminals) need to find another line of work.
But the good liars I’m talking about here in the title of this blog are a lot different. They’re the lot known as fiction writers and if you’re interested enough to ask, any one of them will tell you that he or she lies for a living. But some of them are plain and simple bad liars. It’s the good liars that write incredibly good fiction. What separates a good liar from a bad one? Naturally there are many things, but what I’m getting at here is the fact that at the heart of a good writer’s fiction there resides a deep-seated truth or truths woven into the fabric of their narrative that they gleaned from their own personal experiences. And it’s these personal truths they use as vehicles to help get to the heart of one or more of life’s truths that they are trying to reveal to their readers within their fictional narrative.
Fiction is about getting at the truth one lie at a time. Kind of. It’s also about suspending the reader’s disbelief. How does the writer do this effectively? He does it by making the narrative believable by using truths from his own life.
Now I’m not a big fan of the science fiction genre. But bless Ray Bradbury’s heart. (To all you naysayers of my “weapon of choice”; I think Ray loved dill pickle chips too, so there.) He was a metaphorical maestro who created fantastical, sci-fi worlds that are hard to believe. But you do believe them. Through much of his fiction you can see he loved his family, had a wonderful childhood, and blended these facts and clearly many of his life experiences into much of his fiction. Just read his story “The Rocket Man.” Very touching. Very believable. And very Bradbury.
Ray Bradbury was a very, very good liar.
I think the same can be said for all of us whether you’re a fiction writer, a financial analyst, or a flycatcher (good work if you can get it). We can’t speak 100% truly and authoritatively about anything unless we’ve gleaned an in-depth knowledge of the subject through our own experiences. Do we read something on the internet that was, apparently, written by a supposed “expert” (let’s be honest, it could have been written by a twelve year old kid posing as a forty year old brilliant legal mind named Hardy Vale, as an example, who gives advice on how NOT to become a bad liar and therefore avoid the defendant’s chair) and suddenly we become an expert in that field too? Hardly. Do we stand at the water cooler on a break and listen to one of our colleagues brag about the record-setting three hundred and twelve flies he caught in Mrs. McGillicuddy’s house just yesterday and, “Oh yeah, she told me her cousin’s best friend’s husband’s massage therapist gave her a tip on a soon-to-skyrocket stock called Apple,” and then promptly rush to the phone, call our broker and instruct him to buy it? (Okay, fine, you got me here; if this was ten years ago, the answer is an emphatic YES.)
But you get my point, right? No? Well here it is:
If you want to be a good liar, don’t take up crime (all criminals are bad liars and I like you and it would break my heart to visit you in jail).
No, that’s not it.
Listen to the Hardy Vales on the internet.
Wrong again.
If you want to be a good liar, eat dill pickle chips like Ray and I. (Okay, this one would be the truth if I could definitively claim to be a good liar like Ray, but since I leave that for my readers to decide . . .)
That’s not it either.
My point is this: Become an expert through life experiences and leave the other stuff outside your realm of expertise to the true experts in their chosen fields. This way, when you spin some good lies, you know firsthand you’ll be talking the undeniable, incontestable truth and nobody will doubt a word you say, especially you.
Now forgive me but I’m a tad hungry: Netflix (The Puppet Master) and my dilly weapon of choice are beckoning!