When speaking or creating with candor, consider a Venn Diagram of the following:
Truthfulness: What are the unarguable truths that make up your reality? (objective/external facts, your thoughts, your feelings, and your physical sensations). Truthfulness is a measure of what you accurately reveal.
Openness: How much are you revealing? You can be truthful, i.e., accurate, and still withholding certain details.
Awareness: How informed are you of what is influencing your experience of reality and the experience of others’ reality?
As a creative individual, truthfulness, openness, and awareness are all tools with which to tell a story. When you are conscious of all three, you can quite literally play with all three. You have a lot of autonomy with the utilization of openness and truthfulness. When telling a story, the amount of accuracy you want to use will depend on the type of story you wish to tell and the impact you seek to create for the audience.
Documentaries demand more story telling accuracy than biopics because of the implicit promise and expectation a viewer has when choosing the genre of documentaries in contrast to choosing the dramatization of someone or some event from history. Moreover, a biopic may be less truthful than a documentary for cinematic purposes; however, it may be more open in terms of the amount of details about one’s life it chooses to reveal. It is easier for a biopic or a documentary to be more truthful when being less open because there are less historical facts to be researched and re-created in an accurate way.
When creating art, you have less autonomy with the utilization of awareness because, given, you don’t know what you don’t know, you will be working at the limits of your understanding. Nonetheless, it behooves you to be aware of the intersection between what you are moved to create and what the audience you seek to influence is likely to be moved by as well. The more informed you are of the genre(s) inside of which you desire to create, the more you will resonate and appear on the radar of fans of that genre.
Awareness of genre and the creative sensibilities that are found in different types of genre gives you more opportunity with which to play with the levers of truthfulness and openness. Therefore, I suggest that creative individuals start from the viewpoint of awareness and then determine how much truthfulness or openness to use. The reason being is that genres are defined by the amount of truthfulness and openness they rely upon. For example, blues music is much less lyrically open and truthful than folk or country music.
