Is honesty a concern in writing fiction?
Most people would probably say no. It’s supposed to all be made up. Out of your head. Figments of imagination. If it’s not, then it’s not fiction–it’s nonfiction.
Beginning writers often write about real events that happened to them–and defend themselves when told it’s not plausible by saying, “But that really happened to me!”
So what do we mean when we say we want honesty in fiction?
Well, often what has happened is that the writer has set up a character to be a certain sort of person–honest, villainous, seductive, dogmatic, whatever their defining trait is–and then the writer has those characters do something that readers literally describe as “out of character”. The honest person may lie. The villainous character may rescue a homeless kitten. The seductive character may get to the edge with a seductee and upon finding out she’s married, turn virtuous and say no to sleeping with her.
Often when the reader gets taken out of the story by someone acting “out of character”, it’s because they writer didn’t draw the character as a fully rounded complex individual. I like to write characters where a reader may have no idea what the character might do next–they’re interesting, but often dangerous, just as an unpredictable person might be in “real life”.
Flat characters are actually hard to write about in an interesting way. They may have only one defining trait, and therefore their path is fixed. The honest character will always tell the truth no matter what the consequences. The villainous character would always lie even when there’s no clear benefit to doing so.
Whatever world you create–whether your characters live in the middle of Mississippi or on the edges of the galaxy–readers often want writers to follow the rules the writers create. If a writer builds a world where the atmosphere is unbreathable–until the main character steps foot on it and needs to survive without his spacesuit, which the writer had fail upon atmospheric entry to heighten the dramatic tension–the writer better have a good explanation why that character stays alive that makes sense in the world the writer has created–beyond simply that the writer wants him to survive.
One of the most effective techniques to create dramatic tension around what a character may or may not do is foreshadowing–dropping small hints about how the honest guy is only honest about one aspect of his life but not about another. Another is immediate flashbacking following the character’s uncharacteristic action–where the reader sees what the character did when it was a kid faced with the same type of choice–what did the character do then? Is that character going to make the same choice, or a different one? Why?
Robertson Davies, one of Canada’s leading authors of the twentieth century, once said, “Imagination is a good horse to carry you over the ground, not a flying carpet to set you free from probability.” If a writer’s world follows certain rules, the writer must be honest with the reader as to why the roles are there–and why they get broken. If a character is rounded, complex and human–those rules can be bent a bit– if and only if the writer is sure to point out how said bend serves the story and is not as “out of character” as the reader suspects.
Julie Liddell Whitehead 