Some years ago now, I was out for a walk with my son Toby and his family. It was late September as I recall. We were up at Deep Bay on Vancouver Island, near our summer place. I was wearing shorts and a tee shirt and it was cold, like rainy and windy cold.

“How you doing pops?”

It was my son Toby, ever solicitous and watchful over his ageing father.

“I’m cold, Toby” I replied. “So cold I could die!”

They still mock me for my exaggeration that day, although I was not kidding. I was so cold I felt like an icicle.

Like every storyteller every, I am regularly accused of exaggerating.

And I say,

“Yes, I exaggerate. A thousand times yes!”

The fact is we learn how to exaggerate from our mothers.

“I’ve told you a million times, not to do that!”

Now, a perfectly reasonable and accurate response might be,

“Actually Mom, you’ve told me four times, and if I may say so it weakens your argument when you so obviously exaggerate.”

Said no child ever.

For a storyteller exaggeration is everything to our ability to tell an engaging story, and amplify the human connection to it. Exaggerating captures a moment, a feeling, an experience in a way that no analytically accurate response can ever do.

“I hope you’re hungry.”

“I could eat.”

“I hope you’re hungry.”

“I am so hungry I could eat a horse.”

The Irish may be the best exaggerators in the world. I could have said the Irish are good at exaggerating but writing that they are ‘the best in the world’ creates a premise I have to explore. No Irishman ever let the truth get in the way of good story. They will always favour the emotional truth and joy over facts. They call them Áibhéalaí (AH-vel), exaggerators, masters at expanding the truth to make stories more colourful and engaging. The word comes from the Celtic for ’embroidery’, each version of the story more grand than the last, exaggeration celebrated as cultural art, rather than being condemned as creating a false narrative. One embracing the unlimited human capacity for storytelling, the other puritanical, a perfect salve for the joyless and unimaginative among us.

“She looked at him and reflected on what he had just said.”

‘She looked at him and felt her heart pounding in her chest, cheeks flushed a vivid pink, a million thoughts racing through her mind.”

The Áibhéalaí understands how to seize the moment and capture how she felt, unbound by some expectation of an accurate description of what just happened. As readers or listeners, we will always be drawn to the storyteller’s version, the one that adheres most closely to our own experience, our own imagination.

The American humourist David Sedaris, is my writing mentor. When he is asked if he’s telling the truth in his storytelling he says, ” … a truth that works for me…”. I get it.

“The other day I was out having dinner with my wife Mac. The restaurant had no wifi. I was completely disoriented. I had to actually find things to talk to her about. She seems like a nice person. I’ll likely ask her out again.”

Do not fact check this. I wasn’t out for dinner with Mac at a restaurant with no wifi. I was exaggerating to describe an all too common modern observation, watching a couple go out to dinner and spend the entire time with their heads buried in their cellphones. It is storytelling to highlight a very real social issue, which is in the most ironic of ways, damaging families and our actual ability to communicate. These unbelievably sophisticated communication devices on Vanc are getting in the way of our ability to communicate with one another. The first step, is to acknowledge that. Exaggeration can help.

Well, I won’t go on. I suspect I’m boring you to tears, something I would never set out to do. Not in a thousand years.