The key is to tell it straight.

I have never found alcohol helpful to literary production in any degree. My experience goes to prove that the effect of wine, taken as a preliminary to imaginative work...is to blind the writer to the quality of what he produced rather than to raise its quality.
THOMAS HARDY

I learned a lot from James Joyce and Erskine Caldwell and of course from Hemingway … [but the] tricks you need to transform something which appears fantastic, unbelievable, into something plausible, credible, those I learned from journalism. The key is to tell it straight. It is done by reporters and by country folk. GABRIEL GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ