Lie to Me

by Duane Swierczynski

Storytelling is probably the oldest human urge, next to sex. Hell, back in prehistoric times, the two probably intertwined. "Ugg, you'll never believe who I hooked up with down by the tar pits."

If you tell a story with the truth — and do it accurately, fairly and independently--it's journalism. If you make it up, it's fiction. You can only get into trouble if you mix the two (ahem, Stephen, Jayson) and don't tell your readers.

That's lying.

And Ugg will never trust you again.

But I do think the principles of good storytelling apply to both journalism and fiction. Both forms should be engaging, suspenseful, spark curiosity and contain no extra words or descriptions of clouds.

Look no further than this week's cover package, "What Happened Next?". It's all about suspense — our need to read the next chapter in the stories we've covered this past year, from a grisly, unsolved inner-city murder to labor unrest at a health-food supermarket to a strange symposium about, er, nothing.

As for fiction, well, that's up to you. If you enter our 19th Annual Writing Contest.

This year, we're looking for short stories in one of three genres: mystery, sci-fi and romance. Give us smokin' pistols, brain-sucking aliens or ripped lace bodices — we don't care. Just set it in Philadelphia and make us turn the pages. And for the love of God, do not describe the freakin' clouds.

We mean it. We see one cumulonimbus, you're disqualified.

Why genre fiction? We could say we're all hip and inspired by those recent McSweeney's Thrilling and Astonishing anthologies.

But the truth is, a few of us are genre fiction fans. When I'm not wearing my editor-in-chief fedora, I write crime novels. (Blatant Plug Alert: My first, Secret Dead Men, is due out next month from PointBlank Press, and my second will be published by St. Martin’s next fall.)

The appeal of genre fiction is the lack of bullshit <\m> which is more or less what appeals to me about journalism. You don't have all day or countless column inches. You have a job to do: Engage your reader's imagination by any means necessary.

So get scribblin'. Judging your hard work will be Sarah Dunn, CP alum and author of The Big Love (romance); Michael Swanwick, the award-winning author of Bones of the Earth (sci-fi); and my friend Ken Bruen, the Shamus Award-winning crime novelist whose latest is The Killing of the Tinkers (mystery).

The deadline: January 28, 2005. (For more details, click here.) No, that's not much time. But trust me. If you had all the time in the world, you'd start in with the clouds.