Truth and Truthability
And Other Made-Up Words
Truthability is not a real word. I just wanted to sound Austenian. It’s been a while since I made a Jane Austen reference. Like a really long time. Some of these Shelf Lifes are old now. Some of them have had a birthday. Then again, if I say a word I speak it into reality so I guess truthability is a real word now. It’s on the internet so it must be true. I was thinking about some of my most ancient and decrepit essays because I’m going to reference one in a moment. Don’t leave the pages of these ancient and decrepit essays lying around. If you don’t sweep them up you’ll get moths.
We love truth and the idea of truth in the media we consume. Right? “You can’t handle the truth!” No, we can handle the truth. It’s one of our favorite ideals. I know a whole story just about the nature of truth, a masterpiece of both short storytelling (“In a Grove”) and filmmaking (Rashōmon). Long short stories/short novelettes are the best-size fiction to make a movie from. That’s a factoid.
Sometimes one obeys the spirit of a law even while breaking the letter of that same law. Similarly, sometimes (more often, I think) one can obey the letter of the law while disrespecting its spirit. This latter is the favorite game of the rules lawyer, who is nobody’s favorite person. They are constantly looking for technicalities and loopholes to obtain an outcome in their favor and completely missing the spirit of whatever rule or law or guideline they’re arguing about.
Today, instead of law, a thing I don’t know much about, I am talking about truth, a thing I know as much about as anybody else I guess. Truth works in a similar way, in that it has two aspects best worked in tandem but which can sometimes be manipulated separately to interesting effect in writing. These two aspects are what I think of as truthfulness—that which is literally true and factual; and truthiness, that which feels like it’s true. Sometimes things are truthy but not truthful, for example:
The Great Wall of China is the only manmade structure that can be seen from space.
Either the Great Wall cannot be seen from space (it cannot be seen with the unaided human eye even at low orbit) or it is one of many manmade structures that can be seen from space (with the aid of digital photography). NASA has a nice article explaining the history of viewing the Great Wall from space.
Then, sometimes, things can be truthful but not have the ring of truthiness, for example:
“Tiffany” was a common name for girls and women during the Middle Ages and is a contemporary of the name “Mildred.”
This is a phenomenon I discussed in a much earlier Shelf Life on naming fictional characters. Most people would not be surprised to encounter a character named Mildred in historical fiction about Medieval England, but I think many of us raised in the 1980s would be surprised to encounter a Tiffany in the same story. While it’s historically accurate (truthful), it doesn’t feel right (feels untruthy).
Stephen Colbert coined the use of the term truthiness in this sense in 2005 and it’s caught on like a house fire since. You can find it in Merriam-Webster’s (though not in the AHD). Note that not everything that is truthy is also untruthful. I think most truthful things feel truthful as well. What I’m getting at is sometimes there’s a disconnect between what is the truth and what feels like the truth, and that disconnect is something writers should wield intentionally.
Maybe today’s Shelf Life will be the one that is finally short so I can go to bed at a reasonable hour. A truthful statement (this could maybe happen, there’s no reason it could not) but is untruthy (I never manage to keep a Shelf Life short and so although I know this could happen I feel like it cannot). Let’s aim for 1500 words, shall we?
Well we can try but I haven’t even gotten to truism and factoid yet.
How can you make this odd duality of the truth work for you? Consider these statements, both of which, I think, are true:
If you write a statement that is not true but feels true, some readers will accept it without questioning and move on.
This happens in television all the time. A character in an authority role makes a highly technical or scientific statement with an air of confidence and viewers will go “yeah, okay, that makes sense, she’s a doctor so she’d know.”
If you write a statement that is true but feels untrue, some readers will stop reading to factcheck you (as many readers probably clicked the NASA Great Wall link above) and others will read on with a feeling of suspicion for you (the writer) or the character who made the truthful-but-untruthy statement.
A character who says untruthful but truthy things and who uses charisma to manipulate others around them (including, if you can swing it, the reader) into accepting their falsehood as the truth can make a reading audience furious with them. And, I suppose, we’ve seen that they can also make an audience applaud them for their ability to manipulate others. This is an admirable trait in a con artist toward whom you feel positively disposed, but perhaps a repugnant quality in a member of clergy or or a military officer. A traveling con artist who does this abuses a position of trust the same as a priest, but a con artist tricks their way into your confidence with their own skills and abilities, while a person who swindles you from behind the altar is relying, perhaps unfairly, on borrowed or purchased authority.
A character who says truthful but untruthy things can inspire great sympathy and empathy in an audience. Cassandra of Troy is one of the original examples of this, certainly the eldest that comes right to mind, who always told the truth and who no one believed. Well, not no one, right? The other characters never believed her but the key thing about Cassandra in poetry and drama is that the audience always knows she is telling the truth.
How about a character who believes everything they hear that has the ring of truth to it, without bothering to verify whether it is true or not? A character who then passes on these factoids—assumptions or speculations that have been presented and accepted as the truth—to others? What kind of emotional reaction could that type of person evoke in an audience? And how different might we feel about a news-media-consuming housewife who does this versus a well-paid, tenured university professor?
Anyway, the truth is near and dear to our hearts as humans and the way narrators and characters manipulate it can affect the way the reader perceives them and feels about them. One of my favorite things in reading is the slow realization that a narrator you trusted is unreliable after all, casting all the things you’d previously taken for granted into doubt.
Readers of fiction almost always like to be surprised. A lot of the time they enjoy being deceived. But almost no one enjoys feeling duped or tricked. It’s safe to assume no one wants to be made a fool of. When you fool around with both cutting edges of the truth at one time, you should proceed with caution to make sure you don’t alienate your reader or, if you do want to alienate your reader or make them angry or uncomfortable, that you do it intentionally rather than not.
Readers are encouraged to identify with protagonists, even when the protagonist is someone they don’t like or agree with (for instance, Humbert Humbert from Lolita). You might find that if you want to have characters buy into a truthy-but-untruthful statement without duping your reader into believing the same thing, showing the protagonist being suspicious of the untruth can cause the reader to feel suspicion as well.
In the same vein, if a protagonist or another sympathetic character is successfully duped, their experience afterward can also shape the reader’s reaction to the narrative. Is the consensus around the character that they were treated unjustly, or that they should have known better than to be fooled? If a reader has mentally aligned with them, that can affect the reader’s sense of justice as well.
Some final thoughts:
If you’re going to insert something that feels true but isn’t, you can allow characters to be deceived while giving your reader clues to ensure they won’t be.
Including something that feels like it’s not true, even if it is true, can cause a reader to put the text down to Google whatever it is. Use caution with anything that can cause your reader to disengage from the text.
Messing with a reader’s sense of who they can trust is always fun.
We did it, Shelf Life. We finished to spec.
I’ll be back on Thursday with an article on polar opposites, black and white, nothing and everything, and all the gray areas in between. Or maybe I won’t and I’ll write you a book report or something, who knows. Get carving those pumpkins. Spooky season is upon us.
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