How and why nonfiction authors lie

We all know that fiction authors are liars, writing about people and events that never happened. But nonfiction authors tell the truth, right?

Well, perhaps the truth, but not the whole truth.

Why nonfiction authors lie

A nonfiction book has a point of view. It’s based on an idea. If the book is any good, it’s an idea that hasn’t been shared before in other books.

Generally, the new idea exists because something has changed. Technology has changed the playing field. New research reveals unsuspected trends. People’s attitudes shift. The author tells a story about events and people we never knew about before. Or even, the author has seen things from a new perspective. Unless something has changed, you’re writing the same things that have been written before, so why bother?

Because of the newness of the idea, the author needs to find facts to back it up, and such facts are difficult to find. (If the facts backing up the idea were plentiful and easy to spot, the book about it was probably already written based on all those facts.)

Convincing people of a new point requires new evidence. For example:

• A study that reveals facts or statistics that were not suspected before.
• A story or case study of someone whose experience was uncommon compared to what came before.
• A familiar story, but with new revelations about elements of the story that hadn’t previously been revealed.
• The author’s common-sense musings about why things are different now.

Put simply, the author is saying “Everyone who came before was wrong, and I found some facts to show why they were wrong and my idea is right.”

Inevitably, this means sharing a carefully selected set of facts that are different from the common mass of facts that most people believe.

This is how nonfiction authors lie. They pick facts, statistics, stories, and ideas that back their point of view and assemble them into a narrative. They ignore, downplay, and denigrate the mass of other facts that led those that came before to believe something else.

This is telling the truth in a way, but not the whole truth — because if we look at all the evidence, we’d probably just come to the same conclusions everyone did before.

Is this wrong?

No.

New ideas have to come from somewhere. Authors often discover new ideas, or at least new perspectives, that have value. Sometimes they’ve identified a trend that no one else has seen. Other times, they assemble previous facts and ideas in a new way that inspires people. Sometime their fragmentary, tentative new facts are pointing to an idea that was hiding.

Nobody thought bacteria caused stomach ulcers until Barry Marshall suspected it and proved it.

Nobody thought a Republican could win the presidency based on demonizing immigrants and raising tariffs until Donald Trump did.

Nobody understood how AI companions could supercharge individual productivity until Ethan Mollick wrote about it.

Of course, for every idea like this, there are 100 other ideas that are new, radical, intriguing, and wrong. When you cherry-pick evidence for a counterintuitive thesis, you may just be seeing a pattern that doesn’t exist.

Be open but skeptical

Without new ideas, life is boring. And without new ideas, you’d miss out on ways to change and get ahead.

But with AI, it’s now far easier for authors to find the tiny particles of evidence for their counterintuitive theses. (Or to be convinced they found those particles, even though AI fabricated them.)

Lying by failing to tell the whole truth is easier than ever.

When an author doesn’t tell the whole truth — and no author possibly can — they can easily be wrong.

But they might be right. Inspiration and appropriate skepticism are uncomfortable bedfellows. Be hopeful. But don’t swallow selective truth whole.

The tentative acceptance of inspirational ideas may be the most important skill for people in the modern era.

Do you agree?