In the end, fiction is the craft of telling truth through lies.
Interpretation
Fiction reveals deeper truths about reality by using imaginative storytelling.
This quote by Lauren Groff suggests that while fiction may be composed of made-up stories and characters, it often conveys profound truths about human experiences, emotions, and societal issues. By presenting lies, or fictional elements, storytellers can explore and express truths that resonate with readers on a deeper level, allowing for insights that might not be possible through direct representation of reality.
In practice
A writer's workshop discussing the interplay between fact and fiction.
And she, the new mother of a daughter, felt a fierceness come over her that seized at her heart, that made her feel as if her bones were turned to steel, as if she could turn herself into a weapon to keep this daughter of hers from having to be hurt by the world outside the ring of her arms.
Sometimes immense things, like war and death and aging, are best seen from the corner of the eye and written of only obliquely, with tremendous lightness.
I seem to long for community and mistrust it in equal measure, and so I spend most of my days carefully constructing various communities in stories and seeing if they fly.
Drawing is still basically the same as it has been since prehistoric times. It brings together man and the world. It lives through magic.
I'm never tired of going to the studio. I enjoy recording and documenting everything and trying new things.
At our present bad moment, we need above all to recover our sense of literary individuality and of poetic autonomy.
What art was to the ancient world, Science is to the modern; the distinctive faculty. In the minds of men, the useful has succeeded to the beautiful.
Still ours the dance, the feast, the glorious Psalm, The mystic lights of emblem, and the Word.
We're all born storytellers. It's part of the species. But, more specifically, I suppose a particular combination of sensitivity and trauma made me a writer: an essential disquiet with reality, which required exploration through portrayal.
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