Hey storytellers. This is the first installment in a two-part series about the blurry (but important) line between making things up and telling the truth.
There’s a lot to explore when it comes to this topic, so if it sparks any thoughts or reflections on your end, feel free to hit that reply button and let me know what’s on your mind!
Also, before we dive in, a talk on storytelling I recorded for the UX Research Collective is going live on Tuesday. I’ll be doing a realtime Q&A at 12pm eastern that day for anyone interested in checking it out!
Find out more info and add the event to your calendar here.
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Sometimes I reflect on the fact that I make stuff up for a living.
That’s a little flippant, but not inaccurate. When it comes to marketing writing, there’s often data driving the choices you make, both on the audience and the product side. And I try to be ethical in my work and not mislead donors or consumers. Misleading rarely works in the long run anyway.
But when it comes to crafting the institutional narrative that ties it all together, there is a bit of gut feeling involved. And a lot of imagination.
On the creative writing side, the stuff I’ve completely made up includes, but is not limited to, an Iowa town, an extremely exciting soccer game, at least one hundred people, a fictional tree species, a religion, a planet, and a raw material that happened to be extremely convenient for a particular novel’s plot.
One of the principles of revision I learned while getting my MFA was to ask yourself, is it true yet? If the answer was no, you needed to keep rewriting. I think about this a lot because it makes it so clear that there’s a difference between something being made-up and being a lie.
Has a book or a film or another piece of art ever given you butterflies? Not because it was a romantic scene or because that actor you love walked onscreen. (Though that’s fun too!) But just because a deep part of you said, Yes. That. To me, this butterfly feeling is something inside you responding to truth.
Certain turns of phrase, character interactions, or observations about the world just feel so right. It could be Mary Oliver describing “the muscle of the wind” in fall. Or the potter slowly opening up to Tree-Ear in Linda Sue Park’s A Single Shard. Or Uncle Iroh believing in Prince Zuko no matter what. And always being ready with a warm cup of tea.
One of the moments I love most with my own writing is when I give myself butterflies. (If that sounds like a literary flex, I guess I’m guilty, but also it took like 15 years of working on my writing before that happened, so I think I earned my flexing lol.)
I find that these butterflies happen when, through revision after revision, I get closer to the core of some emotion or observation about what it’s like to be human. The butterflies really appreciate when the answer to Is it true yet? is the closest it can possibly be to yes.
This moment can be something small, like remembering what it felt like to kick the tops of dandelions when you were a kid and notice the way the flower snapped straight from the stem. Or it can be something big, like the slow realization a friendship isn’t right for you anymore, and wondering how you’re possibly going to say goodbye.
In a novel, the vehicle for these truths is a cast of fictional characters. There’s a tension there, but maybe that’s part of it.
And one of the things I love and find endlessly fascinating is how all these people being completely made-up doesn’t make any of it less true.
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So it’s important for storytellers to hold in their head that things can be made up and also be true. It’s also really important to remember that something can be not made up, but also be a lie.
I thought about this the other day while reading a summary of some recent research on previous pandemics and epidemics, including the story many of us learned in school about the role epidemics played in the colonization of the Americas.
This part was particularly interesting:
“According to the “Virgin Soil” theory, the epidemics were so destructive because “the populations at risk have had no previous contact with the diseases that strike them and are therefore immunologically… defenceless,” as the psychiatrist David Jones writes in the William & Mary Quarterly. The theory is still widespread, often devolving into vague claims that indigenous people had “no immunity” to the new epidemics. By now we know that the lack of immunity played a role, but mostly early on. Current research instead emphasizes an interplay of influences, for the most part triggered by Europeans: slavery, forced labor, wars, and large-scale resettlements all worked together to make indigenous communities more vulnerable to disease.”
The piece later continues:
“According to a group of scholars writing in the journal Latin American Antiquity, in colonial Mexico, “by the mid-17th century, many… communities had failed, victims of massive population decline, environmental degradation, and economic collapse.” This is why it’s crucial for today’s scholars to emphasize the influence of colonial policies—as opposed to the Virgin Soil theory, which shifts responsibility away from Europeans.”
This is just one example of a story I’d been taught that wasn’t quite made up, but wasn’t really true, either. And yes, it’s just one story. But here it’s easy to see how this one story has the potential to affect the way we think about colonization, the indigenous peoples of the Americas, the history of the Western hemisphere, how we care for the planet, and the effects of human behavior and systems on the devastation from an epidemic or a pandemic.
So, pretty relevant stuff these days.
Sometimes I wonder how many more not-made-up, but not-really-true stories we “know.” It’s kind of overwhelming to think about. But thinking about it is at least a start.
As storytellers, our job is to understand the power of this tool we’re using, and try to honor that power as best we can.
As readers (and I’d argue, as humans, too) our job is to ask a lot of questions.
One in particular––is it true yet?––over and over and over, until it is.
–Erin
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Erin Becker (she/her)
Writer | Communications Consultant | Storytelling Expert
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