A Liar's Tale: When This Reporter Stretches the Truth, It's Okay
Carl Kozlowski
(Email to a Friend)

As a reporter for the Pasadena Weekly in California, André Coleman has learned to keep his eyes and ears open everywhere he goes. Normally, it pays off by providing him with an idea for one of his wide-ranging article topics: the police, the Pasadena Unified School District, or events out of Northwest Pasadena.

But one day years ago, his keen hearing provided the inspiration to launch his lifelong dream.

"I was going into a North Hollywood 7-11 in 1992, and there was a guy on a pay phone who was lying to his girlfriend, using every trick he could," Coleman recalls. "He was saying there was a death in the family, and that another family member had gone to drinking, and my instant thought was, 'What if he ended up him in a situation where all of those lies came true just based on his word?'"

Adding up the possibilities, Coleman quickly realized that he had found the core idea of what would become his first movie script. Growing up watching fantasy series like The Twilight Zone, and with his love of shows like Quantum Leap in adulthood, he always wanted to write his own scripts.

The script only made it to the option stage (in which a producer buys the right to market it around Hollywood), but years later, he still couldn't shake the concept from his mind, and he decided to rewrite the script as a novel.

Changing the title to A Liar’s Tale from Liar, Liar because of the movie starring Jim Carrey, Coleman tells the story of a habitual liar who finds himself in a world where all of his lies have come true -- only now he can't get anyone to believe him.

"It plays with the idea of perception being reality," Coleman said. "With all the paranoia coming out of Washington -- the last two elections, the Patriot Act, the War on Terror and the Iraq War - that concept has taken on an entirely new meaning."

Yet politics may be about the only subject the book doesn't examine, as it effortlessly crosses genres, beginning as a coming of age story and crossing romance, mystery, and spirituality.

"When I sent the book to a couple of publishing houses, one was very interested, but they wanted it to focus on one genre, and they didn't want the lead character to be the liar. They wanted him to be a detective trapped in the world of a criminal he was chasing. They wanted a boy scout like Superman. The only problem is I dig Batman because he is psycho, so I told them no deal. Life is not just one genre, sometimes it's a tragedy and sometimes it's a comedy."

The result is a story that incorporates heavy doses of mystery and thrills with a solid mix of humor, strong characters and an effective sense of sadness as lead character Scott Hampton gets sucked further and further into his nightmare situation. And in presenting fully rounded characters who defy easy stereotypes or "good" versus "bad" labels, Coleman pays tribute to his literary hero and fellow African-American novelist Walter Mosley.

Perhaps more impressively, Coleman decided to take all the financial risks himself, and established his own publishing house, Razor7 Publishing, to launch an initial printing of 1500 copies.

"Man, it's been great so far," he said. "I put the first chapter on my Web site, and posted in some news groups and sent out a bunch of email blasts and I have made half of my investment back from advance copies."

While many writers might shudder at taking such a big financial risk, the decision was easy for Coleman, who was raised to believe that there are no walls, only doors that need to be kicked in.

He proudly recalls seeing his family break open doors in the 60s and 70s living in Altadena His parents and Muhammad Ali were his heroes.

"I think what's really been cool about my life is that my family has always been breaking color barriers. My father's folks were an interracial couple in West Virginia pre-1920, when a black man could get lynched for just looking at a white woman," he said. "In 1969 we became just the second black family to live on Altadena Drive, which means we crossed economic lines too. For years, Altadena (a town near Pasadena) was segregated de facto because black folks knew which neighborhoods not to go in, and there were real estate clauses that said you couldn't buy a home unless you promised never to sell it to a black person."

Born in 1964, Coleman has experienced firsthand the historic changes that have taken place in the civil rights arena and in race relations. He was one of the first black students to be bused to school when desegregation hit the PUSD, a move that had a greater psychological and emotional than physical significance for him, since he only lived less than ten blocks from his new school and notes that he could have easily walked the distance.

Riding the bus not only taught Coleman about being a trendsetter for change, it reinforced the pioneering spirit he had been raised to hold dear.

"I do think in some ways the Civil Rights Movement came up short because people were saying 'give us a piece of the pie.' They should have looked for the ingredients instead. I want my own pie. I feel like even now, writing in the fantasy/science fiction genre, I'm helping to break another color barrier," he explains. "I'm not the first black writer in the genre, but it's not like you could blindly throw a rock and hit a black sci-fi writer at every convention either."

In keeping with that goal of bringing a black voice to the fantasy genre, Coleman chose to center his novel A Liar's Tale on an African-American cast of characters.

"People tell the stories they relate to, and I think that every culture does have its own stories. While every man has lied to some degree to women at work or someplace, I think our culture does have a lot to do with the kind of lies we tell," he said. "I'm talking about American culture, but African-Americans tend to have more bravado. If you listen to a white person at a bar, he'll tell you how important he is at work. The black guy is going to say how many women he has, or how he could kick everyone's ass in the bar."

Coleman felt that his longtime experience as an alt-weekly reporter helped his fiction-writing process, as he had learned "to know stories inside-out," and because working at weeklies has provided him with the opportunity to write longer stories than daily papers afford. He also believes that weeklies allow their writers to be more storytellers than mere recorders of facts. 

"I love reporting, but a lot of times when I read newspapers, I feel like the news stories are missing something. The stories lack emotion. 'What was the look in Robert Blake's eye while he waited for his verdict? What did the people of New Orleans look like while they waited for aid during Hurricane Katrina?' This is why I think most weekly and daily newspapers are failing. They try and give me what I can get on CNN. They report facts, but they don't tell stories. I fail at it myself all the time, but when I can add that element to the facts and tell a story I think do my best work. The articles I'm proudest of, for instance, explained how the construction of Pasadena's freeways displaced minorities and showed the human side of that, and my story on the Voting Rights Act allowed me to do that even more.

"I think we've seen revolutions in music and film due to independent artists," he said. "I suspect we are on the verge of a true independent publishing revolution also. I'm not talking about the vanity presses, but I'm talking about people starting their own company, laying out their own book, and owning the ISBN number and it's their book lock, stock and barrel."

Download a sample chapter (PDF) from A Liar's Tale here.

Carl Kozlowski is a regular Arriviste contributor and the co-author of the satirical self-help guide Life: The Final Frontier. (Pick this up!) He has also performed standup coast to coast and written for the Chicago Tribune, New City Weekly in Chicago, Chicago Reader and Pasadena Weekly.
(Email to a Friend)