Fiction is not lying. That’s not what I’m talking about when I talk about the lies some writers tell. And writers aren’t liars for writing fiction. Far from it. They’re telling a sort of truth that is purer than any fact one might produce from experimentation and research.
How so? They’ve told you in advance that this is fiction. Therefore what you are reading is what is understood to be their thoughts, their creation. What could be purer or truer than that?
Now I must apologize
I, dear reader, have deliberately mislead you. This is actually a post about editing. Well, it’s also about lying.
Some years ago, about a hundred I’d say, I was attending a writing class. One of my classmates was excited to have the teacher read her work. The teacher accepted the offered piece of writing and with the other hand picked up a red pencil. The student’s face went from happy to incredulous to angry in the space of a few seconds, the time it took for the red marks to start.
The student was convinced that the work was perfect.
It was not!
I’m not naming names here, but the student wasn’t me if that narrows it down at all. My moment came when I read something and started editing it only to find it was something I had written over two years earlier. I went from thinking “This person needs to go back to school.” to realizing that we all think we write what perfect prose, and we don’t.
Fortunately I had the opportunity to learn this in the privacy of my own company. My anger and my shame were not on display. Unfortunately I’m to much of a loud mouth to keep my anger and shame to myself, and now I’ve told all of you.
So the student may as well have been me. In fact the student is all of us.
So what?
I own a kindle. Yes, I know, I seem to be wandering here, bear with me won’tcha? I own a kindle e-reader AND I’m cheap. Well, maybe not so much cheap as not able to afford to buy all the books I’d like to own. What does this add up to? Did you know there are free books on Amazon?
Sadly, if you want new books and you’re willing to pay nothing for them, you get to see some of the worst literature ever penned. In fact, calling much of it literature is an insult to the collective writings of humanity.
I’m a bit of a Sci-Fi fan and much of the stuff I’ve been exposed to for free is little more than the imaginings of a pubescent boy penned late at night alone in his room. The fact that the pubescent boy is in his thirties, forties, or fifties is even more of an embarrassment. The work is full of delusions of self grandeur and plot errors that were written that way because fixing them would inconvenience trying to get to the sexy part where the hero wins it all and gets the girl.
Vanity publishing is not everyone’s friend
The idea that you can write something and then publish it without the expense of editors or publishers may seem like a boon to many, but that means there are also no required checks on quality.
And that means that I keep finding free books on Amazon that, as previously mentioned, insult the written word in the same way the AMC Pacer insulted the automobile industry, in the same way haute couture insults fashion, in the same way … well, you get the idea.
Maybe it’s my fault for downloading free books, but I’m not downloading free books because they’re free, I’m downloading them because they are the ones I can justify the expense of. If there were no free books, I’d be getting the ones that cost a dollar or two.
So …
My problem with the lies some writers tell is not with the ones they tell to me, that’s just fiction and sometimes it’s good.
My problem is with the lies they tell themselves, starting with the one that goes, “I’m too good at this to need an editor.”
None one any of us are.
