The significance of Telling has remained grossly underrated. The desire to tell someone, or some people, something or things is universal and vitally essential. Not telling can lead to disease; telling can be curative. Not telling your own people something that weighs heavily upon the heart can even lead to fatal ailments. Telling is therapeutic because it provides instant unburdening and relief.

The desire to tell and be relieved is felt from early childhood. The little boy who has been hit by someone or bullied comes crying to tell his mother, or another, about the injustice he has suffered. Just the telling will take care of much of the problem. Reporting, complaining, loudly lamenting, etc. are mechanisms of the body to ease itself. They may alienate and create ill will but they prevent the subject from greater problems. They are therefore superior to measures such as sulking, retaliating directly or resorting to long drawn vendetta. If there is no one available to listen, one might even tell God in the hope that He will hear. Being heard by someone is what matters.

Telling can take on a creative dimension in one who writes fiction or becomes a reporter. The latter is not quite the same as the former because what the reporter tells is generally little related to his own personal pain or life. One who can become creative in the telling of his personal woes succeeds in impersonalizing them. Such a person has realized that just the personal complaint will not interest the ears of many and therefore he needs to make out a narrative in which his personal pain has been shaped into a general pattern of human suffering. In this kind of telling more people find interest. The teller also feels relieved in this that he is not alone in the manner of his suffering; he has other fellow brethren wailing along with him.

Fiction is therefore lies. It is the writer’s concoction of a tale that has knitted in his personal woes into the general fabric of human suffering. Hence though fiction is a lie, it makes us realize the truth; the truth which he has felt upon his pulses but which he is not alone in feeling. Wherever there is telling, there will be some lies. No one yet born is capable of telling the absolute truth for language has limitations and narrative by nature needs to become imaginative and arresting if it is to be effective. However, at the time of telling it seems to “lie like truth” and therefore impresses as the very truth, forcing the reader to accept without becoming skeptical.

In fiction telling becomes an art-form. The story teller acquires a rhetoric which is aimed at persuading the reader and so many kinds of ingredients are blended into the final recipe for success. Narratives, it has been claimed, have become powerful mediums of power and unifications; says Edward Said, “Nations are Narrations”.