Become a Benevolent Liar: Write What You Don’t Know
I’ve been reading a wonderful book, and it’s called Wonderbook (apt name) by Jeff Vandermeer.
It’s a glossy tome about writing fiction that’s brimming with illustrations and odd ends that are unlocking parts of my brain typical writing craft books don’t touch—much less tickle.
Chapter 1 is all about inspiration. Where does it come from? How do you fabricate fiction from the everyday moments of life?
I want to nose my way into each creative writer’s brain to see how this happens for them. And I got a peek into a few.
Legos of unreality
The book doesn’t exactly use the term Legos (that’s my embellishment) but the idea is this:
Writers take inspiration and ideas from their lives
They deconstruct and deform this reality into Lego blocks of unreality
They play with these Legos to arrange a new reality through fiction
A couple authors quoted express this theme of turning the real → unreal → fiction that feels real.
Junot Diaz:
I’ve never been able to write directly about things that happen to me: I need to deform them in ways to make them strange to me, I need to change them enough so that I can ‘play’—invent freely. My art begins when I stop trying to be faithful to my life…
Haruki Murakami:
It’s not that I’m trying to introduce into the story surrealistic things and situations that I became aware of. I’m just trying to portray things that are real to me, myself, a little more realistically. However, the harder I try to realistically portray real things, the more the things that appear in my work have a tendency to become unreal. To put it another way, by viewing it through an unreal lens, the world looks more real.
Karen Lord on Mary Shelley’s personal life appearing to feed into Frankenstein:
She fractured what she had known and scattered the small pieces until the picture no longer resembled her real life. Then she took those fragments of experience and reassembled them into a newly imagined creation.
Write what you know? No.
Jeff offers a counterpoint to this mantra-like advice: Write what interests you.
“You can always find out what you do not know, but you can’t fake that spark of curiosity that comes with being interested in something.”
He calls writers benevolent liars (I rather like this moniker), especially in speculative fiction genres like fantasy and sci-fi, where they must convince the reader of their expertise despite their lack of it.
You can’t know what it’s like to ride a dragon. But you can elicit the awe and fear and adrenaline of the experience to a degree that it feels real—feels like you know.
Becoming a benevolent liar
I can’t be the only one who mourns the fact that I’ll never ride a dragon. But great fiction gives us a taste of the impossible and keeps the yearning alive. (And oh, the yearning is delicious.)
Your reality is already stuffed with sufficient source material, if you take the time to observe and capture. A snippet of an eavesdropped conversation. How you felt when you realized the tooth fairy was a myth. Yesterday's disappointing lunch.
These experiences hold kernels of truth that can be deformed and reformed into fantastical reality. And that fantasy can feel real and hold truths that transcend nonfiction.
A few thought experiments for aspiring or practicing liars:
What snippets of your reality could be deconstructed for play, without pressure to stay true to original context?
What fictional reality are you trying to construct—and do you have the necessary Lego blocks? How can you source more from your reality while allowing for their transformation into better building materials?
What color is each particular Lego? How do you know?
Where is being true to reality holding back the truth in your writing?
