I can’t stop thinking about Stephen Glass.

He was the bright, young, arrogant, ethically-challenged reporter for The New Republic who “cooked” 27 of the 41 stories he wrote for that magazine. “Cooked” in this context means everything from relatively minor infractions like writing as fact an assumption he didn’t bother to check to almost stupefying flights of fancy and deception. One story was based on his experiences and interviews at an absolutely fascinating convention that never took place. Another story was predicated on an entirely imaginary premise supported by fabricated statistics and fictitious legislative activity. In the course of what ordinarily might be thought of as research, Glass concocted a company (and designed a website for it so fact-checkers would have something to check) and fabricated sources. One of the sources, the nonexistent president of this nonexistent company, was a voice on an answering machine – his brother’s voice, his brother’s phone.

Why? Why would a bright guy working for a thoughtful, serious magazine do such a thing? Surely he spent almost as much time fabricating material, creating checkable sources and covering his rear as he would have had he actually gone out and reported a real story. So he didn’t do it out of laziness. Or lack of resourcefulness, for that matter. He was nothing if not resourceful in the creation of the elaborate fantasy worlds that supported his stories. Perhaps he was merely overly ambitious? I don’t think so. Someone with an overabundance of ambition would have gone after big, significant, career-advancing stories and tapped into important, powerful (extant) sources.

Maybe he was just a lonely, insecure guy looking to impress his colleagues. Maybe he was mentally ill and unable to distinguish between imagination and reality. I don’t know. What I do know is that he told stories that weren’t true and pretended they were.

I have some sympathy for this. I don’t mean I condone it, and I don’t mean I feel sorry for Mr. Glass. But I do understand what he did, at least on one level. Telling stories is at the heart of being human. We all do it. Some of us get paid for the privilege of doing it. And when we tell stories -- whether singing for our suppers or just singing, whether the audience is our children at bedtime or the readers of the New York Times, whether the stories are factual or imaginary, --we want them to be good. We want to grab the attention of our audience and hold it. We want our stories to be meaningful and memorable, sad, funny, quirky, dramatic, important.

And so, at the heart of telling stories is embroidery and embellishment. The fish that grows six inches longer in the telling. The close call that is even closer than it really was. The clever retort we say we made at the time but actually thought of ten minutes too late. We all do this. And we don’t think of ourselves as liars when we do. We think of ourselves as storytellers.

But shouldn’t those of us in the profession of storytelling be held to higher standards? More important, we shouldn’t we hold ourselves to those standards, regardless of what lazy editors or unknowing readers will let us get away with?

Yes. But we also must remember – and admit to ourselves -- that, in the service of a good story, all writers are tempted by the dark side. For fiction writers, the dark side is the stuff of life. How many novelists have written, verbatim, as dialog coming out of an imaginary character’s mouth, the exact words they overheard that morning waiting in line at the grocery store? The words were just too good, too perfect, much better than the novelist could have hoped to create. So the writer “borrows” from reality and passes it off as fiction. The writer gets unearned credit for the invention of these clever or insightful or funny words.

And then there’s a guy like Stephen Glass who might say to himself, while on a real story, wouldn’t it be great if I had a source who could say thus-and-such? And so, knowing from real research, let’s say, that someone could probably be found to say thus-and-such, he saves himself the trouble of looking and just creates the source and puts the quote in the source’s mouth. He gets unearned credit for finding the source and getting the great quote.

Putting aberrant young men like Glass and the New York Times’ Jayson Blair aside for a moment, perfectly respectable, honest, law-abiding, psychologically stable nonfiction writers are also tempted by the dark side (that is, their imagination). Especially tempted are nonfiction writers who write literary nonfiction, writers who want to tell stories not just pass along information.

It would be so much better for the story, for the dramatic narrative, if it had been sunny that day…if the incident happened during the first week of on the job rather than the fifth…if what this person said yesterday she had actually said two weeks ago. So many temptations, so many ways the writer could make this a more interesting, more meaningful story if only it could be tweaked just a little.

The difference between that kind of tweaking and Stephen Glass’ wholesale fabrication is just one of degree (okay, many degrees – but it’s the same thermometer). And what exactly is the difference between passing off as fact what is really fiction and passing off as fiction what is really fact? Why are we appalled by one and accepting of the other?

When I read a work of purported fiction only to discover later that the author has merely changed the names and some minor details of what was an actual, factual story, I feel cheated. When I read a memoir which purports to be fact, and is marketed as nonfiction, later to discover that the author has reimagined and reinvented the past, I feel cheated. And when I read the journalism of Stephen Glass and discover later that it was fiction, I feel cheated.

On the other hand, perhaps despite myself, I keep reading. My attention has been captured. I’ve learned something. And I think of the words of the Acuma Pueblo poet Simon Ortiz, who said: “There are no truths, only stories.”

LAUREN KESSLER’S tenth book, Clever Girl, will be out in paperback this summer. She is the editor of Etude and the director of the graduate program I literary nonfiction at the University of Oregon.