Lies, Legends, and Fiction

From the Mailbag, A asks:

“Hi. So I was reading Ovid’s Metamorpheses in which he talks about Diana and Acteaon. When i read you unicorn books i thought of that. I have to make an oral presentation about one of the books we read and I was going to relate Diana and Acteaon to your book. I was wondering if the story about Diana and Alexander the Great is real…”

Thanks for reading! And to answer your question, yes…and no.

Is Alexander the Great real? Yes. Was the temple of Artemis at Ephesus a real place? Yes. Is the story about the goddess Artemis (Diana) attending the birth of Alexander the Great and thus being unable to stop the burning of her temple in 326 BC real?

Well, Plutarch said it was.

The story of Alexander the Great, the temple fire, and the goddess’s involvement (or lack thereof) is a legend, the same way people in America have a legend about George Washington admitting to his dad that he cut down the cherry tree. It’s generally accepted by historians that the temple fire happened on the night of Alexander’s birth.

What I did, throughout Rampant, was take truth (the rules about Vestal Virgins, the name of Alexander the Great’s horse, the art in the Borghese gallery, Danish thrones featuring items that look like unicorn horns), and established legend (the stores of Diana and her involvement in Alexander’s birth, the rules of unicorns, the various legends about unicorns) and mix it up with fiction until you (hopefully) could no longer see the seams. I know which parts of the story are “true”, which parts are not true but not made up by me, either, and which parts I made up entirely.

But it’s entirely likely that unless you’ve spent as much time researching unicorns as I have, you don’t know what other parts of the story are “true” legends. (For instance, I didn’t make up any of the types of unicorns. They are based on “real” legends from around the world.)I’m a huge lover of myth and classical mythology and history, and I hope that other people who are appreciate my atempts to incorporate and interpret various myths to fit my fantasy world. I also hope that some people can discover all these awesome stories through my work.

But I realize that unless you have spent the last few years as obsessed with unicorn legends as I have, it can be a bit difficult to separate the fact (where “fact” means “legends invented by someone other than me”) from the fiction.

I was actually talking about this earlier today with some friends as we were discussing the introduction to the published shooting script of Synecdoche, New York. (Link is totally awesome and absolutely worth reading.) Basically, Charlie Kaufman goes on this long rant about some dude named Keith who works for the publisher and you aren’t sure (even though he co-credits Keith) whether or not Keith is a real person, because Kaufman has done this before (Hello, Donald Kaufman, fictional nominee of entirely real awards for the screenplay of Adaptation). And that just makes you (where “you” means “me”) think of the introduction to The Princess Bride (the book), where William Goldman talks about his (fictional) son and his (fictional) wife and his (fictional) quest for a (fictional) book his probably fictional father used to read to him as a boy. But since Goldman is saying he’s Goldman, and even referencing his real other works, you have a really hard time trying to figure out where the truth ends.

It’s all very cool and meta. Confusing, but that’s the fun.

And I’m not about to publish a glossary that delineates which parts of my stories are true and which aren’t. Because that would be boring for me to put together and probably seventeen times as boring for you to read. Plus, ruins the fun, as well as all that hard work I did trying to make it look seamless.

I think that’s what fiction is, even on a minute scale. Story tellers are always taking truth and twisting it to fit — big, factual truths like histories and places, and even bigger truths like human nature and the ways of the heart. And little tiny truths too — details they capture just so that send your nerve endings into high alert and make you think — yes — it looks/feels/tastes/sounds/smells/was exactly like that.

All good fiction is true. Just like unicorns.