Facts can spoil stories

The historian is required to give up dramatic interest in the pursuit of accuracy, but a novelist must give-up accuracy in pursuit of narrative drive and emotional impact.

Jane Smiley, 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel

That sentence by Jane Smiley in her book 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel is packed with lessons.

Don't expect historical novels to be completely reliable.

Don't expect historical accounts told in story form to be completely reliable either. Is it possible that the more interesting a history book is, the less accurate it is likely to be?

Don't expect memoirs and autobiographies to be completely reliable.

Don't expect the stories people tell, whether in divorce court or at parties, to be completely reliable.

To tell a good story, one must, to some degree, fudge the facts. We tend to make ourselves the hero of our own stories. We eliminate anything that might spoil the story or that make us look bad. We exaggerate anything that makes the story more entertaining or that makes us look better.

The more we tell favorite stories the more we embellish them, and the more we embellish them the more we believe the embellishments. Our memories gradually conform more to our stories than to what actually happened.

When I worked for newspapers, a favorite insult was, "He didn't let the facts get in the way of a good story." That was funny because it was often so true.