The Truth About Fiction

Some say that people who write fiction are just really good liars—but if you ask me, that’s a damned lie. Because fiction writers don’t lie; they just find new ways of telling the truth. New settings, new characters, new sequences of events. New perspectives on real moments they have absorbed and reimagined, molding them into a narrative that’s unrecognizable, yet rings true. It’s the closest any of us are ever likely to come to actually rewriting history. When I write a novel, as I’m doing now, nothing in it actually happened—except for the parts that did, in a different way, at a different time, with different people present and a different outcome. All writing is fueled by some mysterious combination of experience, learned knowledge, and inspiration. Which means all fiction, at its purely emotional, impressionistic core, is true. It’s truth that has been reconfigured and reconstituted in a way that...

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