creative fiction

(Fantasy Sculpture Garden- Nantucket)
JOE: Good morning Calliope.
CALLIOPE: Good morning Joe. I missed you on Saturday.
JOE: Sorry. I got busy early and never got back to the computer.
CALLIOPE: I guess you are entitled to a life.
JOE: I guess so. But ideas churned in my mind yesterday and woke me up very early this morning.
CALLIOPE: What's churning?
JOE: My column for next Saturday among other things.
CALLIOPE: Tell me about it.
JOE: I had a recent experience of being lied to as a way of explaining away an act of poor judgment. It made me think of all the lies I have read about in the news lately to cover tracks and avoid responsibility.
CALLIOPE: But there is another side as well?
JOE: I think so. Fiction is also a way of playing with the facts but doing so in a way to entertain and even teach from writing about what might be rather than what is.
CALLIOPE: An interesting way to put it.
JOE: I think so.
CALLIOPE: So what's the difference?
JOE: Lies are ways of deceiving others and avoiding responsibility while fiction is an imagined reality to which we can relate and use to make sense of the human condition. Talk with you tomorrow.