Yesterday, I posted a wonderful quote from Ursula Le Guin, from the introduction to the science fiction classic, The Left Hand Of Darkness, all about truth, lies, and writing fiction.

I do really like it, and as an author I also understand it. But I also thought, as I reflected on the quote during the course of the day, that although notions of artistic truth are important—and alternately, the nadir of artistic truth’s zenith may be that fiction is, in fact, no more or less than a ‘pack of lies’—at the end of the day the reason I write is because I have a story to tell.

More, I have a story that demands to be told—that demands, by day and by night, that I keep writing and not rest until it is told. Nor does it stop there: the story also insists that I sweat over character development and plot continuity, over pacing and motivation and believability, world building and internal coherence and emotional authenticity… because for some reason, the stories that come to me insist not only on being told, but told well.

Or at least, as well as I can possibly tell them, i.e. if fault there be, it lies not with the story, but with me!

But whether a story contains artistic truth, or is no more than fantastic lies—at the end of the day, perhaps that is not my business as author to decide. My primary job as an author is to tell stories: the rest, I suspect, lies with each and every reader, in all their multifarious guises…

And so we find ourselves on the shores of another quote, this one from AS Byatt:

 “Think of this – that the writer wrote alone, and the reader read alone, and they were alone with each other.”