Writing a Web of Lies
Author Afsheen Farhadi shares how fiction writers are often searching for the truth but sometimes write a web of lies to get there.
People make many assumptions about fiction writers, namely that we’re experts at crafting multi-faceted, engaging lies, both on and off the page. However, I know many writers of literary fiction, and most would probably agree when I say my job feelsmore accurately aligned with truth telling.
As writers, we’re always aiming to articulate or evoke some truth about our lives, our species, or our world that is difficult to describe by direct means. Why not convey itthrough a more straightforward medium, like the essay, op-ed, or podcast? Because what we’re trying to say eludes language, eludes us. We don’t know what it is, and we might never, and this is why the metaphor of fiction, the one-remove of made-up characters in a made-up situation, is the only way to approach that which draws us with its simultaneous importance and breathtaking incompleteness.
This is the pleasure of reading literary fiction—its ambition is a sort of magic, by which the author communicates something to the reader so profound, and profoundly true, that it doesn’t sit cleanly within the bounds of their minds, a puzzle they continue to work long after they’ve put the book down.
Contrary to the assumption, I’m a particularly bad liar. I might have some naturalaptitude for crafting a good one, but lies don’t rest easily on my face, and dishonesty feels like a canker sore, a discomfort I can’t help prodding, again and again. If anything, I consider myself honest to a fault, as are many of the writers I’ve known—these natural observers, who were once the quiet kids in the backs of classrooms, the ones their families ordained sensitive and shy. In their introspection, writers tend to be analytical, thoughtful, and considerate. Sure, toxic and belligerent writers exist, but from my vantage they are the exceptions that prove the rule.
Writers, largely, are not pot stirrers. This is why on the page it’s important to have our characters act out. All of our characters contain some modicum of us. But they can’tbe us, certainly not so much that they, like us, good people in civilized society, always do what’s right and sensible. Because the opposite choice is what compels conflict, the kind that makes a story move, churns plot, and helps build a cohesive, sustained causality from beginning to end.
When I was writing my debut novel, False Prophet, I knew it was going to factor in a lie—the story my protagonist tells, and which accounts for the story-within-the-story that is half the book, was going to be fabricated. At the same time, the main character, Jal, shared a few outward traits with me: a Guyanese-American who grew up in Phoenix, Arizona. Then, in the opening pages came, so the speak, the moment of truth, when Jal, after admitting to his agent that his recently deceased mother was from Guyana, and trying to address the so-what? he feels echoing in an emptiness hollowed out by self-doubt and insecurity, does what I never would: He lies, telling his agent that his mother was involved in Jonestown, the deadly cult that ended in Guyana in 1978.
From that moment, I had everything a writer needs to finish a novel: I had a character, not some shadow of myself, but an actual character to develop and learn from and be surprised by, who would do things I, gentle writer, would find scandalous; and I had the catalyst for a plot, built on the waves of causality starting with this first ripple, all of which would later be described in the novel’s copy as “a web of lies.”
I suspect readers will have questions about Jal, will debate whether he is, to put it bluntly, a good character or bad character—good or bad in the moral sense. But I know he’s a good character in the craft sense, coming to life in his strange decisions as he moved interestingly further from his creator’s moral gravity.
Check out Afsheen Farhadi's False Prophet here:
Ultimately, building a web of lies is no different from any other web of poor or questionable decisions—it’s about fully inhabiting a character unlike yourself and getting the plot to spring from those decisions. It was important for me to think about how I could raise the stakes from Jal’s ultimately harmless lie, into something that saw him by the end of the novel transformed by it. The only way to do that in such contained space/time was to not let my protagonist be as reasonable as I am, as so many of us are. Making sensible choices will lead to a good life, but rarely will it lead to a good story.
In life, we generally know what not to do, and we often know why we shouldn’t do it.But though I’ve described writers as kind and gentle, we’re also a little mischievous.You will likely see it if engaged in a sustained conversation with a writer. At some point, they might get a glint in their eye, a little smirk that seems to have no obvious source. In those moments, they’re measuring the circumstances, letting their imaginations wander, and thinking some version of, “I know better… but what if I didn’t?”
I’m sure a lot of great stories, and compelling characters, have been born from that question.
