Reply #71: Truly awesome thread hijack, I congratulate you.

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And of course you are quite right. I would say however that calling it a "lie" is a bit provocative, nobody calls a novelist a liar, yet he is making stuff up wholesale. Storytellers are not necessarily liars. The lie comes in when you assert that your story is literally or historically true. When you leave your story a story, it can be good, useful, meaninful, educational, many good things, without being a lie.