It seems common sense that fact should be our common ground. But in fact, fact is so hard to come by, so dependent on point of view, so debatable, that we may be more likely to meet a shared reality in fiction. By telling—or by reading—a story of what didn’t in fact happen, but what could have happened or could yet happen, to somebody who isn’t an actual person but who might have been or could be, we open the door to the imagination. And imagination is the best, maybe the only way we have to know anything about each other’s minds and hearts.
Ursula K. Le Guin, “Making Up Stories” (2013) in Words Are My Matter (2019, p. 108)
Facts are strong, but they are not stable. Soon you find your sources are riddled with contradiction, and that even when the facts are agreed, their meaning often isn’t.
Hilary Mantel, “Can These Bones Live?” (Reith Lecture 4, July 4, 2017)
if we’re psychologically healthy, our brain makes us feel as if we’re the moral heroes at the centre of the unfolding plots of our lives. Any ‘facts’ it comes across tend to be subordinate to that story.
Will Storr, The Science of Storytelling (2020, p. 3)
Fiction is invention, but it is not lies. It moves on a different level of reality from either fact-finding or lying.
Ursula K. Le Guin, “Making Up Stories” (2013) in Words Are My Matter (2019, p. 108)
But the facts support the story in a screenplay; you might even say they create the story. In journalism, you go from the specific to the general; you collect the facts first, then find the story. In screenwriting, it’s just the opposite: You go from the general to the specific. First you find the story, then you collect the facts you need to make the story work.
Syd Field, Screenplay: The Foundations of Screenwriting (2005, p. 273)
If you’re honestly trying to tell what happened, you find facts are very obstinate things to deal with. But if you begin to fake them, to pretend things happened in a way that makes a nice neat story, you’re misusing imagination. You’re passing invention off as fact; which is, among children at least, called lying.
Ursula K. Le Guin, “Making Up Stories” (2013) in Words Are My Matter (2019, p. 108)