There’s a Tracy Chapman song called Telling Stories that starts like this:

There is fiction in the space between
The lines on your page of memories
Write it down but it doesn’t mean
You’re not just telling stories

How often do we hear the phrase “telling stories” to mean that you’ve made it all up rather than you’re actually relating something that happened. When I took a Landmark Forum workshop many years ago, the trainers regularly confronted individuals by saying, “that’s your story” meaning that’s what you tell yourself instead of the truth.

The way we use the word story it can mean fiction or fact. Authors pick stories out of their imaginations and hope that their skills will bring the reader into another reality. Autobiographers present the stories of their lives as accurately as they can, trying to stick to the truth, to tell their story. The most notorious exception of late is James Frey who was exposed by The Smoking Gun for making up most of his non-fiction memoir, A Million Little Pieces. The country (and Oprah) were angered and felt deceived.

As story listeners, we need to know if what we’re hearing is “just a story” (made up) or if it is a true story. Conflict abides in the space in between truth and lies: how much easier it would be if we knew the difference.

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 telling 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).

Sometimes 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?