Author: Angela Rydell

This summer, I woke to loon song on the shores of a freshwater lake, tried grilling a panini over an open fire (almost successfully), reconnected with old college friends, got stung by a bee, met a man who shot a giant fish between the eyes, and survived a hiking encounter with a skinny black bear barely fifty feet from our group. “Does skinny mean hungry?” someone asked when my brother and I returned. Fortunately the bear was only hungry for corn in the field near our hiking trail, the bee sting itched but didn’t swell, and I learned a life hack: if you want to eat a panini grilled in a grilling basket be sure to secure the basket tightly.

I also sharpened my storytelling skills. As I retold the stories of my summer, they got taller. I didn’t just wake to loon song, I swam alongside loons. The big fish shot by the man I met wasn’t just big but a shark. And my brother says the bear was normal-bear-sized, but I remember it towered over us, especially when it paused in its slow amble away along the westward ridge and rose up on its hind legs, taller, skinnier and hungrier.

It’s a well-known truism that the secret to good storytelling is embellishment. But would you believe that when we returned from our bear encounter, shaken, and my brother brought out a bottle of whisky he’d meant to give our dad as a gift, the bottle read, “When facing a great bear, don’t play dead, or try to outrun it. Rather, make light of the situation, keep eye contact, and pour a drink for two.” Believe me, I couldn’t make that part up.

Let’s face it, sometimes true stories are too unlikely to sound true, and sometimes a story’s fantastical hyperbole makes it feel more true—whether true to life or not.

The truth itself can sound stretched or too on-the-nose, manufactured or too coincidental, while fictionalized embellishments—overstatement or understatement, metaphor, allegory, exaggerations of facts—may make the story resonate more fully, even if it’s not more factual. The best “embellishments” don’t obscure but enhance. The more I tell the tale, the more colorful that bear story gets, and the more real the bear encounter becomes—for the audience, I hope, but even me. Though I’m calibrating as I retell it, testing to see if another detail, and yet another, makes the bear story too tall, so tall it topples over. That happens when ornamentation or wordplay or excess details or unnecessary digressions—factual or not—detract from the truth at the core of the story. (FYI, seriously, that whiskey bottle detail is true, I swear.)

As writers, what matters the most is the ring of truth that comes from the whole, that makes our writing true to life. Whether turning fact into fiction.  creative nonfiction, or poetry, when you write bearing detail to help uphold the truth, you’ve got to be selective, even at times leave out some facts to serve the greater truth—or incorporate the narrator’s incredulity so the interpretation of what’s hard to believe is true true gets massaged into the tale-teller’s greater themes.

So, how do you strike the right balance? You get to be choosy. Use good details as a guide, a kind of beacon that focuses what matters. As Michael Ondaatje said, “Before the real city could be seen it had to be imagined, the way rumors and tall tales were a kind of charting.” Choose facts and details that work like marks on a map and that bring you closer and closer to your true destination—a true story well told.