Truth telling is a tricky business, especially if you do it on paper. In real life, we have the convenience to play with realities in our head. When emotions and experiences are too overbearing or embarrassing, it helps us cope to create some variations of ‘truth’. The most common pretence are excuses and cliches. We make excuses as some kind of personal fact out of thin air, as though it was a real thought, just when the reality doesn’t collide with our self-image or ideas on how things are supposed to be. Cliches are equally bad. And by using a cliche, we hide ourselves behind a mask worn by the many. It requires no thoughts, no self-confrontation, no risk-taking, and so do we become vague lies.
Writing drags us stark-naked to the front. To produce good writing, you have to represent yourself either as something, which is definite and specific, or something else, which is also definite and specific. Writing is an act of choosing to be, and in order to be you have to figure out the fundamentals of mind: what it is that you want to say, why you say it, and how you say it. Maybe we just wanted our voice heard, to vent, to unleash suppressed rancor. Or perhaps we write to know what we really are. There is no better way to see what hides in the fog unless we walk into it and make a little dance.
And there is also the part about revealing too much of ourselves. How much to tell? In what tone? And what if it doesn’t lead to understanding? Stephen King once gave an advice that stuck with me in his book, On Writing: good writing is letting go of fear and affectation. What we should instead be afraid of, is that we don’t show too much of ourselves. Writing is a chance to be bold and leave all words mincing to polite society. It’s a conversation between the self and a blank paper, in an open, free space where appropriacy doesn’t matter. I know how frustrating and depressing it is to not sound like anything we want to be. Perhaps a week has passed, and you are still stuck with the rotten piece which shows no improvement of any kind. But it’s only a reminder to try harder, to admit we are not E.B White after all, and the betrayal was a deliberate attempt of vengeance. That is okay, my friend, because no one is perfect. At the end, at least you get to hear your true voice. Better than shackled, always too scared to think, say, or do the wrong things.
Having the truth acknowledged and specified, we may try create fictions. A short story, a novel, maybe. And now that we see the damned embarrassment and shame won’t go away, it’s a better way to lie. We share with others what we know by having clear in mind the elements that can be altered and buttered up. So in a fiction, we freely make up facts and realities to wrap up the truth in our own idiosyncratic way. I find this process very helpful in my novel writing. By giving my characters voices, thoughts and behaviours I don’t wish to admit much to in real life, I too, give myself the voice that otherwise could have been scaffolded in excuses and cliches.
Siming Lan 