About this class: Hi, I’m Peter Orner. And somehow Five Things—against the better judgement of the organization’s esteemed leadership—is having me back again for a whole new two-hour class, Five Things I’ve Learned about Messing with the Truth (In order to lie). I hope you’ll join me to explore what seems to me to be a deceptively simple premise: we’ll examine how a diverse group of writers work with “actual facts” to create something brand new: fiction.
The binding of fact and fiction has always been a sweet spot. I’ve always written fiction that has some toehold in the truth. And that toehold is often the key to the launch into story. There is something about getting real close to the truth – and then veering away…
There’s something about hard cold facts. For instance, give me a street name, or even better, an address, and I’ll lie about something that didn’t happen there. There in that very specific place.
This quote by Harry Crews has always struck me as getting to the heart of where fact and imagination collide.
My first memory is of a time before I was born, and the memory takes place where I have never been and involves my daddy who I never knew.
You see? Memory emerges from what we know (facts) and what we don’t know (invention). But how exactly? And what does it mean to write in a way that makes fiction from what we think of as the factual world around us?
We sometimes hear this sensible phrase: “You aren’t entitled to your own facts.” But the truth is, when it comes to the creation of new, invented work, we are, at times, entitled to our own facts. (Caveat, I’m not talking about politics here; I’m talking about story.)
Our goal will be to explore how certain texts bend, stretch, sculpt, argue with, and even, yes, manipulate, non-fictional elements. “Fact” will be the slippery thing that grounds us here, and we’ll examine the work of Marilynne Robinson, John Edgar Wideman, Harold Pinter, Natalie Léger, Patrick Modiano, Isaac Babel and, likely, many others as more and more names keep coming to me….
I hope you’ll join me,
– Peter Orner
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