Abstract
Some writers think all prose, including autobiography, is fiction. Writing about self is really alibiography they say — stories invented to explain (away?), rationalise, excuse, justify and disguise the truth. The same writers would also doubt whether there is any such thing as truth. For them there are at best versions of the truth, partial glimpses perhaps, no more. Fictions. John Barth, the American novelist, sums this up. ‘The mother of all fiction,’ he writes, ‘is surely our common sense that our lives are stories — more exactly that each of our lives is a story-in-progress whereof each of us is perforce the central, if not necessarily, the dominant, character.’
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© 1996 John Singleton
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Singleton, J. (1996). The Short Story. In: Singleton, J., Luckhurst, M. (eds) The Creative Writing Handbook. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-13814-2_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-13814-2_5
Publisher Name: Palgrave, London
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