The Difference Between What-Actually-Happened and What-It-Meant
Readers often want to know if a story is true, by which they mean did it actually happen? It’s a natural thing, to want to know if people and events that feel so real really do have some real existence somewhere—and yet, in a way, I feel the question misses the point about what is so wonderful about writing. In my opinion, the main job of a writer is the truth—but not truth in the sense of “what actually happened” but in the sense of “what did those events mean to us.” In others words, I feel that the job of the writer is to identify the deeper “truth” in “what actually happened.”
Even if you’re not a writer, you’ve probably experienced this in your own life. Imagine, for example that it’s a cold day—a bleak, bitter day with a biting wind. Now imagine that you’re running late maybe even to a place you don’t especially wish you were going. You’re hurrying along the sidewalk, and suddenly a car drives by, splashing you with slush from the puddle, and suddenly you think, the universe hates me. You get where you’re going, and explain the frozen mud on your pant leg, but people don’t seem to understand how it felt out there in the heartless cold, splashed unfeelingly by a driver who could have swerved away from the puddle when he saw you there—what-actually-happened doesn’t at all express what it felt like to you. So if you’re writing the story, you say the driver actually swerved into the puddle, just to splash you, and he was laughing, laughing! And he rolled down the window and threw his coffee cup right at you, at the same time—because that’s how it felt, that was how the incident felt to you: “He splashed me, on purpose! There I was, walking, not contributing to global warming, minding my own business, and he splashed me on purpose, and then he threw his coffee cup at me, and it landed right on my head!” Was it true? No! Is it a lie? Well, yes—but it is a lie that expresses what the event meant to you, and that, I think, is what Picasso means when he says “Art is the lie that tells the truth.”
An excellent example of this phenomenon is in the work of a wonderful writer named Tim O’Brien. O’Brien was a kid in the 1960s when he was drafted to go to Vietnam. Understandably, he didn’t want to go, but he couldn’t quite get up the courage to go to jail or flee his country or do any of the other things that you would need to do to get out of the army back in the 60s. So he went, shot people, got shot at, and generally had a hellish time, and when he came back, he did what he needed to do to come to grips with what had happened: he wrote about it, in a memoir called If I die in the Combat Zone (Box Me Up And Send Me Home). In the book he recounts the story of how he went away on a weekend furlough during his army training. He went to Seattle, where he picked up a ticket to Sweden he had secretly bought, and he sat there, preparing to leave his country forever. Except that he couldn’t do it. He sat in his hotel room, trying to scrounge up the courage, but he just couldn’t make himself do it—and so he went back to the army and went off to war.
Many years later, O’Brien revisited the same experiences in his brilliant book The Things They Carried. One of the most moving stories in the collection is called “Along the Rainy River,” which tells the story of a young man who tries to run to Canada when he gets his draft notice. Read these two stories together. One of them is “true” in the sense that it’s what really happened, but the other one is “true” in the sense that it takes the whole experience and gets to the meaning of it—and it is the story that makes you say, as you lay down the book, “Wow. That story was really true.” It’s a lie, but a lie that tells the truth. Writing literature is not the same as writing history, and one way to make your writing instantly better is to understand that what actually happened is irrelevant—it’s what it meant that’s important. When I recently reread one of those autobiographical pieces I wrote at the age of 14, I was struck by the many details I had included that make the story much more cumbersome and boring and add nothing. Why did I put them in? It was because I didn’t understand that what-actually-happened is not important. What-actually-happened is often an excellent place to start in writing a story, but a writer needs to trust her imagination enough to follow the story where it wants to go, and to have the courage to leave what-actually-happened behind.