I lie for a living—that’s all fiction is, after all, when you drill down to the molten core of it: I, the writer, create in my mind a pair of characters, two people who did not heretofore exist, and I strive to make them seem real. I give them backstories. I give them foibles and flaws. Scars, peccadilloes, fetishes. Like you, like me. Then I come up with a way to force them into orbit around each other. This is the plot—the path of their orbits as they intersect, creating a necessary collision. The collision results in not destruction as in true astronomy, but creation. This collision is where the magic happens. It’s the real lie. It’s a lie that these people exist, that this story is real, or even possible. The happily ever after carries on after you’ve read those words: The End. You, the reader, come to me begging for that lie. You relish it. That lie provides you with comfort, with entertainment, with emotions your real life may lack. You know exactly what I’m doing, but like any accomplished magician, you don’t know how I do it. Even the above explanation doesn’t show you how I tell my lies, or how I perform the magic, the sleight of hand, the prestidigitation which turns ideas in my brain into real people on the page.

I am very, very good at this kind of lying.

My lies have won literary awards. They’ve been turned into movies, which themselves have won awards. Movies made from my books have launched careers.

I am also, perhaps unfortunately, good at lying in other ways. I just am. It comes naturally to me. I’m a storyteller. I could have been an actor, but I’m far too self-conscious for that. I comfort myself with the fact that, in general, I do not lie in everyday life. I’m not practiced at it. Lies do not come smoothly. I must work at them. Create them, smooth out the edges like a blacksmith with a hammer and anvil.

This is what I’m doing as I drive home from the airport: working on my lie. The best lies, as any accomplished liar knows, contain a counterintuitively disproportionate amount of truth. You can’t tell a whole lie. As in, you can’t create a whole fiction to cover your ass. For it to work your story has to be more truth than lie.