the lie’s the thing

I currently have a piece in The Writer’s Chronicle called “In Search of the Beautiful Lie.” Pamela Schoenewaldt, whom I met a few months ago when she submitted a lovely story called Threads on the Mountain to Fiction Attic, just emailed me in response to the WC piece…thought I’d pass her well-said missive along:

The issue of lies and writing is so complicated and fascinating – the efforts we go to convince students to pry themselves away from “but that’s what really happened,” and then the dark side of the writers’ life, or mine anyway, lying in bed at night imagining dire or dark, or just weird scenarios of what might be or what could have been and then getting tangled up in reacting to that fiction as if it were true. Do you remember Kermode’s “The Sense of an Ending,” which speaks with such moving eloquence about our needs for significant endings, for a shape to history and then the strangeness that the fiction is healing if and only if we can retain the awareness that it is created – a lie. He gave an example of the lie of nationalism – we’re so much better than the other guys – which can have some motivational uses as a shared fiction, but then becomes lethal if taken literally, such as in Nazism.