The above picture has nothing to do with this post, but this is what happens when you return home from Hawaii to cold and rain and don't feel like writing, so you sit at your desk taking pictures of the rain with your iPhone.

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There was wonderful line
by Walter Kirn in his review of Sam Shepard’s new collection of short stories The Highwayman in the New York Times
Book Review this past weekend. “Fantasies,”
he wrote, “organize experience in the manner of a good journey, while facts
retard progress, pulling up short.” 
This struck me because I’d just had an email exchange with a writer who
was struggling with a true story and was wondering whether to write it as
fiction or memoir. But since the characters she really wanted to write about
weren’t the real people in the story she was leaning toward fiction.

In Half-Broke Horses Jeannette Walls solved the problem of trying to
write a memoir about her grandmother without knowing enough facts of her early
life by making up what she didn’t know and calling it a novel. 

I think the tricky part of
all this is allowing yourself to let go of what really happened, to let go of
the facts, and to get into fantasy. That’s the joy of writing fiction. But I do
think in memoir you can also “organize experience in the manner of a good
journey” while writing the truth but letting go of some of the facts.