Taking a wee break from work this morning to reflect on, well, work.

One of the fascinating dynamics that invariably emerges in writing fiction is the sense that some events and behaviors–all of them squarely in the Land of Make-Believe, mind you–will feel untrue. It’s not just a question of representational verisimilitude, it’s a question of epistemology, of thinking about what we believe and why we believe it.

I am deep in the woods in the revision of my novel manuscript. I went over it once not long after it was drafted, and this summer, having identified a dreamy prospective publisher, I decided to go over it again. I finished a full revision of the text just a couple days ago, and it occurred to me that only one element was awry. Without getting too spoilery or gory, let’s say I needed to be more explicit about what happened to a particular corpse, which had vanished from the site of its corpsification.

Normally I wouldn’t reckon that detail as an especially big deal; it’s the sort of blank any reader might reasonably fill in. But in this case the detail, as I’d first rendered it, involved an untruth–not just a bit of deception, but an outright lie. And that character, in the relationship as I envision and depict it, would simply not lie to the person she lied to.

So today and tomorrow, rather than writing the synopsis I’ll need to send the piece off to my dream publisher, I’m going to go to need to go back over about 300 pages of prose to make sure every instance when that subject comes up aligns with a more truthful reckoning of the event.

It’s a pain in the butt, but it’s also, I think, as sign that I’m approaching the narrative properly. There are plenty of games one has to play in fiction, when secrets, deception, and lies are all human behaviors on the exam table, but by story’s end, readers need to come away with the feeling that the writer has played the games fairly.

I know the two primary areas I’ll need to address–two accounts of the same event by different characters–but revisiting the story as a whole will give me a little more peace of mind. (This morning I recalled, for example, a minor timeline discrepancy that will need to be sorted along the way.) It’s hard not to be obsessive about the little things this late in the game. As a reader I like the experience to be immersive, with no disruptions to break the spell of a story, so going a few extra miles to make sure the reader stays within the fiction. seems like a very small price to pay for a story I love.