The Dilemma of Telling the Truth in Fiction

I added to this article 24 Sept 2025 (sw)

Writing true stories is a hard and dicey affair. 

Recently, I experienced a paradoxical rejection of my historical novel (The Wizard Clip Haunting) principally because it features an important aspect of all story telling—paradox. In this case a paradoxical Catholic priest. The renegade (or vice) aspects of this priest's nature are historically documented. At the same time, the heroic (or virtue) aspects of this priest's nature are also historically true. Yet, because the priest plays a central role in the plot of the story, and because he fulfills the critical narrative nature of being human (that is, imperfection, which allows readers to connect with someone like themselves), a few Catholic readers are hesitant to endorse the novel. 

This is nothing new for any writer, especially any historical fiction or non-fiction writer. The problem occurs when the subject of your story touches on the beliefs or ideologies of a social subgroup that clings to those beliefs. It doesn't matter if the subgroup is a religious faith (e.g. Catholicism), a political party, professional organization, or a cadre of social activists. You're sure to upset someone, somehow, sometime...even if you're trying hard to tell the truth.

Although there is something called "objective" truth, to every social subgroup "truth" is relative and "subjective" to a particular worldview. This is what makes telling the truth difficult. 

If you have a character that is morally flawed -- and all characters need to be flawed for the story to connect with audiences -- there will be a subgroup in that audience who will cling to an "ideal" of how a particular character should act. And when your human character, who is part of a subgroup thinks, speaks, or acts in contradiction to the subgroup's ideal, although the character is being true to his human nature, members of the associated subgroup will be offended by what you've written. 

Have you told the truth? To the subgroup you may not have told the truth...about the reader's IDEAL. But you have told the truth about the character's fallible, human character.  The criticism comes because you have not sanitized the subgroup's hero and portrayed he or she as perfect—the central problem of most Christian, so-called "faith films."  My conclusion is that if you were to sanitize the hero and make him or her perfect, you would be lying—a lie historically and a lie about the human condition. 

Thus, writing true stories is a hard and dicey affair.  The best stories that resonate with truth of the human condition do not land solidly in the ideal worldview of good and evil, like the red or black realms of the above Yin-Yang illustration. Rather, the best stories that tell the truth reside on the curved line between the two realms. This thin and chaotic border is where all of humanity exists. The Yin-Yang also illustrates the necessity of mystery and the human soul's quest for perfection—the red and block dots.

Going a Bit Further 

In an early blog post, "Can Historical Fiction Be True?", I described six aspects of telling the truth in fiction.  The second aspect describes how multiple stories of the same event can conflict, simply by the storyteller's different perspective. This touches on the logical fallacy known as AND/OR. where one person may claim that a fact is either A or B, when the truth may actually be A and B.  

While "objective" truth may exist as a heavenly ideal, human "subjective" truth becomes a paradox—an apparent logical contradiction—that through reason can be explained as plausible. As writers of fiction or non-fiction, we all know that successful stories are based on what appears to be a contradiction or great irony. For example,  a man falls in love with a mermaid—something that is logically impossible—but through the skill of storytelling the writer explains how the impossible can be possible, e.g. the hit movie SPASH.  (1984, Ron Howard, Brian Grazer, Tom  Hanks, Daryl Hannah, John Candy & Eugene Levy.)  SPLASH necessarily lies on the Yin-Yang border or the A&B region. 

Thus, all good writing begins with an ironic premise, because the human condition is inherently ironic. At every moment of every day we all want something...but can't have it—the 2 spheres of the Yin-Yang.  Hope turns to despair, our exhausting effort is always in need of a rewrite, love is lost, and "snakes on a plane." All good stories are about the human condition, which by definition is ironic. The good guy is sometimes fallible, and the villain sometimes noble. 

Back to those social subgroups that cling to beliefs or ideologies—where "belief" is a logically defensible, and "ideology" is a logically indefensible. Depending on the topic, the subgroup, and the perspective, what is a belief to one is an ideology to another. Yes, irony is ubiquitous. 

Truth hurts. It's the human condition to avoid being hurt, to attack those who do the hurting, or at least shun such miscreants.  But while we are driven toward the ideal, it's the paradox that gives life intrigue.

How Fiction Tells the Truth and Non-Fiction Cannot.

Fiction is necessary to convey the truth about the human condition. Fiction allows the writer to examine the heart of his characters. Non-Fiction cannot authentically write about what someone is thinking, unless that thinking is confessed and documented—a memoir  But fiction, especially in a novel, can spend hours inside the value system and thoughts of a character. This occurs when the writer delves into the psychological heart and moral truth of natural law and its effect on the character and plot. In so doing, the character, at the hands of the writer, begins to explore how natural moral law and works—not just in the physical realm (like gravity) but also in the psychological realm (like guilt). 

What is worth underscoring here is that ALL physical action is the consequence of moral decision-making. The outward dissection actions take (what we normally document in non-fiction texts), must first originate in the mind, and what non-fiction cannot access. Thus, what happens in the non-fiction sphere is a metaphor for what happened previously in the mental value sphere, the sphere from which memoirs are written and where only fiction can tread.   

And this is what makes stories so alluring to audiences and readers—they get to peek behind the curtain at the truth of what is really going on .