TWFest: WRITER’S CRAFT—COLM TÓIBÍN

FACT AND FICTION WITH COLM TÓIBÍN
How history, biography and journalism, or an overheard remark, or a story half told, or an experience, can make their way into fiction, and how life can be completed using fictional methods, with special attention to Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw and Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice. With these two stories, we have evidence (from James’s Notebooks and from Katia Mann’s memoirs) about the origin of the stories. We can then study the story, learning how the authors made use of facts to create their fiction and how the imagination was nourished by fact, by anecdote, and by experience that were then transformed as the work progressed.