Fiction, like most women, should never be trusted

As part of an ongoing series with different writers here, I’ve been asked to come up with a short summary of why I primarily write fiction. The short answer to that question would be that all too often, I find more truth in fiction than in fact. So I’ve turned the explanation into a full  and fraudulent piece instead, where I must liberally lie again to tell the truth.

 

My friends are convinced that many of the personal stories of my life are made up, or at least embellished to the extent that the original tale is rendered almost unrecognizable. For example: I have never been related to Abraham Lincoln. (He in fact has no living relatives at all) I did not win the state wrestling championship. I never shot a music video for Yes in 1984, nor did I actually sing in a California raisin commercial that same summer. But they make really good stories, and besides, no one is listening to them anyway, at least as told by me. In the course of sharing our past with each other, what would we really have to talk about without the tall tales and outright lies?

 

As for my life story, these things are true: I did run fifty yards for that touchdown when I was 12, and at 13 my girlfriend of four days really was a Revlon model. But why won’t anyone believe me when I tell a tale of the past? Well, because I can't be trusted to get my facts straight. 

 

I read history and I read the news. Much of the content of both is fictional. History is just old news with varied nuance added by the writers thereof, through the prism of an always biased perspective. We never seem to learn anything from that history, because people are stupid and always will be, so history endlessly repeats itself, perpetually useless like the application of Keynesian economics and wars in the Middle East. What other species on Earth tries the same stuff, does the same stuff, over and over again, never learning? I am fascinated by how stupid and inept we are. I should be appalled but I can’t help it that people are dopey. And besides, dumb is always funny.

 

In my opinion, fiction gets short shrift here at OS. The aversion to fiction is sometimes so bad that I’ve been advised by multiple personages not to label any pieces with the “fiction” tag, lest the words themselves burst into flame for lack of reader interest right there on the screen. At least now I have an excuse for why my works don’t get rated more, and it is not because the stories are actually pieces of literary guano. Tee. Hee.

 

Hopefully the readers I do have know the fiction from the fact. I am sure they do because they’re so smart.

 

For example, about a year ago, I was watching a documentary on the Roman Empire in the 1^st century BC. The show’s main focus was the political struggle between Julius Caesar and Marcus Tullius Cicero, among others, about what direction the Roman Republic would take in its future. Fascinating. As that show went to commercial, I channel-surfed back to ESPN, which was televising a skateboarding competition. The weird idea came to mind of Caesar and Cicero deciding the destiny of Rome’s system of government based upon a half-pipe skateboarding competition. And there it is; the title of a flash fiction and my second book. Both remain horribly unread.

 

At the end of the piece, I suggest that William Shakespeare killed Caesar in the Roman Senate on the Ides of March. My logic was thus; our version of Caesar’s life comes largely from Julius Caesar. The true history of Caesar (along with his cautionary tale) was hijacked by Shakespeare- thus he did kill Caesar, in an Elizabethan sort of way.

 

Fiction can be foul, mean, and cruel. Reality is usually much worse. By using fiction in history, we can repair the things we don’t like about the past. We can make Oswald’s rifle jam on the Sixth Floor of the Book Depository. We can choke Stalin on his morning borscht before he ever has the chance to develop another disastrous and genocidal Five-Year Plan. We can hide the tub of Viagra from Clinton before Monica comes copiously waltzing into the Oval to deliver "pizza".

 

Fiction applied personally makes my truth infinitely more interesting; it makes me six feet tall when I am actually five foot nine. It makes me 7^th grade spelling champ, when in fact I placed third two years in a row. (misspelling “frontier” and "happiness" consecutively)

 

Fiction repairs our wounds and our egos and our wounded egos. It refills our empty five gallon bucket of pride. Applied liberally, fiction falsely prepares us to face an unreal world. It makes us all handsome or pretty. It makes our bank account fat. It always justifies that which can never be justified. Fiction is our friend. Therefore, I highly recommend it.