Blog for September 2022

“Tell all the truth but tell it slant”

(Emily Dickinson 1263)

Recently, I went to a fabulous workshop in the Ahuriri version of NZSA Roadshow entitled ‘Tell it slant’. In it, Tracy Farr spoke how slippery truth is, and how writers can and do blur fact and fiction to tell a story in deliberate degrees of truthiness.

Truthiness.

What a magnificent word.

She talked about how there are layers of truthiness in all fiction, a delicious blurring of truth and lies, a melding fact and fiction in order to create something new. Make the ordinary made strange. Writers who can play with reality enough to unsettle us and connect things that don’t go together to create something new but yet uncomfortably familiar. Jasper Fforde (The Constant Rabbit, Shades of Grey) and Neil Gaiman (Stardust, The Graveyard book) spring to mind.