"Writers, all the good ones, are Natural Born Liars"
About this Quote
The line lands like a provocation, but it’s really a defense of the craft: if you’re not lying, you’re probably just taking notes. Daniel Keys Moran’s “Natural Born Liars” flips the usual moral panic about fiction on its head and reframes deception as a native talent, almost a biological prerequisite, for making imagined worlds feel more real than the reader’s afternoon.
The intent is partly to reclaim “liar” from its ethical baggage and attach it to a different skill set: selective omission, strategic exaggeration, and the confident presentation of invented facts. Good writers don’t merely fabricate events; they fabricate inevitability. They move the reader into a state where disbelief isn’t suspended so much as outcompeted by momentum, detail, and emotional logic. Calling that “lying” is a bracing way to admit how manipulative storytelling is - and how consensual that manipulation becomes when it’s done well.
Subtext: sincerity is overrated as a badge of artistic virtue. The writer’s job isn’t to be “authentic” in the confessional sense; it’s to be convincing. Moran’s phrasing also needles literary respectability. “Natural born” implies instinct, not credentialism, cutting against the workshop-industrial idea that craft is purely teachable technique. You can train prose, pacing, and structure. The deeper con is the ability to intuit what a reader wants to believe and deliver it without showing the seams.
Context matters: a science fiction writer, steeped in genre that routinely gets dismissed as escapist, is staking a claim that invention isn’t escapism - it’s an advanced form of truth-making. The lie, in other words, is the delivery system. The payload is insight.
The intent is partly to reclaim “liar” from its ethical baggage and attach it to a different skill set: selective omission, strategic exaggeration, and the confident presentation of invented facts. Good writers don’t merely fabricate events; they fabricate inevitability. They move the reader into a state where disbelief isn’t suspended so much as outcompeted by momentum, detail, and emotional logic. Calling that “lying” is a bracing way to admit how manipulative storytelling is - and how consensual that manipulation becomes when it’s done well.
Subtext: sincerity is overrated as a badge of artistic virtue. The writer’s job isn’t to be “authentic” in the confessional sense; it’s to be convincing. Moran’s phrasing also needles literary respectability. “Natural born” implies instinct, not credentialism, cutting against the workshop-industrial idea that craft is purely teachable technique. You can train prose, pacing, and structure. The deeper con is the ability to intuit what a reader wants to believe and deliver it without showing the seams.
Context matters: a science fiction writer, steeped in genre that routinely gets dismissed as escapist, is staking a claim that invention isn’t escapism - it’s an advanced form of truth-making. The lie, in other words, is the delivery system. The payload is insight.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
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