luckily the world doesn't have to rely on my brain.

[maygra]

You all owe ellen_fremedon a round of applause and possibly cookies because she's managed to summarize and illustrate some of the issues I've been trying to get to gel in my fractured brain for the last couple of days only it's already taken me 30,000 words and I still haven't managed to make it make sense even to myself.

...and in doing so, she reminded me of something I'd written as a forward to a piece of original fiction a decade or so ago, that could apply to my fan fiction as well as any other fiction I write -- in which I tried to summarize that I do, indeed write with a sense of honesty and responsibility but both of those things are more a matter of me being honest with myself and responsibile to my own moral and ethical principles.

Therefore, enjoy, suspend disbelief and know that while all of this is true, none of it is the Truth.

Comments

[cathexys.livejournal.com]

*g*

during all of these debates, I always flash back to my diss topic which, though in a very different realm, dealt with a lot of the same issues (or rather, its inverse maybe?).

I'm just c&ping the epigraphs to an article I wrote, which all really resonate with what you're saying omn a differnt level:

“Today at this very moment as I sit writing at a table, I am not convinced that these things really happened” (Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz)
“I am no longer sure that what I have written is true, but I am sure it's truthful” ["Aujourd’hui, je ne suis pas sûre que ce que j’ai écrit soit vrai. Je suis sûre que c’est véridique.](Charlotte Delbo, Auschwitz and After)
“Some events do take place but are not true; others are—although they never occurred” (Elie Wiesel, Legends of Our Time) (here)

I.e., whereas you're emphasizing the truthful aspect in fiction, these autobiographical writers emphasize the fictional aspects to truth.

Eh...sorry...not quite what you're talking about, but the true/Truth thing definitely resonates with me on so many levels...

[maygra.livejournal.com]

I think both can be held as accurate. Thee is frequently fiction in truth, and just as often, if not more, truth in fiction.

It's a much beleaguered trope, but I've always held this is what Twain meant when he's quoted as saying, Write what you know, because it isn't limited to what we have personally experienced as much as it relates to what we imperfectly understand about the world we live in. And so therefore, what we write is written to the truth, be it simple or complex, internal to the story or external to the writer.

And sometimes, that means the only truth in a story is the one you tell yourself.

[gretazreta.livejournal.com]

Hi, sorry to butt in but i was interested in what you had to say here, very much.

You've probably come across Giorgio Agamben... the main point I remember from his "Remnants of Auschwitz" is that even survivors cannot describe the Holocaust, seeing as they were exceptions, rather than the rule. The "truth" of the Holocaust is therefore only known to those who are dead.

If we take the "truth" argument to its fullest extent, then there is no hope for writing or human expression whatever - because if we can't relate to another person's reality, then there is no purpose in trying to express through art. And the result is that we must all recognise ourselves as perpetually isolated, perhaps.

I say, screw that. But then I'm a modernist and a humanist and an agnostic all rolled into one, and I like to think that the imagination can take us to places that have their own truth, and that we can share in that. Maybe.

</ butt-in :) >