Authors lie. So do storytellers, but the good ones tell you why
Every story is a choice, but most storyteller’s don’t admin they’re making one. The question is: what are you choosing to reveal and what are you leaving out?
Let’s begin with the lie.
Not the one where you invent clients out of thin air. Not the dramatic glow-up story with three filters and business class ticket. Not even the one your audience can see through from a mile away.
No, the real lie. The one you don’t notice is the shape of the story itself.
The voice that tells it. The version of events that gets the spotlight. The pieces you chose to leave out.
Storytelling is not a photograph. It’s painting; curated, cropped, colored with mood and intent. That’s not a flaw. That’s the craft.
In marketing, we keep pretending that story = truth. But the best storytellers, especially the ethical ones, know that story is always a beautiful lie.
And they tell you so.
Fiction knows this. Marketing pretends not to
Writers have always played with the slipperiness of truth.
Morrison gave us Beloved’s Sethe, a narrator whose trauma distorts memory, and whose story unfolds in fragments and silences. Truth becomes emotional, not chronological. Atwood, in The Handmaid’s Tale, uses Offred’s voice to show us what’s missing, what’s feared, what’s imagined, and dares us to question what’s “real” in the story Offred tells under surveillance.
Carmen Maria Machado, in In the Dream House, breaks genre, time, and structure, writing memoir like gothic fiction, speculative horror, and archive. She names the lie and then writes around it, through it, against it.
In fiction, this trick is the feature. We know we’re being guided, distorted even. And we trust the author more because they let us see the strings.
But in marketing, we still act like the founder story just… happened. Like the glowing testimonial floated down from a cloud of objectivity. Like the brand voice isn’t performing a character, but simply “being real”.
That’s the real lie. Not the story as such, but the claim that it’s just how it was.
The narrator is always constructed (yes, even yours)
In fiction, we call it voice. In marketing, it’s called tone. In both cases, we’re dealing with a narrator. Sometimes it’s the founder, speaking as themselves, but cleaner. Sometimes it’s a persona, a quirky, polished, audience-ready projection of the brand. Sometimes it’s a collective “we”, speaking with an authority no one person could actually own. Just like I did in the beginning of this paragraph.
A few examples:
Monki, the Swedish fashion brand whose voice blends radical softness with Gen Z irreverence. It’s not just a tone, it’s a character with opinions, contradictions, and edge.
Sniph, the Swedish scent subscription brand, whose voice feels like a well-dressed friend whispering perfume secrets from a Parisian rooftop.
Finnair, in recent campaigns, has leaned into a cool, almost poetic minimalism that reframes air travel with feeling, not just as function.
Each of these is a narrator, a character, and everyone knows it’s a performance. That’s the point. In fact, the problem isn’t that it’s a character. The problem is when brands pretend it’s not.
Ask yourself: Does your narrator know it’s a character? Does your audience? When the answer is no, you’re not building a relationship. You’re setting up a revelation that might crack your brand when the illusion shatters.
Shaping is not the same as deceiving
Not all lying is unethical. Great storytelling is about shaping, not distorting. You have to make choices. You have to frame. To emphasize. To lease some things unsaid so that other things can land.
What matters is how and why you do it. Let’s break it down:
- Omission is inevitable, but do you omit to streamline or to sanitize?
- Emphasis can heighten meaning, but are you highlighting the human moment or just the moment that converts?
- Framing gives narrative shape, but does it respect the audience’s intelligence or manipulate their fear?
The brands that do this well don’t claim to tell the whole truth. They tell a truth, clearly, consciously, and with care. They earn trust not by being authentic but by being intentional.
Transparency beats illusion (but you still get to perform)
Some of the most compelling brands right now are deeply constructed. They’re not trying to be real. They’re trying to be memorable, and they are.
Liquid Death’s entire brand is a performance, a satire of energy drinks built on heavy metal, horror, and hydration. Oatly speaks in contradictions on purpose: self-aware, chatty, and sometimes nonsensical. It works.
Seth Godin practically trademarked the “I’m whispering something smart from the corner” voice. That’s a character too.
The key difference is that they all own the illusion.
There’s no one right narrator for your brand. You can be the sage, the rebel, the cheerleader, the ghost in the machine. Just don’t forget: Your audience can feel the difference between character and camouflage. One builds connection, the other breeds suspicion.
So choose your mask, but don’t pretend it’s your face.
Bonus prompt: Reverse-engineer the lie
Time to pull back the curtain. Go grab something you wrote recently: a sales page, an email, your about page. Now ask:
- What did I emphasize?
- What did I leave out?
- What’s framed as inevitable, obvious, or universally true?
- Who is narrating this and what do they want the reader to believe?
This is a way for you to take responsibility for the version of truth you’re choosing to tell. That’s what story is: a shaped truth.
Good storytellers shape with precision. Great ones admit they’re doing it. And you might discover that your most powerful story isn’t the one you’ve been telling, but the one hiding in the shadows.
