is there any place for the truth in writing fiction?

Writers are liars my dear, surely you know that by now?”

― Neil Gaiman, The Sandman, Vol. 3: Dream Country


When one sits down to write a story in any way shape or form they should never think of it as inventing false events situations and characters. If I could perhaps coin a term I would call them "micro-truths". as they appear on the page and as they occur in the piece all that is there is true. You should not be asking your audience or reader to suspend their disbelief but rather to embrace your micro-truth for as long as they are reading or watching. So they may say that writers are liars. But writers can never call themselves as such. We merely invent micro truths.

In Oscar Wilde's the decay of lying he states that the true nature of art is "the telling of beautiful untrue things"
Wilde being a romantic at heart wrote this essay as a protest against the trends of literature in his time becoming too focused on real life and real people. His argument was that one should write as one wishes about the world and that eventually life would imitate art. The best message this essay can give to the writers of today is that they should not feel they have to write about the world as everyone see's it but write from one's own viewpoint. Others may disagree but in my humble opinion the best way to write is to reject other's reality and substitute your own

How is it that I became a writer?

I have been writing shot stories poems and various other bits and pieces since I was around 12. But I never once considered myself a writer until recently. In my childhood I always thought of writers as people one would never even see or meet. Most of the writers whose work I read where dead and those that where alive where always being talked about excitedly by the adults around me. It almost felt sometimes that writers where  merely names on the front of books that someone had invented a personality around. Being a writer never seemed to me something that real people did. I thought i was merely having fun by imitating what had come before me.

But as I reached college and university  I became more and more aware that writer's did exist. not only that but they could sometimes even be fairly ordinary if not dull. suddenly the mystique was gone. but knowing that writers where not all that special did not upset me. Rather it made me think that if being a writer is something that these people could manage then why not me? Maybe one day I would be a name on a book that someone might pick up and read believing the author to be a wonderfully talented fellow. They would never know that the person who wrote that book once spent 4 hours playing brickbreaker on his phone