One of the most important writing tips I learned many years ago was that characters lie.  They don't always say the truth.  They say things in order to get out of trouble.  "Duh," you say.  "Like, um, where did you come from?" you say.

Well, here's the thing.  I had never felt so honest as when I was writing.  The truth in all its ugliness and scary consequences could come out.  How people feel--it had to be true and real.  How people thought--the utter, stark truth.  My characters were like fonts of reality, shining bright from their plot lines, saying all that was true and ruining the damn story.

"Lie," a teacher said.  "Let them lie."

So they started lying.  They lied as a way to get out of paying the price of their own actions.  They lied in order to get another character to do something.  They lied because they were most ashamed of their behavior and wanted to make themselves look better.  They lied to pit two other characters against each other.  They lied, just as people do, all the time.

Maybe I had too much lying at first, but then things calmed down.  And then lying took subtle turns, turning more into obfuscation and omission sometimes.  But it helped.  It was real.  It made the story better.

Lying in life, though, usually doesn't help, or at least it feels that way.  I have lied myself up a storm in my 46 years, and I am sure I will do it again.  In fact, I'm going to lie today, it seems.  Some studies have shown that one fourth of our daily interactions involve lying, varying from outright falsehoods to the smaller omissions and feints.  We lie to avoid conflicts and to avoid hurting other people's feelings.  We lie on the phone.  We lie face-to-face.  Men and women lie in the same percentage, saying two or three lies per day. (that's a lie--it's really 1 or 2.  I was just testing you and your math skills).

But when the lie is found, caught in the cross hairs of relationship, lies hurt.  They make us bleed a little.  Sure, they add tons to a plot line, but not to our lives, really.  We are caught, have to confess or staunchly refuse to--that refusal causes more grief and the confession sounds like a plea for mercy.  For those who are lied about, well, how do we defend ourselves against one?  Truly, I think the best offense is no offense.  Let it go.  The person who lied about us needed the lie, and we can't really do much more than wait.  We shouldn't take out billboards to proclaim our innocence, or we end up like the Player Queen in Hamlet, Gertrude telling us all, "The lady doth protest too much."  And the basic truth is that the truth will out, as it always does, god dammit!

Lies are part of our life, the big ones and the ones that sound like, "I love that dress."

I am going to see if today I can go out and say what is true all day, even when my students read a bad essay to me.  Even when I am asked at a party I'm going to tonight how my school year went. 

"Bad essay," I will say.  "This semester sucked."

I can see why we lie already.

Jessica