Telling lies for fun and profit . . . The lie that tells the truth . . . These are the titles of two well-known writing guides. They are riffing off an axiom of the writing enterprise, especially pertaining to fiction: that the lie told artfully is more true to life than the truth told blankly, frankly, superficially, “factually.” Much has been made of how the subconscious works for writers and how they can tailor their efforts in ways that maximize the “downtime” input of that part of the mind. We learn to stuff a rough draft until it’s as full as we can make it, then put it away for a week or three so as to be fresh when we look at it again to trim and shape it. Same principle applies to editing a draft or reworking or rewriting it: Put it away and come back when the piece has fermented a while – or, that is, when we’ve fermented a while, after a period of time off (consciously) during which the mind has (unconsciously) continued to work on the material. A lot of thinking may be available on how the subconscious functions as the source of fictional material and how to feed and exercise the imagination. Not that much on the subject has crossed my path. I’ve read and written enough to have a good idea how the process works, and once in a while I run across a writer whose experience and knowledge gives me more insight on it. Victoria Nelson’s On Writer’s Block and Robert Olen Butler’s From Where You Dream are fine examples. The recent Alone With All That Could Happen by David Jauss (Cincinatti: Writer’s Digest Books, 2008) purports to be an unconventional reassessment of several aspects of writing, especially fiction writing. I stop short of a recommendation, because I’m not done reading the book; on the other hand, the first three of his seven essays are enormously helpful. I’ll follow up later on the question whether I’d suggest it as a resource and for whom. Meanwhile, in the highest tradition of blogging, I’ll shamelessly borrow some sharp statements from Jauss’s first chapter, “Autobiographobia” (AU-to-bi-OG-ra-PHObia works for me; Chekhov coined the word). These statements, located on pages 5-12, themselves abundantly quote other writers. If you find what follows valuable to stimulate thought, reward reflection, or strengthen the flow of words, please let me know. For ease of digestion, I’m discarding both Jauss’s paragraphing and all ellipses. I prefer to lay out these excerpts as aphorisms, long or short, the way I mark or copy them and mull them over.

Perhaps the most repeated advice in the history of creative writing workshops is “Write what you know.” For writers who have a talent for negotiating between the demands of facts and the demands of the imagination, this may be valid advice. But for most of us, I believe, writing what we know can only result in nonfiction, whether thickly or thinly disguised.

This is why Graham Greene suggested that a good memory was incompatible with good fiction writing: “All good novelists have bad memories,” he said. As Robert Olen Butler explains, “What you remember comes out as journalism. What you forget goes into the compost of the imagination.”

Grace Paley got it exactly right when she said, “You write from what you know but you write into what you don’t know.” You can’t avoid what you know – it’s who you are, after all – but if you’re trying to write into what you don’t know, you’ll discover things about yourself that you didn’t know. In short, you’ll discover your secret life, and so will your readers.

Here’s the paradox: Just as you reveal your secret life when you imagine others’, you reveal others’ secret lives when you reveal your own. As Donald Hall once remarked, literature “starts by being personal but the deeper we go inside the more we become everybody.” Everybody, c’est moi. And c’est vous.

Reading Chekhov and Shakespeare, and others like them, we inhabit their essential selves and dream their dreams along with them.

Oscar Wilde once said, “Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell the truth.” Lionel Trilling seconds that opinion, saying “disguise is not concealment” but revelation, for “the more a writer takes pains with his work to remove it from the personal and subjective, the more – and not the less – he will express his true unconscious.”

Even if we know our secret selves (and that’s a big if), it’s almost impossible to draw our true faces for our readers merely by reporting what seems to be the “truth.” Instead, like Shakespeare, like Chekhov, we have to imagine we are someone else, we have to wear a mask; in short, we have to lie. For a lie is nothing more, nor less, than the means to make a secret public while still keeping it secret.

Writing about the secret life is not, then, a matter of revealing actual secrets but of distorting and altering them, consciously or unconsciously, so they tell a larger kind of truth. If you simply reveal a secret, at the very least, you will be false to the primary characteristic of the secret, which is that it is secret.

A secret that remains buried under the oppressive weight of silence increases in significance and value, the way carbon buried under the weight of the earth turns into a diamond. To reveal this “diamond” factually is to return it to carbon, but to reveal it in a way that conceals it – in other words, to tell a lie about it – allows the secret to retain the luster that silence has given it.

As this suggests, a lie is a form of silence, for it is a refusal to reveal the secret. But, as Wilde suggests, a lie tells the truth all the more fully and honestly by refusing to tell it. Or, as Emily Dickinson would put it, it tells the truth but tells it slant.

The secret cannot be kept and it must be kept. The only way to satisfy both demands, the only way the secret can cross over without being recognized, is to don the disguise of a lie.

Literature has its origin in secrets that the author feels compelled both to reveal and to conceal. In other words, secrets, and the secret life, generate literature.

Finally, one more that relates to the emotional power of strong fiction:

If Dickinson and Cavafy and writers like them had revealed their secret selves nakedly, we would not feel their inner lives so much as know them, and feeling is a deeper, more vital form of knowing.

I hope all fiction writers will find these thoughts as energizing as I do. It refreshes me to find such reflections expounded at length. They encourage me to let my imagination make up fiction that reveals a human truth and connects with the hidden truth in readers.