Fact & Fiction

I miss writing for fun. I used to derive great enjoyment from stringing words together in sentences, creating stories and poems. But lately, I have to write so many essays for my program that I have no creative juice left for doing it just for fun.
My English prof is making us watch Big Fish for our Literary Theory and Criticism class. Big Fish is a movie about tall tales. The father in the movie tells his son of all the extraordinary events that allegedly compose his life story. As the son gets older, he becomes jaded and cynical, and he realizes that the stories his father tells him are just "lies." At the end of his father's life, he becomes obsessed with finding out the real story. However, the son eventually discovers that the truth in his father' s life lies in the stories that the father told the son. Whether the tales were true or not, there was hidden in them the life lessons that the father wanted the son to hear.
I think that one of the lessons in that movie is about the power of fiction. Stories have the ability to move us in the way that perhaps a sermon or a purely biographical tale may not be able to do. Stories have a healing power. Although it may be fictional, far-fetched, or removed from reality, a good story has a nugget of truth hidden in it. It is up to the discerning reader to search it out. As Rudyard Kipling said, "Fiction is Truth's eldest sister."
Maybe I'll go write a story!