Lying Our Way to Truer Truths

An unconventional, step-by-step exercise for becoming a stranger to yourself and unearthing a truer, better story + a podcast convo on exteriority, tense, point of view, aboutness, and time control

Hello! Before I launch into this week’s writing prompt (which is a doozie and a day early because our grandbabies are arriving today!) I want to share this conversation with Brooke Warner (of She Writes Press) and Grant Faulkner (of National Novel Writing Month) on the Write Minded podcast. Here’s Write Minded said about the episode:

This week Brooke and Grant are in thoughtful, deep conversation with Jeannine Ouellette about craft—ranging from exteriority, tense, point of view, aboutness, and time control. This episode touches upon observing others’ work to inform your own—and we encourage all listeners to read Jeannine’s recent post that’s mentioned a few times in this week’s show: “Eleven Urgent and Possibly Helpful Things I’ve Learned From Reading Thousands of Manuscripts.”

The intro with Brooke and Grant is, in itself, worth a listen. I loved speaking with them these thoughtful, smart writers, and, yes, the conversation is deep!

You can listen here.

Meanwhile, this question of lying our way to a truer truth. What is that about? I’ll unpack it in a moment, but first let me emphasize that it is not about attempting to pass off false statements as true. That’s something we absolutely should not do, ever. So then … what does it mean to lie our way to a truer truth?

It starts with challenging yourself in ways that break you out of what you think you know, because what you think you know is often not as true as you have come to believe. Socrates said, “To know thyself is the beginning of wisdom.” What he meant was, in part, that true wisdom comes from knowing what you do not know. Put another way by poet Zachary Fruhling, “[A]n essential part of knowing yourself must be recognizing the limits of your own wisdom and understanding—knowing what you do genuinely know and knowing what you have yet to learn.” To this I would add, recognizing the untruths in the stories we’ve been telling ourselves all along.

To take this a step further, it helps to consider how high-impact events and experiences, often traumatic ones, live on in us well past the moment in which they occur. These events and experiences persist in our bodies, in our cells. They curl up there and hide, sometimes so quietly we could forget them altogether, except that now and again, they squirm. Uncurl. Kick. These memories remind us, persistently even if irregularly, of their presence. They become old stories that are so stuck within us that we think we’ve memorized them. That’s the heart of the problem. Because writing must first and foremost be a voyage of discovery, a headlong hurtle into the unknown.

Not surprisingly, these stuck stories are also the ones that tend to holler for our attention on the page, while simultaneously being the ones we find most impossible to write.

This week’s writing exercise explores an unconventional but potent, step-by-step method for writing these experiences. The exercise is inspired by an effect created in one of the best essays I read in 2022. It’s called Ghosts, by Vauhini Vara, and was originally published in The Believer, then reprinted in last year’s Best American Essays.  So well deserved. What Vara did was use AI to explore her experience of her sister’s death, an experience she had previously been unable to write about (note, the exercise this week does not involve AI, it involves using a technique to tap into the effect that the AI created in Vara’s essay, which is the continual undermining and recreating of meaning).  Here’s what said about the process of writing Ghosts:

I had always avoided writing about my sister’s death. At first, in my reticence, I offered GPT-3 only one brief, somewhat rote sentence about it. The AI matched my canned language; clichés abounded. But as I tried to write more honestly, the AI seemed to be doing the same. It made sense, given that GPT-3 generates its own text based on the language it has been fed: Candor, apparently, begat candor.

In Ghosts, a strange and gorgeous tension results from the juxtaposition of Vara’s own words and the AI, and that tension changes and deepens as the balance between Vara’s voice and the AI shifts. Something extraordinary unfolds in the spaces between what the AI gets wrong about the how the author experienced her sister's death—and the author's own emerging account of it—and what the AI gets right.

The interesting thing about Ghosts (well, one of the many fascinating things about Ghosts) is how the AI got so much wrong, yes, but also got just enough right to wake us up. I think lies are like that, too. Rarely is anything just one thing or the other. More often, almost always, things are partly one thing, partly another, and partly something else again. When we’re able to capture that complexity in our writing, it’s a huge, huge win.

We’re going to try to tap into that effect this week, except instead of AI, we’re going to use lying to create a similar tension between a “wrong” version of the story, and an increasingly truer one. Margaret Atwood does this beautifully in her stunning poem, “You Begin,” as the speaker of the poem continually undermines what she has previously stated as fact, and a more complicated truth emerges.

And now it’s our turn to write, using this step-by-step process.