How to Detect a Lie

As a writer, one learns how to make a story believable. After all why read something that does not ring true? There are certain elements that make us believe something is true. Verisimilitude lies often in the voice itself: the way the narrator tells the story.

My sister and I, as girls, every time my mother began to talk of our dead father, would roll our eyes at one another as if to say, "Here she goes again." We did not believe her stories, mostly stories of her travels with our father because of the way she told them. She would lift her dark gaze dreamily to the ceiling, wave her small hands about in the air, and with a little tremolo in her voice, make some exaggerated statement like. "Those were the happiest days of my life." This seemed so one-dimensional and false to us. Besides, we had memories of quarrels we had witnessed that she seemed to have forgotten or certainly never mentioned. Then she would trot out a long list of the names of the places she had visited with our father that sounded like a Latin prayer: "Sacramento, Carmel, San Diego, Las Vegas." She would sigh to people who had never heard of such places in our native South Africa.

In literature, a first-person narrator who speaks directly and simply to the reader often convinces us when he or she is not quite certain of what happened or uses the juxtaposition of opposites to convince. Some of the most famous beginning lines of novels, and surely those first lines are very important, give us this doubt or juxtaposition of opposites.

For example, at the beginning of "The Stranger" by the French author Albert Camus, Maman died today. Or, yesterday maybe; I don’t know. I got a telegram from the home: 
Mother deceased. Funeral tomorrow. Faithfully yours. That doesn’t mean anything; Maybe it was yesterday." Though there are many arguments over the way these sentences should be translated and they do many things, still, I think we believe this narrator is telling us the truth as he sees it, damning though it may be.

Dickens famously begins "A Tale of Two Cities" with a series of opposites: "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair."

We may not be initially quite certain of this description of the French Revolution but we believe this narrator because of the complexity of the message that describes a time of turmoil and trouble but also of change and hope.

People too are seldom simply good or bad but rather a complex mix of often opposing tendencies: Do we not know liberal people who speak of freedom, equality, and justice for all who are at the same time in their private life stingy? As the French say, le coeur a gauche mais la portefeuille a droite, the heart to the left but the wallet to the right. Or conservatives who are rigid and narrow-minded in their politics, but generous in their charity? Often we believe a character is real when he or she is presented with contradictions: "There are many examples of how to make something believable and the use of concrete detail—detail that seems genuine, unexpected, surprising, that presents an unexpected reversal. We are more convinced by the concrete: the use of things: a familiar place vividly rendered, for example, a place that is not what we expected it to be."

Life is full of mystery, and often the truth as the old saying goes is much stranger than fiction.

Source: Sheila Kohler