Fact into fiction is a current preoccupation of mine, it's at the heart of my current work-in-progress. How far can I stray? I want a nugget of fact - or do I mean 'truth' - in each scene. So I was delighted to come across this quote:
'I’m increasingly interested in the gulf between what is “fictional” and what is “non-fiction.” I have long doubted the word “fiction,” but I’m even more doubtful about what “non-fiction” supposedly represents. Clifford Geertz said that the real is imagined, just as the imagined is real. Who is to say where the lines can be drawn? What is it that we choose to invent? And how does language negotiate that territory?'
It's novelist Colum McCann, from an interview in the New Yorker in which he talks about the process of writing his short story, 'Transatlantic.'
McCann's novel Let The Great Wold Spin is a masterful blend of fact and fiction. I'm currently working my way through McCann's backlist he is so creative with history.
Read the full interview here.
'Transatlantic' is featured in the 16 April 2012 edition of the New Yorker which you can get from the LRB Bookshop.
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