The Lie Your Character Believes

This is an especially important bit of characterization, and it is not limited to your protagonist. Read on to see how you can increase your story’s emotional punch and also help create high-stakes tension with little additional effort.

What’s in a Lie?

There are several ways to approach this concept; for me, the easiest way to understand its importance is to think of your story as a whole. The Lie is central to the action of your story and to the arc of each character to varying degrees.

For example, in Toni Morrison’s The Song of Solomon, the main Lie that Milkman believes is that he is not “of” his family. He believes he is separate; he believes that family does not matter and does not have any impact on the self. This is a crucial belief because it drives him to take action that another character might not: betrayal of his family. Eventually, he is forced to look at his own connection to his roots and how it has shaped him as a person.

As you can see, if Morrison had written him with a different Lie, or different beliefs as a character, the entire story would lose the impact of his emotional journey of self-discovery and the realization that his beliefs were, in fact, a Lie.

This example replicates itself again and again in literature, and I find it is most evident in stories that have an intense emotional arc. It is not, however, limited to the protagonist.

To take a more well-known example, we can look at The Shining, by Stephen King. In this story, we can look at the role the Lie takes in an antagonist character. I would make the argument that Jack is not the only antagonist, and rather, the hotel serves as a major antagonistic force in the novel, but for this example, we will use him.

Jack is an alcoholic. Deep down, the Lie he believes is the one the alcohol is whispering to him all the time. Despite being in recovery and sober at the outset of the story, he quickly deteriorates at the hotel. Jack believes that he cannot overcome the poisonous voices in his head, something he saw his own father succumb to over time. Eventually, he relents to the toxic voices in his head, not only returning to alcohol (provided by the hotel) but also attempting to murder his wife and young son.

For Jack, the Lie he believed was not one he overcame at the end of the novel. This dynamic for an antagonist can be useful in developing emotional stakes for them as well as the protagonist. Many times, “villains” come across as flat, with little emotional resonance with the reader.

By establishing a Lie that the antagonist cannot defeat, we enable the reader to step inside their belief system and understand their actions in a more nuanced way. Have you ever read a book where you feel a strange sense of sympathy for the bad guy? The author probably gave him a really good Lie that helped you see things the way he might, lending his actions and beliefs a healthy dose of believability.