Lawrence Tarpey's "Pinocchio"
An old boyfriend once told me that I was the worst liar he ever knew. He told me he could hear that distinct quiver in my voice and see the slight shift in my eyes every time I told a lie. What he sadly never learned in our short-lived relationship was that these were calculated moments concocted to conceal my true dishonest self. I had lulled him into believing I was a terrible liar in order to conceal the fact that I was actually great at it.
Before you go analyzing the verity of every past conversation you have ever had with me, please know that I’m given more crap for being too honest than lying too often. I am that person in your life that tells you your latest script bored me to death and that your new girlfriend’s voice is the source of my migraines. Though I choose not to engage it in often, lying is a necessary part of life. Imagine if I had been completely honest with my old boyfriend? Or if he had been completely honest with me? The upside is that we probably would have wasted less time together but we also would have left the relationship with less of our dignity intact. But forget all that – Lit Drift isn’t a dating column (at least not until Cosmo starts linking our articles) – I’m here today to hopefully find the correlation between great liars and great writers. 
My friends are all in the general profession of lying. They are writers, actors, and those who provide a place for all these fabulous fibbers to convene – filmmakers. Many of them are indeed great liars. I once watched a friend calmly flash a random piece of paper and explain to a disgruntled woman that we had the permit to shoot in front of her apartment. It was done so convincingly that I had momentarily forgotten that it was my job to get the permits and I hadn’t covered that location. This friend also happens to be a pretty great writer. But on the other hand, my sister isn’t the best at lying but she’s definitely a great writer. Ethics seem to bar her from fabrication unless it’s done in Final Draft. I think the question is really less about whether or not there is a correlation between great liars and great writers but more about the line that is often blurred between what we create and who we are.
We often hear about method actors becoming so immersed in a character that it is difficult to come out of it at the end of a workday and we know writers inject elements of their personalities into their characters. Knowing this, it seems that it is only natural to allow the factors of our profession to bleed into our reality but is there a point in which it goes too far?
At Barnes and Noble the other day, I noticed that James Frey’s book, A Million Little Pieces, is still categorized under “memoir.” If you don’t recall, Frey was that guy whose memoir was publicly shot down by the biggest names in media when his work was revealed to be egregious enhancements of what actually happened. Previous to his infamous foray into non-fiction, Frey was a screenwriter, making him no stranger to fiction. You can almost see the man’s thought process: Just a nip at this truth and a tuck at that memory… just to spice things up… and then suddenly a single day in jail becomes eighty-seven and you’ve got yourself a critically acclaimed bestseller being endorsed by Oprah. When the results are that good, well then damn – please mash my lies in with my real life until I don’t know the difference anymore!
Though Frey has become one of our decade’s many faces of dishonesty, he was rewarded for his skills of deception in 2007 – a seven-figure deal with Harper Collins to return to fiction. I’d be lying if I said that didn’t make me think twice about the value of my righteousness.
* Free candy for the first person to correctly name the author behind the quote in the title. Don’t Google it – you’re on the honor system.
