Writers are liars my dear, surely you know that by now?”
― Neil Gaiman, The Sandman, Vol. 3: Dream CountryWhen 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
i like the term 'micro-truths' - it is a good way to depict a writer as everything they write is loosely based on or inspired by the truth. I agree with the Oscar Wilde evidence.
ReplyDeleteSome interesting comparisons between Wilde and Cheever could be drawn here; both men married women with whom they had children and yet found themselves attracted to men at a time when this was considered a transgression of the law. Given the nature of Wilde's subsequent trial and imprisonment, his comparison of untruth with beauty is interesting as it was his (eventual) honesty about his feelings towards younger men that saw him sentenced to hard labour.
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