The Facts Don’t Tell the Story

A psychological thriller by J.K. Franko

Within these pages
lies a puzzle written
by a dead man.

Writers don’t just tell stories. They curate reality. More than four hundred years ago, Miguel de Cervantes built Don Quixote around that concept.

Cervantes employs a simple device repeatedly throughout the novel. Don Quixote and Sancho Panza encounter something on the road. Don Quixote interprets it one way; Sancho sees something else. Don Quixote acts on his interpretation, generally with unfortunate consequences for him, sometimes for Sancho. And afterward, the two attempt to explain what they have just experienced.

The windmills are the most famous example. Don Quixote sees giants. Sancho insists they are windmills. Don Quixote charges, is thrown from his horse, and finds himself badly battered. You would think that would settle the matter, but not for Don Quixote. He claims that an enchanter has turned the giants into windmills to deprive him of victory. The collision with the windmill doesn’t correct Don Quixote’s account of reality. It simply gives him another fact to explain. And he explains it in a way that preserves the story he already believes.

“Change those choices and you can change the story without changing the underlying events.”

The point isn’t that Don Quixote is deluded and Sancho is sensible. Their differing perspectives and arguments dramatize something fundamental about human experience: reality does not arrive with meaning attached. As we experience events unfolding through time, we begin looking for connections, assigning causes, inferring motives. We construct explanations that make sense of experience. Those explanations are stories.

Of course, our memories, prejudices, expectations, and beliefs influence what kinds of stories we construct—Don Quixote’s were idealized; Sancho’s were more realistic. But beneath those influences lies something more fundamental—this primordial impulse to organize experience into meaning. The stories we construct determine how we understand what we have experienced.

That is what storytellers do, although with more deliberation. A writer chooses what to show, what to leave out, whose perceptions to trust, and when to reveal what another character knows. Change those choices and you can change the story without changing the underlying events. The raw material may remain identical. What changes is the pattern through which the reader understands it.

This is what I mean when I say that writers curate reality.

Cervantes does something especially clever with the reader. The reader generally sees reality as Sancho sees it. We know that Don Quixote is charging at windmills, which allows us to recognize the gulf between the world and the story he has made of it. But imagine if Cervantes had denied us that certainty. If the windmills might actually have been giants. If Sancho’s explanation were only one interpretation among several.

When certainty disappears

That is an approach I wanted to explore in my latest novel, What You Let In.

Nicholas Rogers experiences numerous events that admit radically different explanations. Nicholas regularly reinterprets what he has experienced, adding one level of instability. Sometimes other characters offer him accounts of their own, further destabilizing reality.

Like writers, readers curate reality, too. Every time we read a novel, we select among the facts presented, weigh competing accounts, and construct our own understanding of what happened. In What You Let In, I deny readers the certainty Cervantes provides, leaving them to decide which version of Nicholas’s experiences they will accept.

When the story reaches you

But the novel goes a step further. As the story unfolds, it begins to escape Nicholas’s control, reaching J.K. Franko, who believes he is merely presenting Nicholas’s manuscript.

Eventually, the story breaks through the fourth wall and addresses you directly, as you sit on your sofa or lie in bed with the book in your hands. It calls into question the nature of the manuscript itself: what is it, what is its purpose, and who—or what—is its true author?

And it challenges the assumption that what you have allowed into your mind will remain safely confined to the pages of the manuscript, rather than staying with you, living in you, long after you close the book.