Bearded Liar With Flowers by Ezume Images, licensed from Adobe Stock

Fiction Writing: Telling Lies For Fun and Profit

Or is it?

Coming up as a writer, I recall countless times a jocular, financially successful older writer would repeat the maxim: “Fiction (or screenwriting, playwriting, etc.) is telling lies for fun and profit.” Sometimes they’d just say “profit” or “money.”

This is the title of a famous book by Lawrence Block, a mystery writer and author of many writing advice books, now in his 80s. I heard these statements made back at the Clarion Science Fiction Writers Workshop in 1984, so Block’s advice may have started the phrasing or concept, or he may just have capitalized on the zeitgeist of what passed for creativity in fiction in the 1980s.

I now view creativity as far more than the restrictive pronouncements of every writing seminar I ever came anywhere near.

I view what I am doing now, every day, as highly creative. In 2013 when I was Alumna in Residence at my disowned undergraduate institution of higher learning, the title of my week was Life as Art.

I think I got this concept first by osmosis and reading everything Oscar Wilde seems to have written, including unpublished manuscripts faxed to me by his grandson, to aid my graduate study at the school I still affiliate with: Chapman University in Orange, CA. Oscar believed in things like this. He had a huge…