{"id":3579,"date":"2016-09-12T10:17:34","date_gmt":"2016-09-12T15:17:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cecilesune.com\/?p=3579"},"modified":"2018-12-09T21:21:00","modified_gmt":"2018-12-10T02:21:00","slug":"truth-no-excuse","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cecilesune.com\/truth-no-excuse\/","title":{"rendered":"The Truth Is No Excuse"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"The<\/a>The following is a guest post by Gino Bardi,\u00a0author of\u00a0The Cow in the Doorway<\/strong>.<\/em><\/p>\n

Every now and then, a reader will approach me and pay me a gigantic compliment.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou have a terrific imagination,\u201d he or she will say.\u00a0 I will nod appreciatively, and thank them profusely.\u00a0 I love compliments. Even when they are dead wrong. My imagination is probably no better than their own, and possibly much worse. What I have is a good memory.<\/em><\/p>\n

My wife and kids, of course would not only disagree with that statement, they would still be laughing about it a week later. I\u2019ll stand in front of the open refrigerator for five minutes staring blankly into the shelves, with no idea whatever of why I opened the thing in the first place. When my kids were younger we spent fifteen minutes searching for a child\u2019s hairbrush before we could all get in the car and leave. Now everyone has to help look for Dad\u2019s car keys\u2026then his wallet\u2026then his sunglasses. Assuming I remember where I left the car! Normally, this behavior would send me scurrying to the doctor or shrink, but all my writer friends suffer from the same condition. (And without my writer friends I wouldn\u2019t have no friends at all.)<\/p>\n

But, for some wonderful reason, I have been blessed with a crystal-clear memory of the weirdest stuff that has happened to me over my life.\u00a0 I have another, marvelous ability as well: As this crazy stuff is going on around me, I am aware of it! <\/em>\u00a0I have a picture-perfect memory, for example, of chasing a mouse down a snow covered sidewalk in freezing weather, lunging at him with a crab net\u2014to save him from freezing to death. I had just dropped him into a toilet because I thought he was a goner. As I slid across the ice on my bare feet, I remember thinking, \u201cYou can\u2019t make this stuff up.\u201d\u00a0 <\/em>At least I can\u2019t. Thirty years later that sequence of events resurfaced in a short story.\u00a0 In another story, the hero escapes testifying at his girlfriend\u2019s DUI trial, because he suffered total amnesia the night she got arrested, when she wrecked the car he was riding in<\/em>. Yeah, that happened, too.<\/p>\n

\"GinoBut a carefully curated library of bizarre memories isn\u2019t enough to fill a book of short stories or carry a novel from Page One to The End.\u00a0 The crazy scenes in my life, for the most part, are just scenes; they are not stories, and if told faithfully and accurately, would elicit no more response from a reader than\u00a0 \u201cYeah? So what?\u201d\u00a0 It is at this point that fiction and memoir part company. When the sizzle fizzles out and life returns to normal, I have to remind myself: I am not beholden to the truth. I have no obligation whatsoever to stick to the facts. I\u2019m a fiction writer. <\/em>I make stuff up. I change things, exaggerate, twist, create new realities\u2026in other words I am not only able<\/em> to lie, I am required<\/em> to lie or risk committing the fiction writer\u2019s biggest sin: boring the reader. What freedom! It\u2019s exhilarating.<\/p>\n

Above my desk hang several signs. The biggest one reads, \u201cThe Truth is No Excuse.\u201d The new members of my writers group take a while to trust and embrace this simple concept. They defend their less-than-compelling stories by lashing back with \u201cBut that\u2019s the way it really happened!\u201d<\/p>\n

So what? Who cares? When the real story runs out of steam, throw in some shovels of coal from your imagination. But in my experience, the truth will burn hotter. It just doesn\u2019t burn for long, without a little help.<\/p>\n

More about the author\u00a0and his work: Gino Bardi’s Facebook page<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The following is a guest post by Gino Bardi,\u00a0author of\u00a0The Cow in the Doorway. Every now and then, a reader will approach me and pay me a gigantic compliment. \u201cYou have a terrific imagination,\u201d he or she will say.\u00a0 I will nod appreciatively, and thank them profusely.\u00a0 I love compliments. Even when they are dead… Read More »The Truth Is No Excuse<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":90,"featured_media":3580,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"neve_meta_sidebar":"","neve_meta_container":"","neve_meta_enable_content_width":"","neve_meta_content_width":0,"neve_meta_title_alignment":"","neve_meta_author_avatar":"","neve_post_elements_order":"","neve_meta_disable_header":"","neve_meta_disable_footer":"","neve_meta_disable_title":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[3295,365],"tags":[523,3298,3297,3299,42,3296,2879,771,1212,1021,2272,53,1668,557],"yoast_head":"\nThe Truth Is No Excuse - C\u00e9cile Sune<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/cecilesune.com\/truth-no-excuse\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Truth Is No Excuse - C\u00e9cile Sune\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"The following is a guest post by Gino Bardi,\u00a0author of\u00a0The Cow in the Doorway. Every now and then, a reader will approach me and pay me a gigantic compliment. \u201cYou have a terrific imagination,\u201d he or she will say.\u00a0 I will nod appreciatively, and thank them profusely.\u00a0 I love compliments. 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