Stories & Lies

I think the key to being a good writer is to be a good liar. All stories are lies, some more convincing than others. 


The key to a good lie is balance.
    
     When telling a lie, detail is crucial - if your lie is vague and insubstantial, no-one will believe a word of it. Names, places, times - all of these must be established, else the lie falls apart. On the other hand, if you present a lie overburdened with detail - exact times, unimportant persons, and other minutiae - these irrelevances will sink the lie. Either the liar will come across as trying to hard, and so the spell shall be broken, or one of the multitude of facts will be contradicted or forgotten along the way, leaving a hole immediately filled with disbelief. Balance!
    
     People want the world to work a certain way. The best liars are the most effective at motivating this desire, but again there is a balance in this manipulation. If the lie is exactly what those being lied to want or expect to hear, They'll get suspicious at the way the liar's story is adhering so exactly to their expectation, at the fact that, even though this is what they wanted, it was not the lie they needed to hear for them to believe. A lie too far-removed from expectation, however, is also going to fail. The listener will meet a version of the world that contradicts with one inside their head - yes, reality does often contradict the world we hold in our heads, but not in overly dramatic way. When people in a lie act in a way that the listener believes that they do not, again suspicion is raised. Balance!

     Linked to the previous point, lies cannot be too like or unlike life. When a lie completely diverts from reality, the deception will be made obvious - if you say that a gorilla stole your car, then it's pretty clear that you're lying. Even if you're slightly more subtle, and  the lie merely departs completely from events as they were, without becoming ridiculous, the realism is lost and the absence of truth will be noted. However, a lie must never be completely devoid of the fantastic - a lie that is too close to the events as they happened will be seen as just slightly off by the listener, and so bee seen as an untruth. Balance and also balance, too.


Stories. Too much information, too many events, the reader is swamped. Too little, the story is hollow. Too run-of-the-mill, the reader is bored. Too trope-less, the reader is uneased and confused. Too removed from reality, the reader sees the fiction in the story. Too like-life and the suspension of disbelief is broken. Can you say, "balance?"

I swear I had a point in all of this, but it's now twenty-five past two in the morning and my brain is rebelling against consciousness.

Sorry I wrote this guff*

Sam D Grover

*Haha, jokes. I'm AMAZING, all I do is pure gold. No apologies, no prisoners, no surrender! 
GSF4LIFE