A Vital Public Service

I am a professional liar.

That statement is true, but it doesn’t sound right, does it? Who would aspire, or even admit, to something like that? The very idea you would pay good money to be lied to seems preposterous, doesn’t it?

While there are many professions based on some form of lying—con artist, lawyer, advertising copywriter, lobbyist, and politician, to name a few—only novelists will tell you we’re lying right up front. If a politician prefaced a speech by saying, “I’m only saying this to get elected,” not many x’s would show up beside her name in the ballot boxes. If a lawyer came right out and said, “My client is guilty as hell, but here’s why he’s innocent,” the conviction rate would sky-rocket. Yet novelists routinely get away with those “any resemblance to persons living or dead” disclaimers in the front of the book. How do we do this? Here’s my theory:

In many ways, novelists are more honest than other professional liars, because most forms of lying are unavailable to us. A novel is, first and foremost, a logical construct. Within it, everything must make perfect sense to be believable.

We can’t lie by omission. The arthritic, octogenarian, cat-lady character must never take out the assassin-for-hire character by suddenly turning into Yoda on page 245. She has to be Yoda, right from the start.

We can’t bluff. Unless we give you a compelling reason for why the laws of gravity have been suspended, the suicidal stockbroker character who leaps off the roof of the Empire State building, damn well better make a convincing splat when he hits 5^th Avenue.

We can only exaggerate under specific conditions, such as simile, metaphor, or hyperbole. The head of any character whose eyes actually did widen to the dimensions of saucers would explode.

These limitations give fiction a Newtonian kind of hyper-reality. Actions generate reactions. Causes always lead to effects. Every character has understandable motivations. Such conditions do not apply in the real world, where our lives are dominated by spastic, seemingly random co-incidence, and people do the most bizarre things for no apparent reason at all.

The only form of lie available to novelists is the bald/bare-faced lie. (So named, if the etymology is correct, because a man who displays his face seems more trustworthy than a man who hides behind a beard, therefore men who shave get away with telling bigger lies. By extension, bearded men, even though they don’t look trustworthy, would actually be more trustworthy. Something to think about, ladies, next time you’re sussing out the talent on datesRus.com.) By making no attempt to disguise what we write as truth, novelists free readers from distracting suspicions about our motives. You know our motives. We want your money. We’re lying to get it.

When you plunk down $15.99 for the latest pack of lies by Famous Author, what you are really doing is holding out your leg to be pulled. You want to sink into a soothing, make-believe world, where everything is more exciting and believable than real life. You want us to help you escape reality. You want to be lied to.

In this sense, novelists perform a vital public service of which we can be justifiably proud. Without us, you’d be trapped in a world of incomprehensible truth, which, as you know, is far stranger than fiction.