The Art of Lying — It’s in the details
I used to be a good liar, but not anymore.
Telling the truth is very easy. You only need to say what really happened, what you saw, what you heard, and what you felt. Just tell it as it is and be a person of integrity.
Lying is a terrible skill and is incredibly hard.
I understood this concept after watching the Pretty Little Liars series. You need to recall what you said to John so you can tell Doe in the exact same way. You need to remember the emotions you had when telling the lie the first time and replicate them each time so the detective doesn’t figure it out. However, you can’t use the same phrasing too often, or they’ll suspect it was fabricated. You have to be careful about what details you choose to add later and what details you need to exclude, ensuring there’s a logical explanation behind them. You need an alibi — something that makes your lie seem like the truth — to convince witnesses.
As a friend of mine put it,
Liars often try to recount events with careful details and shocking accuracy. They stress themselves to maintain the same extent of psychological effort in retention, narration, and patterning. In contrast, those who tell the truth don’t see the need to remember painstaking details because they’re confident in their honesty. When pressured by an interrogator, they might struggle to remember details because the events we witness often pass by without warning, and we don’t take care to note them. Retention becomes difficult, and sometimes only under immense mental stress can truth-tellers retrieve details, which might still be flawed. Pathological liars, however, create artificial scenarios and work to keep their pattern perfect, resulting in seemingly flawless truths. So much work — smart work, eh?
When I was younger and developing my lying skills, I was an occasional bed wetter. That might not seem related to lying, but lying is literally a cover-up of the truth. At first, my parents could detect my lies, but soon I got so good at it — I perfected the art.
I’d wake up, turn the bed over, change the sheet, change my clothes, and pretend to sleep. They wouldn’t suspect a thing because I perfected the details. I was only about 10 years old.
That’s why I believe every successful liar is a really smart person—someone who’s detail-oriented and has no sense of guilt.
It only takes a moment of guilt and a simple slip-up for the lie to be discovered for what it is — a lie pretending to be the truth.
Growing up, I told better lies that had nothing to do with bedwetting — lies that made the ‘truth-teller’ doubt their own facts because they believed me. I had no tells — I had convinced myself that my lie was the truth.
These are the worst kind of liars — the ones who convince themselves that their lie is the truth. They tell it with such intensity that you cannot help but believe them. They lose the guilt because they believe they are telling the truth and are willing to defend it, like someone with a twisted sense of justice.
Even when someone proves their lie and finds evidence of the truth, they don’t falter or stagger. They say it so confidently that the truth begins to lose its value and arouses suspicion.
They say it so well that the truth seems false, and you begin to question yourself: Who’s really lying here and who’s really telling the truth? That’s how the truth becomes a lie, and a lie becomes the truth.
It all depends on people.
Five witnesses may be lying, and only one is telling the truth.
However, liars lose a part of themselves every day until they don’t know who they are anymore. They become slaves to the lie, lose all sense of reality, and can’t recognise the truth anymore. They live with an impaired mental state.
So, to conclude my story, I used to be a good liar, but not anymore.
I became a person of integrity, a morally upright person.
It takes a smart person to tell a lie that does not arouse suspicion.
It takes a wise person to see that they don’t need to tell that stressful lie.
