How to Tell an Honest Story

By Eleanor Magnuson

“Never let the truth get in the way of a good story” -Mark Twain

I’m sitting in a bar on a Friday night and a man walks over and offers to buy me a drink. 

He’s six foot one and he has perfect teeth and wavy hair, so I say, “Sure, I’ll have a dark n stormy,” which is my favorite cocktail. 

The bartender gives me the drink, and it’s made incorrectly. He used ginger ale instead of ginger beer, but it isn’t worth it to correct the error. I drink my rum and ginger ale while Wavy and I exchange some playful banter. He asks me what brought me here. “Boredom, mostly.” He says he’ll do his best to keep me entertained. “Is that a promise?” We go back and forth like this for a little while. 

Eventually I ask him what he does for a living. 

“I’m a firefighter.” 

Half of a smile reveals itself, so I follow his lead and feign astonishment, just a hair over the top so he knows I’m  teasing. 

“I actually fought the biggest fire in California history,” he says. 

I raise an eyebrow and lean back in my seat.

“Well, you didn’t do a very good job!”

I tell that story a fair amount. My friends are probably tired of hearing it, but I think it’s a good one, and it usually gets a laugh. But the thing is, it didn’t actually happen that way. I didn’t say that, I only thought it. And actually the whole bit about the dark and stormy is from a different story, but that one isn’t as funny and I think the detail about the drink fills out the narrative in a way that I enjoy. Maybe I like for people to know that I have good taste, but I’m not snobby about it. Or maybe I want people to think of me as the kind of person who is nice to bartenders and doesn’t make a stink about a little mistake. After all, ginger ale is close enough. 

If I’m being entirely honest, this story didn’t really happen at all. At least not the way I tell it. This guy does exist, and we did have a flirtatious interchange, and he did tell me that he fought the biggest fire in California history, but we didn’t meet in a bar. We met on Tinder, and this whole conversation happened over text. But I don’t like that story as much, so I tell it a different way. I like the woman who exchanges snarky one-liners with cute firefighters in bars while she drinks a bad cocktail without complaint. Maybe I like her a little more than the girl who talks to boys on dating apps while drinking a beer alone in her apartment. 

In my senior year of high school, my English teacher once told me that sometimes, being a good storyteller is about telling little lies. Maybe you don’t remember the exact details of how something happened, or maybe you just like the story better if it’s a little exaggerated. Storytelling is about sharing something about yourself with an audience, and  it can be easy to get bogged down trying to figure out exactly how something happened. This kind of perfectionism can prevent us from telling stories at all, so sometimes it’s best to tell a story that’s only mostly true, or a story that’s pieced together from a few different experiences. 

Try this out as an exercise! Start with something true, and try to think of ways to stretch and mold it into something new. Combine it with other things that have happened to you, change the setting to a place you find more interesting, or add some details that you find compelling. You might find that through this process, the story you want to tell reveals a lot about who you are, and who you want to be. 

In a funny sort of way, sometimes the little lies make the story feel truer, the little details that might not be quite right, or the funny thing we didn’t say but really wished we had said. When we let go of that fixation on absolute, objective truth, we can find new paths towards honesty and authenticity. It’s your story, tell it the way you like it. If it’s mostly true, or if it expresses the truth of how something felt, maybe it doesn’t really matter. Maybe ginger ale is close enough.