Two truths and a lie

Novelist Lily King, says that one of her favorite exercises in the creative writing class she teaches, is to ask students to write the first paragraph of a short story. The first two sentences of the paragraph have to be two truths like "my sister has brown hair" and "her name is Lisa"; followed by a third sentence which is a lie, like, "Yesterday she went to prison." Why the "lie"? Because,

It's the lie that brings the story to life, makes it hum. The lie is the steering wheel, the gearshift and the engine. The lie takes your two true sentences and makes a left turn off road and straight into the woods. It slams the story into fifth gear and guns it.

By "lie" King means imagination which allows a novelist to "slip out of the shackles of history." In an interesting piece on the inception of her new, highly regarded novel, Euphoria, based on the life of the legendary American anthropologist, Margaret Mead, King shares the story of her "lies" as she plots the lives of Mead and her two fellow anthropologists, husband Reo Fortune and lover, Gregory Bateson, and runs free into the "jungle" of her imagination.