Truth Telling

For best results, maybe throw in a vampire

Hi Friends,

It’s been a few weeks since you’ve heard from me, but I figured we both needed a little break. I hope you’re enjoying the last precious days of summer wherever you are. I’ve been busy. I played a show for the first time in almost two years and I’ve been making steady progress on the new novel. I’d love to hear what you’ve been up to, so please say hi in the comments and let’s catch up.

The subject of this week’s post is something I’ve thought about a lot over the years but struggled to articulate because on the surface, it’s completely obvious. Whether you’re a writer or not, I think this piece might resonate with you as you think about the role truth-telling plays in your life. Thanks for being here and for supporting my work. I couldn’t do it without you.

Telling the truth is hard. I believe that’s why we invented stories—to take the edge off of truth, to slow the speed of the wrecking ball.

In stories, we can cast truth in an ensemble with supporting characters like motivation, intent, and regret, and place it in a scene with atmosphere, dimension, shadow, and light. Staged in a story, the truth can be more powerful, more affecting, and more real than it might be otherwise.

There’s a symbiotic relationship between story and truth. As truth needs the ingredients of a story to be ingested and digested, story needs to be grounded in truth for it to be a little more satisfying than a wand of cotton candy. Truth in fiction is odorless, colorless, and has no dimension, yet we know when it’s there and we know when it's missing. I can’t speak to memoir because I’ve not written one, but I suspect the author’s relationship to the truth is considerably more fraught.

This past weekend, I spent three days in the mountains with two of my oldest friends, friends I experienced so many of my firsts with, friends I loved like brothers. We were bandmates before any of us knew how to properly play, much less perform, and we learned how to do both together. In time, college, girlfriends, politics, and geographical distance eventually dissolved the bond we thought was unbreakable. The three of us hadn’t been in the same room together for nearly 35 years. In all that time, I’ve been the one to keep the pilot light on. I’ve been the unwitting go-between for my two friends. When a childhood friend of ours was diagnosed with ALS last year and all three of us failed to see him before the end, I vowed we would get together, so I planned this weekend. For months I worried our reunion would be a disaster. Forget being able to truly connect and repair our trio; I was afraid we wouldn’t even be able to sustain a conversation. I’m happy to say I worried for nothing.

There was so much to catch up on that we stayed up late into the night just talking as we sat on the deck of the cabin looking out over the Blue Ridge Mountains—the mountains where all of us were born and raised. Between the cross-fade of the sun setting and the cacophonous din of cicadas tuning up, we sipped bourbon and shared the stories of our lives, occasionally interjecting a memory, a phrase, or an inside joke from our sixteen-year-old lives.

For the more difficult conversations, the harder truth-telling, we sat in Adirondack chairs staring out at the stars or into a fire, rarely, if ever, making eye contact. The act of sharing our truths, especially those that have left bruises and even scars, is delicate work. It requires a cloak. Maybe that cloak is liquid courage or just physical exhaustion. It could be darkness or the absence of eye contact. For our purposes, it was all of these, and it worked. We reestablished our friendship and vowed we wouldn’t let more than a year pass before we got together again.

I was reminded of what I’ve always known: telling the truth demands some distance.

I believe fiction, at the height of its powers, achieves this magic trick. It’s why I’ve always loved reading fiction and why I’m drawn to write it. In a great novel, a character you might normally shun in the course of your real life can illuminate a deep insecurity you have but were never able to recognize, much less accept. Your private prejudices and bias, your secret desires and longing, the deep truths you’ve buried, can be exhumed, examined, and understood as you sit at the bar of a busy restaurant reading a John Irving novel. Stories have the power to change us because we let them in. We let them into our innermost thoughts in ways we would not permit even our closest friends.

As a writer, I made a discovery about ten years ago. It wasn’t overnight. It wasn’t conscious. It’s only looking back at the evolution of my novels that I can see the obvious inflection point. When I started out, my drive was to render the world I’ve experienced and observed throughout my life with as much depth and accuracy as possible. To me, that was the purpose: to create real characters in real settings, working through real problems. Ironically, the shows and movies and even books I was drawn to played well outside this fence. Aliens, zombies, vampires, time-travelers, mystics, and wizards took center stage when I was idly searching for something to dive into. I was looking for escape. My real life was hard enough at the time, so the last thing I wanted to do was immerse myself in a family drama full of real-life heartbreak. But a story that’s just moving a vampire through a cardboard set, like a child playing with an action figure, didn’t do the trick. There needed to be a grounding in real life. There needed to be real stakes (not just wooden ones!). In short, there needed to be truth behind the mask.

It occurred to me that the truth-telling power of stories can be more effective—slip past the reader’s vigilant gatekeeper—when there’s the distraction of a speculative element. It doesn’t have to be a vampire. It could be a character with an unexplained psychic ability or a setting in a near-future world where the looming, distant threats of climate change or AI have finally come to roost. At first, introducing these elements felt awkward, like me trying to dance. I felt silly. What would people think? But I remembered some singing advice I got years ago when recording with a well-known producer who happened to be a singer with a very distinctive voice.

“You don’t have to be so damned sincere. You can put on a mask—throw some gravel in there or even whisper a line. It’s still you, just a version that delivers the goods.”

What he meant was clear: when you’ve stepped onto the stage to perform, you must understand that the audience has already given you permission to break all the rules. In fact, if you play it safe, you’ve failed. They’ve come to be moved, to witness something they can’t in their job or marriage. I try to remember this anytime I get self-conscious about writing a particular character or scene that makes me uncomfortable.

The trick is finding the balance. I think every writer who’s any good is constantly making crazy choices and then stepping back to look at them. It can’t be all gas and no brake. The simplest way I can describe this process is to compare it to what a carpenter does with a level. Every time you build a new scene, put words into a character’s mouth, you hold the level up and see where the bubble is. Sometimes that little fucker is completely gone, and you know you’ve gone too far. That’s when you rip the board out and try again. Sometimes the bubble is just a hair outside the line, and you get your hammer out to tap the board a couple of times to true things up. The level is the truth-o-meter.

I’m excited to be halfway through my sixth novel I’m now calling Daedalia, and I’m looking forward to sharing it with you. Hopefully, I’m getting better at all the things I’ve described in this post. There’s always the fear that I won’t be able to do the magic trick again, that my level will be broken, or my story won’t be animated with enough truth to make it worthy of your time. I will leave you with a lyric from one of my favorite songwriters who captures more in this verse than I’ve managed in an entire essay.

I know the whole truth there is horrible
It’s better if you take a little at a time
Too much and you are not portable
Not enough and you’ll be making happy rhymes
-John Gorka from Gypsy Life