truer than truth

One of the characters in my revision novel says, "There are stories truer than truth."

That is why I read. Life is a series of events that happen to me, or to other people. But I never am able to see them clearly enough to understand what they mean, at least not in the present moment. More often, something happens, and then only months or even years later, it will suddenly come into clarity, as it becomes part of a pattern that I had not seem before because I lived it.

Stories are the way that we are able to show that moment, the pattern that was always there, waiting to be seen, unfolding in a shorter format. As a writer, the best moments are when I realize, as in life, that a pattern has unfolded before me and I didn't know I was the one making it. Maybe I'm not the one really making it, and it was all just the world at work. I don't know. But that shivery feeling of realizing something means something other than what it seemed to, is truer than truth.

And sometimes, it happens multiple times to the same event, which turns out to mean something else again, in light of a new pattern.