Honesty, Writing, and the Fantastic

Reflections — 21/01/21

Photo by Anthony Tran on Unsplash

Honesty simpliciter tends to be thought of as telling the truth. I believe there’s a part of that that follows when thinking about honesty in writing, but I think it encompasses a little more. Honesty in writing means being honest with respect to your vision. This is part of what makes you write in the first place, but I think, to avoid writing “fluff” or trite Hallmark card-type stuff, this includes delivering your reader something that respects them.

If honesty is an important (read: critical) aspect of writing (and I mean the part that includes telling the truth), whether discipline or art, how is it possible to write honestly about things you’ve never experienced or are physically impossible (magic, massive space stations galaxies away, etc.)?

As an avid reader of fantasy novels, even trying to write some, this question has occurred to me frequently. How can I/fantasy writers bend the structure of reality and be honest about it? It would be absurd to say that it’s immaterial and fantasy writers are just hacks making a buck off credulity. No. That’s not what I’m getting at. Does anyone question the integrity of Tolkien, Jordan, Kay, or Martin?

I don’t, and not simply because history, actual human history is a major influence for all of these writers. I mean, could Jordan/Sanderson have really written 13 (fourteen if you count The New Spring) books for The Wheel of Time series if they’d thought they were just filling thousands of pages of lies?

Or, in a different vein, is there anything fundamentally dishonest about Charlotte’s Web or Animal Farm (which is allegorical, yes)? Neither of those stories would grip us, I think, if they were pages devoted to describing the interactions of various animals who can’t communicate with each other. Instead, gifting the animals with human speech results in worlds where we can follow the development of characters and watch the revelation of human issues.

Does that, then, remove all the human-ness of the fantastic, that we won’t ever get to participate in the worlds as such? No. Friendship and political structures are not the sole province of talking animals, nor is the massive struggle of good vs. evil that provides the architectonic for fantastic literature…