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 .                                                                                                                   

Can Historical Fiction be True?

While preparing to print advance review copies of a historical novel I recently completed, I asked my followers for help fine tuning the title and cover design. On the cover was the tag line: "The True Tale of an Early American Haunting." 

A follower raised the bane of fiction writers who base their work on historical events. She wrote to me: "If it's a true story it is not a novel."

My response was less concise.

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Dear Follower:

 

You have served up a delicious morsel for discussion: What is “true” in Historical Fiction, or, can historical fiction ever be true? I think so, for the same reasons I don’t think so called true accounts of history are true. Here are six things to ponder.

 

1. Everything, Everywhere, All at Once? In historical fiction the reader is always wondering which parts are true, even as the reader assumes most of the telling is fiction. Why is that? Because it’s impossible to tell a completely true story if by “true” we mean all of the facts in the true chronological order...especially, if many of the micro facts occurred simultaneously and were somehow co-dependent on each other. Even to record all of the physical events and their related minutia would require too large of a book or too long of a movie...to think nothing of the internal and invisible thoughts, values, and motivations that caused the physical events.  It seems to me that to tell a absolutely true story would require an accurate narrative about all such things, in every conceivable crevice, all at once. Of course, this is ludicrous in a practical sense. So, what really is true?

 

2. Perspective. Since No. 1 is impractical, if not impossible, we, as writers, favor our perspective or bias which can result in a story that some would find totally fiction. The “facts” collected by different people, from different perspectives, even though they are all eye witnesses, always interpret or remember the “true facts” differently. We see this everyday in reports of current events and in scientific interpretations of so called “objective” and “natural” observations, and if we include recent understandings of quantum theory, reality gets a bad name real fast.

 

In researching the particular historical novel I recently completed I collected over 30 (more like 100) different narratives of the same historical event—some whole, most anecdotal. Some accounts were written by witnesses, others collected from second and third hand or generational sources. In every case they were all different. So what was “true?” It’s hard to say, although the core of the story (the main plot points) are similar.

 

In my “fictional” writing, I included as faithful as I could all the documented scraps of the history and wove them together with my imagination so they fit. In such a manner I told a true story...at least my imaginative mind thinks so. 

 

3. The Victors Write the History. We must remember that most of the time, with notable exceptions, it is the "victors" that write the history. Do the victors always tell the truth? No. There is bias is everything that is written. This is well known in so called "documentary" films. There is ALWAYS A POINT OF VIEW. 

 

4. Fiction Pretends to Tell the Truth. In all fiction the storyteller pretends to tell the truth by writing in the imperative mood. That goes for everything from the dialogue to the title, to the tag line. In other words the storyteller, with regard to the physical events described, is lying. But the reader recognizes that or should. If the reader understands Historical Fiction as true history, then the mistake is on the reader’s part, not the author whose intention is to be entertaining. 

 

5. “Non-Fiction" History is the Biased Retelling of Others. All historians writing about events to which they were NOT an eye-witness, are simply retelling what other historians have told. For instance, Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich while a comprehensive account of Nazi Germany, is the retelling form a hundred accounts of voluminous works written by others. Although the current historian is wanting to tell the truth, his truth is only as good as the previous historians have handled the facts. Consequently, a great deal of history is “presumption” or imagined by the historian. 

 

6. What is True is Deeper than the Physical Story. The more important aspect of truth in storytelling is the internal moral truth that the story conveys. In a classical sense the conveyance, or story form, is called a myth. While the outward physical story is fiction (about a donkey, a goose, and a frog talking to each other like human beings), the meaning of the story (the moral premise) is true.  This is the subject of my earlier book, The Moral Premise: Harnessing Virtue and Vice for Box Office Success.  The movie, Armageddon, about Bruce Willis traveling to an asteroid to blow it up before it can destroy Earth, is fiction...unless you know someone who has done that. But the moral premise of that story, about the sacrifices a good father makes for the future sake of his children, is true. 

 

So, in these ways historical fiction can be as true as any documented history:

 

A. The story threads the available historical documentation together and relates them in a fundamentally cogent and reasonable way consistent with the time period. I’m sure many historical fiction writers believe that their telling is as true as any so called history text book written from a biased point of view...which they all are.

 

B. The story is about a true moral premise, e.g. that natural law exists and if it’s not followed, hell is to pay.

A Convincing Impossibility Makes the Best Story

This is a post about STORY HOOKS that could have appeared in my review of WARRIOR. 

Also, Hooks and Log Lines go together. So here's a link to my post on creating good Log Lines.

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I encourage my students to start developing their stories with a nearly impossible physical hook, and then as the story takes shape to stick close to the psychological truth of natural law.  Taking a line from comedy development, a good story will "tell a lie that tells the truth". The LIE is the physical hook (it's an impossibility). But the TRUTH is the moral motivation that drives the action. The two together ensure you will engage your audience.

Storytellers are typically allowed only one hook per story. Everything else must be true in a physical sense. But EVERYTHING in the psychological world must be true. No moral hook is allowed. 

So, with that here's a quote from the production notes of WARRIOR written by the director Gavin O'Conner and Anthony Tambakis.  Emphasis mine.

O'Connor's original, enduring story idea was one about two brothers who haven't seen each other in fourteen years and end up fighting for the world championship, both coming up as extreme underdogs. Although on paper the story might sound farfetched,  the door to the room where Anthony Tambakis and Gavin wrote bore a sing with the Aristotle quote: "A convincing impossibility is better than an unconvincing possibility". To them, this mean that in the world of fiction, anything is possible if it's told truthfully.

The impossibility is the physical hook, and to that O'Connor and Tambakis emphases the importance of telling the story truthfully. So, if I can channel Aristotle and O'Conner here's what I'll put outside my door the next time I write a story:

A convincing impossibility told truthfully

is better than an unconvincing possibility told falsely.

BTW: the original Aristotle quote from POETICS found in my Samuel Henry Butcher based translation is this, [with an editorial correction by me]:

The poet should prefer probable impossibilities to improbable possibilities. ... Once the [impossibility] has been introduced and an air of likelihood imparted to it, we must accept it in spite of the absurdity. (ARISTOTLE: On Man in the Universe. Classics Club Edition. Walter J. Black, Inc., Roslyn, N.Y.. p. 439).

In other words, a possible story that ignores the natural laws of morality is no match for an impossibility story told with moral integrity.

And now a word from a pretty good story writer:
 

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Amended 5/28/13

Critics of Hollywood often point to the a motion picture's overt exaggeration of character trait or story arc. The claim is that the exaggeration is not "real" and therefore invalid. Aside from the boredom factor of watching the story about a man who shops for groceries and comes home to fix dinner as a regular occurrence with associated drama, the criticism ignores the purpose of stories in culture, which I cover elsewhere.

In talking about hooks and story impossibilities, here's the seminal quote (emphasis mine):

In general, the impossible must be justified by reference to artistic requirements, or to the higher reality, or to received opinion. With respect to the requirements of art, a probable impossibility is to be preferred to a thing improbable and yet possible. Again, it may be impossible that there should be men such as Zeuxis painted. 'Yes,' we say, 'but the impossible is the higher thing; for the ideal type must surpass the reality.' To justify the irrational, we appeal to what is commonly said to be. In addition to which, we urge that the irrational sometimes does not violate reason; just as 'it is probable that a thing may happen contrary to probability.'

[POETICS by Aristotle (translated by S.H.Butcher). XXV. Critical Objections brought against Poetry, and the principles on which they are to be answered. http://www.sacred-texts.com/cla/ari/poe/poe26.htm]

 A couple of terms jump out when I look at the original. "higher reality," "Impossibility," and "type"; which reminds me of this:

To the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large startling figures. 

[Flannery O'Connor]

A story's "hook" is all this, and is a necessity for a story to connect. Stories need impossible hooks. These are brought to mind by the concept of type. Types shout. Types draw startling figures. Types, when done properly (like similes and metaphors) do get people's attention because they are not natural, surreal, other-worldly, interesting, and out of the mundane. 

The concept of "type" is worth underscoring. "Types" are like figures of speech. Types exaggerate a particular trait or facet of the story for the sake of underscoring an attribute of the moral or point. Noah taking eight souls on board an ark (along with a host of animals) while all other animal life perishes, is an exaggeration compared to what it foreshadows — Christian baptism, in which no one dies. The same is true of Moses leading the Children of Israel through the Red Sea at the expense of Pharaoh's army. That story also foreshadows Christian baptism. To get the point across, the flood and the Red Sea crossing both sound like impossibilities, and thus accentuate the higher and more important, but less dramatic, thing. They becomes surreal stories that seem to surpass reality, in order to highlight the attributes of the reality. They are thus TYPES.

When Sandra Bullock won her Academy Award for acting in THE BLIND SIDE she thanked the Tuohy's for allowing the them to "exaggerate" their lives. The exaggeration was necessary to convey the finer points of Michael Orr's and Lee Anne Tuohy's lives.

Ralph McInerny and the Wisdom of Fiction

From Daniel McInerny at his blog HIGH CONCEPTS a eulogy of this prolific father, Ralph McInerny, perhaps the most prolific Catholic author of fiction, non-fiction, and philosophy of the last few hundred years.  Click HERE for the entire post at Daniel's blog.

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In Dante and the Blessed Virgin my father articulates a truth that served as one of the most formative principles of his life as both philosopher and writer of fiction. That truth concerns what he follows Aristotle in calling “poetry,” Aristotle’s name for the genus of storytelling, of fiction. About storytelling, my father says this in Dante and the Blessed Virgin:

We become involved in stories because their characters are in some way ourselves. They are our better or worse selves, but not too much the one way or the other. We follow an imagined version of the choices that make up any human life, choices that matter. We are what we do, and characters in a story reveal who they are by their actions and choices. In real life, bounders succeed and the innocent suffer; they do in fiction, too, but the story makes sense of that in a way real life never does. Any story worth reading again will tell us something about the human condition we recognize as true” (21).

Read entire post.