To tell you the truth... I need to lie a little first

There's a moment when you realize what you've written isn't what you meant to say. It's something more.

There's a moment…

When you're writing, somewhere between the third sentence and the first mistake, you realize the thing you're saying isn't what you meant to say.

Back up. Start again.

The next version inches closer, stronger, but still wrong. You keep going, keep cutting, keep reshaping—trying to carve something honest from the mess you've made.

It should be easy to lie, to make things up.

It never is.

I'll be honest. Truth is hard for me. No one ever taught me how.

Truth is mercury: slippery, shifting, bending in the light, refusing to be held. You think you've caught it, but then you read what you wrote. It feels thin, weightless, flimsy. “Likely story.” Like something overheard in a dream.

So you pick at it like a scab. Push harder.

Fiction is supposed to be a dream.

Not a lie, exactly, but a believable fantasy that reveals a common experience. Not the kind you can fact-check, not the kind that fits in a headline. The good stuff, the stuff that pulls you in with invisible thread, lodges in you like a shard of glass, gnaws at the edges of what protects you, threatening to expose your soft, tender secrets.

You feel it in the way a character hesitates before picking up the phone, the way a father grips the steering wheel too tight, the way a place is described not by what you see, but by how you move through it, or avoid it altogether.

You feel it when a sentence stops you dead. The book falls away. You stare into space, dumbstruck, enlightened, frightened, seen—discovered alive.

Truth reveals itself like this: unexpectedly.

In the middle of fabricating a lie, you prick your finger and bleed across the keys. Some memory, some shame, some small violence you've carried leaks onto the page. You didn't invite it. You didn't want it there. But there it is, a crooked, bony finger pointed back at you.

The best fiction happens in this space: Between intention and accident. You set out to write about a cleaning lady living a double life as a secret agent, but somehow you're vilifying the babysitter who locked you in a closet.

Or you create a character who isn't you, except she is. She does things you'd never do, except in dreams. Except in thoughts, fantasies you push away before they fully form.

Writers are liars who bleed truth by accident.

This is our curse, our gift—this beautiful wound that won't heal. The story emerges from the struggle, from the gap between what we mean to say and what ends up on the page. From the thin spaces where our defenses fail.

What's strange is how readers know. They feel that precise moment when fiction cracks open, when the lie begins to bleed.

They don't know your secrets, but they recognize their own.

Maybe this is what we're after all along. Not perfect sentences or clever plots, but those rare, terrifying moments when the mask slips and something raw breaks through. When we mean to hide but end up exposing ourselves—and our readers.

Or maybe that's just another story I'm telling myself.

---

I love you guys ❤️

I swear it.

—Paul

---

p.s. If you appreciate my work, please consider buying me a Diet Coke.

I’ll love you forever ♥️ ☺️

Really, I will.