In a 2009 interview, filmmaker Werner Herzog argued that his documentaries are more like fiction: “I direct them. And I stylize them. I am not the kind of cinéma vérité that demands that you be unobtrusive. I will be present.”

This was a surprising statement, considering that perhaps more than any other artistic medium, documentaries based on video footage claim to be the most faithful to the truth. After all, seeing is believing. Indeed, cinema vérité, known for its “mouse-on-the-wall” approach, seeks to have filmmakers do their best to step away from the scene and capture the “pure truth” of a moment.

But even if this filmmaker were successful, the ratio of footage to editing in most documentaries is 80:1 (Rabinger, 2009). That is, out of 80 hours of footage, only one hour appears in the actual film.

In this editing process – curating, sorting, ordering – Herzog compares himself to “the hornet that goes in and stings.” Since narrativization always requires reduction, a certain amount of fictionalization is inevitable, even if all the source material is true.

In our search for meaning, humans go through a similar process of storytelling – which arguably makes us closer to half-truths than to beings wholly grounded in facts.

We are surrounded by stories

In his excellent TED talk, author Noah Yuval Harari explains how we are the only species that imposes a subjective worldview on an objective reality. For a chimpanzee, a banana will always be a banana. For a human, however, that banana can be a nostalgic memory of youth – reminding them of, for example, the album cover of The Velvet Underground & Nico. For that same chimpanzee, a twenty-dollar bill has no value. For a human, on the other hand, that paper can be used to buy goods in a dynamic economy.

Money, religion, governments – these are all stories we have collectively believed. Our world, our country, our state, our city, our school or job, our family – we are surrounded by constellations of stories.

These many narrative valences can easily overwhelm us. In his book The feeling of an end (2000) the literary theorist Frank Kermode describes this phenomenon: “The organism finds itself in a world of contradictory sensory impressions, it is exposed to the attacks of a hostile world and must resort to all possible means in order to survive.” The “means” here are narratives that provide us with the “mental structures” to bring order to the chaos.

In other words, narrative structure allows us to curate and sort the raw, formless data of reality. If documentaries are more like fictionalizations, are we – by curating, editing, sorting, ordering and serializing the raw data of reality – more like fictions? I would say the answer is yes.

The chaotic practice of capturing “reality”

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“The sense of meaning and continuity achieved through narrating experiences comes at a price,” writes Michael White (1990), the founder of narrative therapy. The “price” that White speaks of is objective truth.

Using our fictions for a better life

What are the consequences of this? And how can we live better lives on this basis? A debate in the literary world of creative nonfiction is a good place to start.

If you spend time with creative writing professors, you’ll soon hear them complaining that students in fiction classes are actually writing thinly veiled memoirs, while students in nonfiction classes are actually writing fiction. This observation holds true in the publishing world as well. Why is Tim O’Brien’s The things they wore classified as fiction and not a memoir, even though he actually fought in the Vietnam War? Why is Dave Eggers’ A heartbreaking work of breathtaking genius (2000) – which begins with the caveat: “This is not actually a purely non-fiction book. Many parts have been fictionalised to varying degrees and for different purposes.” – sold as non-fiction?

Once you question genres, their value can quickly be lost. “Just because something never happened doesn’t mean it isn’t true” has become something of a koan for writers who want to avoid the debate about the truth of genres. These writers seem to have agreed that the most important thing is fidelity to the emotional truth of the story. If you have to invent a scene or two in your memoir to get closer to the emotional truth as you experienced it, that is not only acceptable, it is even encouraged.

How can we apply this lesson of emotional truth to our own lives?

Complicating this question is that memory is notoriously poor. Researchers can implant false memories in willing subjects (see Elizabeth Loftus’ Lost in the Mall technique). The most seemingly durable memories we have – flashbulb memories, a term coined after the world witnessed JFK’s assassination, when researchers found years later that everyone could vividly remember where they were when they heard the news – can turn into fiction over time.

And memories in general are subject to a phenomenon known as memory conformity, which holds that memories are subject to a kind of social contagion. If our stories can only be as true as the memories that shape them, it is difficult to imagine constructing a self-story that makes absolute truth claims, even if one “remembers” all of the constituent parts of the story.

Identity is something you actively create, not something that is given to you.

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The role of narrative therapy

I’m not suggesting that you lie to yourself because I want to discourage you. Rather, it’s important to maintain a constructivist approach to your self-esteem – understand that you are not a pre-written story, but an agent who can rewrite and rewrite your story every day.

Narrative therapists distinguish between an internal self-concept—which describes an essential self that is innate and fixed and located at the core of the person’s identity—and an intentional self-concept, which sees people as active storytellers and meaning makers of their identities. Identity in the intentional self-concept is the real-time manifestation of one’s values ​​lived out in the world.

In his book The Midday DemonAndrew Solomon (2015) describes this understanding of the self very beautifully: “There is no essential self that lies pure as a vein of gold beneath the chaos of experience and chemistry. Everything can be changed, and we must understand the human organism as a succession of selves that are subject to or choose each other.”

This idea contradicts the Western notion of identity. In a consumer-oriented, status-obsessed culture, we are defined by what we do and what we own. Imagine asking a stranger at your next cocktail party what is important to them, rather than what they do.