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Fact or fiction – truth telling in stories

by on Sep. 24, 2009, under Arts

Check your facts and then recheck them again. Didn’t someone say that?  Anyway, it’s my new mantra when it comes to reporting events.

My apologies to anyone who went to the UA bookstore the day before yesterday looking for the Random Obsessions book tour. It had been on my calendar for a few months and I was excited about it so I announced it on this blog. But, when I got there I found out that the author had canceled. I see now that I should have made, and will in the future, a simple phone call to confirm.

What about checking the facts in a personal story? If you’re fire truck 2telling a story about when you were spending the night at your aunt Jenny’s house and was awakened in the middle of the night to the fire alarm and had to climb out the window into the waiting arms of a fire fighter and that was the first time you met your significant other, do you have to accurately report if it was 2 a.m. or 3 a.m.? Or if the room was at the back or side of the house?

Obviously certain facts are essential to the telling and others are insignificant and can be approximated to complete the story. Have you ever heard someone tell a story and hear them engage in a memory fight with themselves in the middle of it – “it was in 1967 – no, it was ’68 – oh no, I remember that I was wearing my blue nightgown and I got that nightgown for my 16th birthday so it must have been 67 – or maybe it was a different nightgown . . .” We’ve all heard this (and probably done it!) and it really interrupts the flow of the story. And, unless the date is crucial to the story, i.e. if it was tied to a historical event, who cares exactly which year it was (except, perhaps, your significant other).

man talking to a man made of wordsSometimes the need to be precise inhibits us in telling our personal stories when the most important thing is to share the emotional impact of the story. I’m not advocating passing off fiction as fact, I’m suggesting that the meaning should take over as the most important thing rather than the color of the nightgown. Supply lots of details so that the listener can visualize the scene and, if you can’t readily remember, make your nightgown blue so that you can move along in the story line.

I’ve found that telling a “true” story is relative.  My memory of a an event from childhood can be very different than my sister’s remembrance.  We each saw it from our unique point of view and who’s to say which one of us has the truest story.

I think that fiction is making it all up BUT facts + a little enhancement is a good story.

What do you think?  Is embellishing a story OK?  When is embellishment straying from the truth?  Would our personal stories be totally flat if we didn’t add the zest of imagination?

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 24th, 2009 at 12:31 pm and is filed under Arts. Tags for this post: , , , . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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  • Kim Lowry

    The factual use of what happened, when, where, why, is always influenced by one’s perception in the happening and perspective at the time of the storytelling. So it seems, to me. Read a number of great books concerning memoirs and I recommend a fine work Unrealiable Truth: On Memoir and Memory by Maureen Murdock. She points out the very different views we receive. Love that memory thing! So our memory builds our life story in many different ways without intentional embellishment.

  • Albert Lannon

    The great sci-fi writer Samuel R. Delaney wrote, “Do not confuse the true and the real.”  The Canadian Indian writer Thomas King wrote, “There are no truths, only stories.”  The truth of a story may be something different than the literal reality — but what is even reality?  As a historian (another hat I wore) I came to realize that everyone’s reality is filtered through their own perceptions; their “truth” is different than another’s.  For instance, when I wrote a biography of my father, my sister said that I missed his sense of humor.  I thought about that, and recalled that, with me, it was a  putting-down sort of humor.  My sister and I had different fathers, because we each had our own relationship with him and they were very different, so our memories are very different.  Truth and reality are both subjective, going through varied and numerous filters.  I wrote a piece called “Casualties of War” which I called “a true story based on a real story.”  It did not necessarily jibe with each and every fact, but conveyed a worthwhile story.  Imagination can make a real story true, or a true story real.

  • Angie

    As you mentioned, you and your sister have different recollections of the same events, as do my sister and I. I’ve come to believe that none of us knows the truth anyway – it’s all embellishment. And it’s a matter of degree -… I used my foot to gently move the dog away from the table – OR- I kicked the dog. I think we’re all delusional and make up so much of the stories that go on around us. It really only matters in court.

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