Two Lies and a Truth

There's an ice breaking game from college I remember. You say three things about yourself. Two of them are lies and one is true. Then everybody guesses which one is real. The natural clowns would usually say one quick truth and then make up some wacky stuff. They'd say something like, "I like to eat pizza. I defeated mutant space bats on three separate occasions. And I'm a Nigerian Prince who wants to give you 12 million dollars." Everybody has a good chuckle and moves on.

Some of the crafty people pick a wacky thing that's true and then make up a mundane lie to trick people. "I once got bitten by an Andean Condor in the zoo. I like to eat salmon. My favorite pizza topping is pepperoni." In that case, the truth is about the condor.

But the truly great liars say three things that are all mundane or are all incredible. "I almost drowned in a kiddie pool at 7. I am three months older than my niece. My current girlfriend used to babysit me." The only way to figure out which is the truth is how I say those things. Truths usually come quicker because we already know them, but lies are made up on the spot. Of course, if somebody is good at lying, the two lies will be really quick and then a good enough truth will have to be thought up. In this case, if two are really similar and one sticks out, you know which is which.

So what's the point in all of this? Well, a good writer is a good liar. Effective stories are realistic, tangible, and grab us, so having the skills to make invented worlds as full and real as the actual world is a useful ability. The other reason is that storytelling is storytelling, regardless of veracity. One of my writing professors called creative nonfiction "the fourth genre", the other three being creative fiction, poetry, and essay. And while it makes sense to say that in order to open the eyes of students, I can't help but feel that creative fiction and creative nonfiction are the same thing; the only difference being the fact that one of them actually happened. Telling a good story doesn't require truth.

So, I think that a great writing exercise can come from the ice breaking game. Write three stories. Make two of them fiction and one of them nonfiction. Try to make them identical in style. Afterward, show them to your friends. See if they can guess which one really happened to you. If they can’t it means you either have good writing skills or stupid friends.