Fact and fiction: writing values...

[fajrdrako]

Over the last 24 hours I have had a sort of dual conversation on the Bujold mailing list with commodorified and others, and here as well, about the nature of art and creative writing, and honesty in vision, and I came across this quote from Dorothy Dunnett:

Facts are the soil from which the story grows. Imagination is a last resort.

It seems doubly meaningful coming from her, when her imagination was so fertile, and her historical research so very wide. She made mistakes, but it wasn't because she didn't try hard to get it right.

That's the sort of thing I mean by honesty of vision.