Writing and the Search for Truth

The Truth About Truth

To begin with, I encourage you to read “Why Absolute Truth is Still Worth Pursuing In a Narrative-Driven World” by Jay Nicorvo. You can find it here, in LitHub.

What Nicorvo writes should be essential reading for everyone, but certainly for nonfiction writers, whose goal is, above all, the pursuit of truth. So it’s worth taking some time to think about what truth is, how to think about truth, and how it applies to your own work.

Nicorvo breaks down the prevailing cultural attitude around truth, at least in the broader nonfiction world. The idea is that absolute truth is impossible to achieve, as everyone’s own individual truths are indisputable (even if incorrect), and because perspective matters more than accuracy in terms of how we relate to the world. This way of thinking isn’t wrong, per se, though perhaps imbued with a certain postmodern irony. Nothing means anything! We’re all just inventing the world as we go!

But absolute truth is real, if asymptotic. Like language, which only approximates that which it describes, the absolute truth can only be approximated, never realized—yet it is essential that we chase after the absolute truth, even if it means challenging our own perceptions of it.

What happens if we prioritize our own truths over the absolute? Nicorvo puts it best:

“It is our smaller truths, yours and mine, so very self-interested and self-determining, that lead us to corruption, tyranny, and lies.”

As writers in search of deeper truths, we owe it to ourselves to interrogate reality—including our own realities, including ourselves. Anything short of this is a disservice to the reader: a self-gratifying attempt to impose ourselves on a world we’ve chosen not to understand.

Notes on the Struggle for Truth

A few vignettes:

1) At the New Years Eve party in an heiress’s comfortable hi-rise condo, our host, who calls herself a writer/philosopher/polymath, tells us how she is in her “receiving era” as she enters her “divine feminine,” and says that we should all just be optimistic about the world because it will inevitably self-correct without human intervention. What does any of that mean, my friend asks? Literally, what does any of that mean? “You’re very angry,” the host tells my friend. “You should start a podcast.”

2) In a fiction workshop my sophomore year, a student shared a short story that was abhorrently, violently misogynistic, with no hint of satire or irony. It seemed redundant to share feedback on the story’s craft elements, in part because the story was also horribly written, but also because the story’s sexism seemed more pressing than the color of the wallpaper. Despite my multiple attempts to discuss the story’s violent elements and interrogate why the student wrote what he did about women, the instructor and other students were too uncomfortable with that discussion. I am told, at one point, that I’m strongly opinionated.

3) At a Friendsgiving dinner, a writer tries, for probably the tenth time, to explain why my personality fits my star chart. I have no interest in astrology, and my patience has worn thin with this writer, who, despite being well-read, is too insecure to defend his own ideas. When I interrogate him—What do the planets have to do with the moment of my birth? How do their “energies” impact my neurons? At what frequency do those energies travel? Since when do arbitrarily drawn shapes in the sky, crafted for pre-GPS circumnavigation, have any say in who I am or want to become as a person?—I am called a “bitch,” and never hear from him again. (He still needs to give me my tupperware back!)

4) At a poetry reading in Brooklyn, I notice that every reader is obsessed with the performance of their own identities. They are drawing boxes around themselves and expecting others to agree with their own self-stereotyping, and their poetry reflects a very narrow understanding of their own selves: surface-level poems about being X, Y, Z identity in the 21st century. Revision: I notice this at every poetry reading I have ever attended in Brooklyn. This isn’t to say that matters of identity are unimportant: I myself needed to write about my experiences as a queer man in order to understand them, but then I also needed to dig deeper into those experiences, to understand the social forces that shaped my experiences—so that I can exert my freedom from them. I needed to escape my own boxes, or else my identity would be a prison.

It’s only very recently that I’ve noticed our culture’s compulsion to avoid the truth. This is a culture that says I am entitled to what I believe in, and anything that questions those beliefs is a form of violence. You can attach this culture to broader events in human society, dress it up in -isms: anti-intellectualism, rabid individualism, postmodernism, Neoliberalism, some combination if isms, or none of the above-ism. Maybe it’s not even inherent to culture, maybe it’s a fact of human life—though I think our culture certainly aids and abets this.

Whatever the -ism, however the diagnosis pans out: our culture encourages us to avoid the truth. This makes the world a much more dangerous place to investigate, for as soon as your interrogation of reality upsets someone’s perceptions, you attack not only their sense of safety, but often their sense of self. When you don’t know who you are, all you have is what you believe in, and when someone shakes what you believe in, they shake who you are as a person. It’s a scary, insecure place to occupy—but many people occupy this space.

It makes the world much lonelier for those of us interested in absolute truth. Those of us who interrogate reality often do so from the margins: acceptance in society requires a certain comfort with self-deception.

But then, as writers, I think we owe it to ourselves to make that sacrifice. A writer’s work is to entertain, yes, and to craft good sentences: but it is also to strip back, reveal, and illuminate the human experience. Anything else is just typing.

The search for absolute truth is not easy. In fact, it is inherently a project of failure. It involves reaching for something that cannot be truly reached (though certain writers have come close enough to absolute truth that their writings resonate long past their deaths).

But this search is a necessary project for anyone called to writing, because we are called to write knowing there is something we must say, and must say well. This means detaching ourselves from our preconceived notions of the world—it means questioning our own beliefs, alongside others’. To do this is a lonely, terrifying process, but at the other end of it, we become much more sure of ourselves as individuals, and can live lives that are more authentic, compassionate, and intentional.

Lately, I have thought about writing not as a means of self-expression, but as a means of liberation. It is a rare and brave thing to have your voice and use it, but this dizzying freedom only comes from disentangling the truth of yourself from the self the world has given you. Whatever form of nonfiction you write, I encourage you to write it from a place of curiosity and bravery, of interrogation and radical honesty: whatever you discover, your reader will discover with you.