fiction and nonfiction essay

The Difference Between Fiction and Nonfiction

Matt Grant is a Brooklyn-based writer, reader, and pop culture enthusiast. In addition to BookRiot, he is a staff writer at LitHub, where he writes about book news. Matt's work has appeared in Longreads, The Brooklyn Rail, Tor.com, Huffpost, and more. You can follow him online at www.mattgrantwriter.com or on Twitter: @mattgrantwriter

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For writers and readers alike, it’s sometimes hard to tell the difference between fiction and nonfiction. In general, fiction refers to plot, settings, and characters created from the imagination, while nonfiction refers to factual stories focused on actual events and people. However, the difference between these two genres is sometimes blurred, as the two often intersect.

Before we go any further, it’s important to note that both fiction and nonfiction can be utilized in any medium (film, television, plays, etc.). Here, we’re focusing on the difference between fiction and nonfiction in literature in particular. Let’s look closer at each of these two categories and examine what sets them apart.

What Is Fiction?

When it comes to the differences between fiction and nonfiction, Joseph Salvatore, Associate Professor of Writing & Literature at The New School in New York City, says,

“I teach a course on the craft, theory, and practice of fiction writing, and in it, we discuss this topic all the time. Although all of the ideas and theories…are disputed and challenged by writers and critics alike (not only as to what fiction is but as to what it is in relation to other genres, e.g., creative nonfiction), I’d say there are some basic components of fiction.”

Fiction is fabricated and based on the author’s imagination. Short stories, novels, myths, legends, and fairy tales are all considered fiction. While settings, plot points, and characters in fiction are sometimes based  on real-life events or people, writers use such things as jumping off points for their stories.

For instance, Stephen King sets many of his stories and novels in the fictional town of Derry, Maine. While Derry is not a real place, it is based on King’s actual hometown of Bangor . King has even created an entire topography for Derry that resembles the actual topography of Bangor.

Additionally, science fiction and fantasy books placed in imaginary worlds often take inspiration from the real world. A example of this is N.K. Jemisin’s The Broken Earth   trilogy, in which she  uses actual science and geological research to make her world believable.

Fiction often uses specific narrative techniques to heighten its impact. Salvatore says that some examples of these components are:

“The use of rich, evocative sensory detail; the different pacing tempos of dramatic and non-dramatic events; the juxtaposition of summarized narrative and dramatized scenes; the temporary delay and withholding of story information, to heighten suspense and complicate plot; the use of different points of view to narrate, including stark objective effacement and deep subjective interiority; and the stylized use of language to narrate events and render human consciousness.”

What Is Nonfiction?

Nonfiction, by contrast, is factual and reports on true events. Histories, biographies, journalism, and essays are all considered nonfiction. Usually, nonfiction has a higher standard to uphold than fiction. A few smatterings of fact in a work of fiction does not make it true, while a few fabrications in a nonfiction work can force that story to lose all credibility.

An example is when James Frey, author of  A Million Little Pieces ,  was kicked out of Oprah’s Book Club in 2006 when it came to light that he had fabricated most of his memoir.

However, nonfiction often uses many of the techniques of fiction to make it more appealing.  In Cold Blood   is widely regarded as one of the best works of nonfiction to significantly blur the line between fiction and nonfiction, since Capote’s descriptions and detailing of events are so rich and evocative. However, this has led to questions about the veracity of his account.

“The so-called New Journalists, of Thompson’s and Wolfe’s and Didion’s day, used the same techniques [as fiction writers],” Salvatore says. “And certainly the resurgence of the so-called true-crime documentaries, both on TV and radio, use similar techniques.”

This has given rise to a new trend called creative nonfiction, which uses the techniques of fiction to report on true events. In his article “ What Is Creative Nonfiction? ” Lee Gutkind, the creator of  Creative Nonfiction   magazine, says the term:

“Refers to the use of literary craft, the techniques fiction writers, playwrights, and poets employ to present nonfiction—factually accurate prose about real people and events—in a compelling, vivid, dramatic manner. The goal is to make nonfiction stories read like fiction so that your readers are as enthralled by fact as they are by fantasy.”

Although it’s sometimes hard to tell the difference between fiction and nonfiction, especially in the hands of a skilled author, just remember this: If it reports the truth, it’s nonfiction. If it stretches the truth, it’s fiction.

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Fiction vs. Nonfiction – What’s the Difference?

Home » Fiction vs. Nonfiction – What’s the Difference?

We see these words in libraries and bookstores, in magazines and online, but what do fiction and nonfiction really mean? What kinds of writing belong in each of these categories, and why?

You are not the first writer to ask these questions, and you will not be the last. Works of fiction and nonfiction can each be enthralling and valuable pieces of literature, but they are different in several important ways.

Continue reading to learn the differences between fiction and nonfiction , and how you can use these words in your own writing.

What is the Difference Between Fiction and Nonfiction?

In this post, I will compare fiction vs. nonfiction . I will use each of these words in at least one example sentence, so you can see them in context.

I will also show you a unique memory tool that will help you decide whether a piece of literature is fiction or nonfiction .

When to Use Fiction

In popular language, fiction is also used to describe anything that is not true.

Here are a few examples of the word fiction in a sentence,

• “I am penning a new work of fiction!” said the old-timey writer from a coffee shop in Paris.
• “The President’s allegations are pure fiction!” screamed the reporters.
• Many people did not know that The War of the Worlds was a work of fiction the first time they heard it.
• Some of the new technologies seem straight out of science fiction. – The Wall Street Journal

Novels are a classic example of fictional prose. If you enjoy reading novels, you are a fan of reading fiction.

When to Use Nonfiction

Here are a few more examples,

• “You will find the biography of Rutherford B. Hayes in the nonfiction section,” said the librarian.
• I would write a memoir, but the details of my life are so fantastical that people would not believe it is a work of nonfiction.
• The new self-help book climbed its way to the top of the nonfiction best sellers list.
• A biography of a book, rather than a person, is a relatively new wrinkle in nonfiction. – The Washington Post

If you enjoy reading biographies, memoirs, historical works, or books on current events, you are a fan of nonfiction works.

Nonfiction sometimes appears as a hyphenated word: non-fiction. Either spelling is accepted, but, as you can see from the below graph, you can see that nonfiction is much more common.

Trick to Remember the Difference

A work that is nonfiction is a recounting of real events. A work of fiction is based on made-up people or events.

Since fiction and false begin with the same letter, we can easily remember that fiction is false , even if it is an excellent and well-crafted story.

You can extend this mnemonic to nonfiction as well. A nonfiction story is not fake .

Is it fiction or nonfiction? Fiction and nonfiction are two categories of writing.

• Fiction deals with made-up people or events.
• Nonfiction deals with real life.

Fiction is also a word that is commonly used to describe anything that is not true , like wild accusations or patently false testimony. This article, though, is a work of nonfiction.

Since fiction and false each begin with the letter F , remembering that a work of fiction is not a true story should not be difficult to remember.

It might be difficult to remember the difference between these words, but remember, you can always reread this article for a quick refresher.

Fiction vs. nonfiction?

Nonfiction writing recounts real experiences, people, and periods. Fiction writing involves imaginary people, places, or periods, but it may incorporate story elements that mimic reality.

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What is the difference between fiction and nonfiction ?

The terms fiction and nonfiction represent two types of literary genres, and they’re useful for distinguishing factual stories from imaginary ones. Fiction and nonfiction writing stand apart from other literary genres ( i.e., drama and poetry ) because they possess opposite conventions: reality vs. imagination.

What is fiction ?

Fiction is any type of writing that introduces an intricate plot, characters, and narratives that an author invents with their imagination. The word fiction is synonymous with terms like “ fable ,” “ figment ,” or “ fabrication ,” and each of these words has a collective meaning: falsehoods, inventions, and lies. 

Not all fiction is entirely made-up, though. Historical fiction, for example, features periods with real events or people, but with an invented storyline. Additionally, science fiction novels function around real scientific theories, but the overall story is untrue. 

What is nonfiction ?

Nonfiction is any writing that represents factual accounts on past or current events. Authors of nonfiction may write subjectively or objectively, but the overall content of their story is not invented (Murfin 340). 

Works of nonfiction are not limited to traditional books, either. Additional examples of nonfiction include: 

• Instruction manuals 
• Safety pamphlets
• Journalism 
• Recipes 
• Medical charts 

Comparing fiction and nonfiction texts

Outside of reality vs. imagination, nonfiction and fiction writing possess several typical features. 

Fictional text features:

• Imaginary characters, settings, or periods
• A subjective narrative
• Novels, novellas, and short stories
• Literary fiction vs. genre fiction ( e.g., sci-fi, romance, mystery ) 

Nonfiction text features:

• Real people, events, and periods
• An authoritative narrative 
• Autobiographies, letters, journals, essays, etc .
• Venn diagrams, anchor charts, mini-lessons, extension activities
• Index, citations, and bibliographies 
• Academic/peer-reviewed publishers

What does fiction and nonfiction have in common?

Oftentimes, an elaborate work of fiction has more in common with nonfiction than a simple fairy tale or children’s book. Examples of shared traits include: 

• Major literary publishers ( e.g., Hachette Books and HarperCollins )
• Photographic and illustrated book covers
• Stylistic elements such as an index, glossary, or citations
• Themes involving history, mythology, and science
• Creative prose narratives 

Prose narratives of fiction vs. nonfiction

According to The Bedford Glossary of Critical and Literary Terms , we can narrowly distinguish fiction from nonfiction through the use of “prose narratives,” a term that refers to an author’s storytelling form.

For works of fiction , authors typically use prose narratives such as the novel , novella , or short story . But for nonfiction books, prose narratives take the form of biographies , expository , letters , essays, and more. 

Prose narratives of fiction

A novel is a long, fictional story that involves several characters with an established motivation, different locations, and an intricate plot. Examples of novels include: 

• The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
• Beloved by Tony Morrison 

A novel is not the same as a novella , which is a shorter fictional account that ranges between 50-100 pages long. You’ve likely heard of novellas such as: 

• Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
• Animal Farm by George Orwell 

Lastly, the short story normally contains 1,000-10,000 words and focuses on one event or length of time, such as: 

• The Cask of Amontillado by Edgar Allen Poe
• The Story of an Hour by Kate Chopin 

Prose narratives of nonfiction

Since nonfiction represents real people, experiences, or events, the most common prose narratives of nonfiction include: 

• Biographies
• Autobiographies
• Journals 
• Essays 
• Informational texts 

Biographies and autobiographies

A biography is written about another person, while an autobiography’s author tells the story of their own life. Popular biographies include: 

• Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer
• Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson 

The difference between the two modes of nonfiction is further illustrated with autobiographies such as: 

• Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass by Frederick Douglass 
• I Am Malala: The Girl Who Stood up for Education and Was Shot by Malala Yousafzai 

Journals and letters

Journals , diaries , and letters provide a glimpse into someone’s life at a particular moment. Diaries and letters are great resources for historical contexts, and especially for periods involving war or political scandals. 

Journal and letters examples: 

• The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank
• Ever Yours: The Essential Letters by Vincent van Gogh

Essay writing

By definition, an essay is a short piece of writing that explores a specific subject, such as philosophy, science, or current events. We read essays within magazines, websites, scholarly journals, or through a published collection of essays.

Essay examples: 

• Consider the Lobster by David Foster Wallace
• The Source of Self-Regard by Toni Morrison 

Informational texts

Informational texts present clear, objective facts about a particular subject, and often take the form of periodicals, news articles, textbooks, printables, or instruction manuals. The difference between informational texts and biographical writing is that biographies possess a range of subjectivity toward a topic, while informational writing is purely educational.

Publishers of informational texts also tailor their writing toward an audience’s reading comprehension. For instance, instructions for first-grade reading levels use different vocabularies than a textbook for college students. The key similarity is that informational writing is clear and educational.

Genres of fiction vs. nonfiction

The French term genre means “kind” or “type,” and genres organize different styles, forms, or subjects of literature. Some sources believe fiction is categorized by genre fiction and literary fiction , while others believe that literary fiction is a subgenre of fiction itself. The same arguments exist within nonfiction genres, except nonfiction is organized by subject matter or writing style. 

Whichever way you look at it, all nonfiction and fiction have distinct genres and subgenres that overlap, and there’s no single way to categorize literature without spurring controversy. If you’re ever doubtful about a particular book, try checking the publisher’s website. 

What is literary fiction ?

If we stick to the dry characteristics of literary fiction , we can define it as any writing that produces an underlying commentary on the human condition. More specifically, literary fiction often involves a metaphorical , poetic narrative or critique around topics such as war, gender, race, sex, economy, or political ideologies.

Literary fiction examples: 

• Quicksand by Nella Larsen 
• The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera 
• The Sellout by Paul Beatty

What is genre fiction ?

Broadly speaking, genre fiction (or popular fiction ) is any writing with a specific theme and the author’s marketability toward a particular audience (aka, the novel is likely a part of a book series). The most common genres of “ genre fiction ” include: 

• Science Fiction
• Suspense/Thriller

Crime fiction and mystery

Crime fiction and mystery novels focus on the motivation of police, detectives, or criminals during an investigation. Four major subgenres of crime fiction and mystery include detective novels, cozy mysteries, caper stories, and police procedurals. 

Crime fiction and mystery examples: 

• The Godfather by Mario Puzo 
• The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Steig Larsson 

The fantasy genre traditionally occurs in medieval-esque settings and often includes mythical creatures such as wizards, elves, and dragons. 

Fantasy examples: 

• The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkein
• A Game of Thrones by George R.R. Martin

The romance genre features stories about romantic relationships with a focus on intimate details. Romance themes often involve betrayal or heroism and elements of sensuality, idealism, morality, and desire. 

Romance examples: 

• Dead Until Dark by Charlaine Harris 
• Fifty Shades of Grey by E.L. James 

Science fiction

Science fiction is one of the largest growing genres because it encompasses several subgenres, such as dystopian, apocalyptic, superhero, or space travel themes. All sci-fi novels incorporate real or imagined scientific concepts within the past, future, or a different dimension of time. 

Science fiction examples: 

• Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler 
• The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin

Suspense and horror

Sometimes described as two separate genres, suspense and horror writing focuses on the pursuit and escape of a main character or villain. Suspense writing uses cliffhangers to “grip” readers, but we can distinguish the horror genre through supernatural, demonic, or occult themes. 

Suspense and horror examples: 

• The Silence of the Lambs by Thomas Harris 
• The Shining by Stephen King

Genres of nonfiction

Finally, we meet again in the nonfiction section. When it comes to nonfiction literature, the most common genres include:

• Autobiography/Biography (see “prose narratives” )

Narrative nonfiction

A memoir recounts the memories and experiences for a specific timeline in an author’s life. But unlike an autobiography, a memoir is less chronological and depends on memories and emotions rather than fact-checked research. 

Memoir examples:

• Wild by Cheryl Strayed 
• When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi 

Self-help writing focuses on delivering a lesson plan for self-improvement. Authors of self-help books describe experiences like a memoir, but the overall purpose is to teach readers a skill that the author possesses. 

Self-help examples: 

• How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie
• The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle

The expository genre introduces or “ exposes ,” a complex subject to readers in an understandable manner. Expository books often take the form of children’s books to provide a clear, educational summary on topics such as history and science. 

Examples of adult vs. children’s expository books include: 

• Death by Black Hole by Neil deGrasse Tyson
• A Black Hole is Not a Hole by Carolyn Cinami Decristofano 

Narrative nonfiction (or “ creative nonfiction ”) tells a true story in the form of literary fiction. In this case, the author presents an autobiography or biography with an emphasis on storytelling over chronology. 

The line between creative nonfiction and literary fiction is thin when the narrative’s presentation is too subjective, and when specific facts are omitted or exaggerated. Literary scholars refer to such works as “ faction ,” a portmanteau word for writing that blurs the line between fiction and nonfiction (Murfin 177). 

Narrative nonfiction examples: 

• In Cold Blood by Truman Capote 
• The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson

Additional resources for nonfiction vs. fiction ?

Understanding the elements of fiction vs. nonfiction writing is a common core standard for language arts (ELA) programs. If you’re looking to learn specific forms of fiction and nonfiction writing, The Word Counter provides additional articles, such as:

• Transition Words: How, When, and Why to Use Them
• What Are the Most Cringe-Worthy English Grammar Mistakes?
• Italics and Underlining: Titles of Books

Test Yourself!

Before you visit your next writing workshop, class discussion, or literacy center, test how well you understand the difference between fiction and nonfiction with the following multiple-choice questions (no peeking into Google!) 

• True or false: An author’s imagination does not invent nonfiction writing. a. True b. False
• Which term is synonymous with fiction? a. Fact b. Fable c. Reality d. None of the above
• Which is a type of nonfiction writing?  a. Novels b. Memoirs c. Novellas d. Short stories 
• Which is not a trait of literary fiction?  a. Underlying commentary on the human condition b. Poetic narrative c. Social and political commentary d. None of the above
• Which genre of nonfiction is the closest to literary fiction? a. Memoirs b. Expository  c. Narrative nonfiction d. Self-help

Photo credits:

[1] Photo by Suad Kamardeen on Unsplash [2] Photo by Jonathan J. Castellon on Unsplash

• “ Essay .” Lexico , Oxford University Press, 2020.
• “ Fiction .” The Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster Inc., 2020.
• MasterClass. “ What Is the Mystery Genre? Learn About Mystery and Crime Fiction, Plus 6 Tips for Writing a Mystery Novel .” MasterClass , 15 Aug 2019. 
• Mazzeo, T.J. “ Writing Creative Nonfiction .” The Great Courses , 2012, pp.4. 
• Murfin, R., Supryia M. Ray. “ The Bedford Glossary of Critical and Literary Terms .” Third Ed, Bedford/St. Martins , 2009, pp. 177-340. 
• “ Nonfiction .” Lexico , Oxford University Press, 2020.World Heritage Encyclopedia. “ List of Literary Genres .” World Library Foundation , 2020.

Alanna Madden

Alanna Madden is a freelance writer and editor from Portland, Oregon. Alanna specializes in data and news reporting and enjoys writing about art, culture, and STEM-related topics. I can be found on Linkedin .

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Fiction vs. Nonfiction: Literature Types (Compared)

• by Team Experts
• July 2, 2023 July 3, 2023

Discover the surprising differences between fiction and nonfiction literature types in this eye-opening comparison.

In conclusion, literature types are an essential aspect of written works that help readers understand the content, style, and purpose of a particular piece. Fiction and nonfiction are two major literature types that differ in their narrative style and content. Fiction includes imaginary stories and creative writing, while nonfiction includes fact-based writing and informational texts. Understanding these literature types and their differences can help readers choose the right book for their needs.

What are the Different Literary Types?

Narrative style in fiction and nonfiction writing, real-life events in nonfiction vs creative writing in fiction, informational texts: understanding their role in literature, common mistakes and misconceptions.

Overall, understanding the differences in narrative style between fiction and nonfiction writing is crucial for effective storytelling . While some elements may overlap, such as plot structure and conflict, the use of characterization, dialogue, imagery, tone, mood, setting, theme, foreshadowing, flashback, symbolism, irony, and climax differ greatly between the two styles . It is important to consider these elements when choosing a narrative style and to use them effectively to engage and captivate the reader.

Overall, the key difference between real-life events in nonfiction and creative writing in fiction is the purpose of the writing and the level of fictionalization. Nonfiction aims to inform and educate readers about real-life events, while fiction aims to entertain and engage readers through creative writing. Nonfiction requires accurate and reliable information about real-life events, while fiction requires creative ideas and imaginative storytelling. Nonfiction should be based on real-life events and should not be overly fictionalized, while fiction can be completely made up or based on real-life events with varying degrees of fictionalization. Both nonfiction and fiction require editing and revision to improve the clarity, coherence, and effectiveness of the writing.

Overall, understanding the role of informational texts in literature can provide readers with valuable knowledge and insights on various topics. However, it is important to approach these texts with a critical eye and consider the potential risks of biased or false information. By analyzing the purpose, type, structure, credibility , audience, and impact of informational texts, readers can gain a deeper understanding of the world around them.

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The Truth About Fiction vs. Nonfiction

Aminatta forna, from reporter to novelist, and everything in between.

Some years ago I was invited to judge a literature prize. The prize was awarded on the basis of a writer’s body of work, but the prize organizers had limited the scope to works of fiction. Works of non-fiction by the same writer were not included. This made no sense to me and I said so. As a novelist and essayist I see the two forms as conjoined twins, sharing themes and concerns, which all come out of the same brain, but flow into two separate entities. The same is true of every writer I can think of who writes both fiction and non-fiction. Marilynne Robinson’s novels Gilead , Home and Housekeeping and her powerful essays examine her reflections on Christanity and morality. Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera, Chronicle of a Death Foretold and News of a Kidnapping tell of the history and making of modern Colombia. Michael Ondaatje says he wrote first his memoir Running in the Family about growing up in Sri Lanka, but felt the need to turn to fiction to write about the Sri Lankan civil war. Aleksandar Hemon’s Nowhere Man and his collection of essays The Book of My Lives excavate themes of loss and displacement from his hometown of Sarajevo.

Twelve years ago I was being interviewed on the radio about my debut novel Ancestor Stones , the first thing I had published following a memoir which had garnered a fair bit of attention. The novel told the stories of four women, each sisters growing up in a different era of a country’s history. The interviewer asked me a question that confounded me. Why I hadn’t written it as a work of nonfiction, she wanted to know. I replied that it would have been difficult, the people didn’t exist and the events I described in their lives hadn’t happened. Later I spent a little time pondering that question. Did the interviewer, who had spoken to hundreds of writers in her career as a critic and radio host, really have so little understanding of the process? I wondered if she thought, as I discovered a good many people lazily assumed, that the family described in the story was nothing more than a lightly disguised version of my own. The historical background to the stories was true, sure, but the stories themselves, the people, I had made all that up.

A while later I was guest lecturer at a British university giving a talk and reading from my memoir to a group of students of creative nonfiction. My publishers had described the book as a “story of a father, a family, a country and a continent.” I had grown up in Sierra Leone, the daughter of a political activist and dissident. The story I told was of my search to uncover events surrounding my father’s murder in the 1970s when I was eleven years old. Back then the kind of political upheaval that was played out in Sierra Leone was being played out all over the continent as nascent democracies of newly independent nations were hijacked by authoritarian regimes.

At the end of the session a middle-aged woman raised her hand: “Why,” she asked “had I gone to all the bother of writing a work of nonfiction when I could just as easily have written a novel.” To write the truest account I could mattered, I answered, a little testily, because these things actually happened. It mattered to my family, to the participants, the witnesses, and the people of the country. This was a book about how oppression unchecked causes a country to implode 25 years later, part of an unveiling of the things that had happened and never been spoken about.

“Each time a writer begins a book they make a contract with all the people who buy their book.”

I began my working career as a journalist, because having grown up in a country where the state controlled the newspapers and the narrative and fed misinformation to the public, truth telling was important to me. In this era of “fake news” my background as a journalist has turned out to be a useful one. I was trained to fact check and to question the reliability of each and every source, and hence these days I’m astonished to discover the credulity of the public, including some friends and Facebook acquaintances, who take apparently at face value stories which would not withstand a few moments scrutiny. “Fake news” has been around a long time from Joseph Goebbels to the British tabloids and the American entertainment magazines. What has changed thanks to social media is the mode and speed of delivery, also the messenger, from basement trolls, to Russian bots all the way to the leader of a Western superpower, who according to various sources lies publicly roughly five or six times a day, whilst at the same time condemning the output of the mainstream media as fake.

A decade after I joined the BBC however, I was done. I was never content as a reporter for a large organization. The problem, I gradually came to realize, was that I was obliged to speak with a voice not my own but another voice belonging to another kind of person. It was the voice of the BBC, a reflection of the broadcaster’s viewers and listeners, people who had on the whole lived lives quite unlike my own, who took for granted a shared knowledge, shared levels of experience, of familiarity and unfamiliarity with their world and the world beyond. They were the great middle class of middle England, and I was not one of them. The voice stuck in my craw. Everyone writes for their own reasons and if there is one thing that moves me to set out my thoughts on paper it is this: that ever since the years of my childhood I have never seen the world the way I am constantly being told it is and I could only do so in my own voice.

In the time I have been writing there have been huge shifts in the sphere of the realm we now call creative nonfiction. Where once most first person nonfiction was generally confined to travel writing, narrative journalism and essays, the late 20th century has seen a huge explosion in personal memoir, from Tobias Wolff and Mary Karr’s tales of family dysfunction to Jung Chang’s “memoir as narrative history,” Wild Swans, set against the historical back-sweep of the Chinese cultural revolution. In nature writing, Annie Dillard’s self-described “theodyssey,” which sees creation in tiny Tinker’s Creek, Helen Macdonald’s exploration of grief and falconry, the expanses of Barry Lopez Arctic Dreams . There are hybrids of every kind: William Fiennes’s account of his brother’s epilepsy combined with the history of the science of the brain in The Music Room , the magic and myth of Maxine Hong Kingston’s Woman Warrior , and again Michael Ondaatje’s Running in the Family which moves beyond the very idea of form.

The writer of creative nonfiction and the writer of fiction have much in common. Both employ the techniques of narrative, plot, pace, mood and tone, considerations of tense and person, the depiction of character, the nuance of dialogue. Where the difference lies is that the primary source of the fiction writer is first and foremost their imagination, followed by their powers of observation and maybe a certain amount of research. The primary resource of the writer of creative nonfiction is lived experience, above and beyond all, memory, add to that observation and research.

Another difference lies in what I call the contract with the reader. Each time a writer begins a book they make a contract with all the people who buy their book. If the book is a work of fiction the contract is pretty vague, essentially saying: “Commit your time and patience to me and I will tell you a story.” There may be a sub-clause about the effort to entertain or to thrill, or some such. In my contract for each of my novels I have promised to try to show my readers the world in a way they have not seen before, or perhaps show it to them in a way they had not considered before. A contract for a work of nonfiction is a more precise affair. The writer says, I am telling you, and to the best of my ability, what I believe to be true. This is a contract not to be broken lightly.

“Where once most first person nonfiction was generally confined to travel writing, narrative journalism and essays, the late 20th century has seen a huge explosion in personal memoir.”

There are those writers of what is published under the heading nonfiction who freely confess to inventing some of their material. Clearly they have a different kind of contract with the reader from mine, or perhaps no contract at all. Whenever I am on stage with memoirists who do this, they start by explaining how the story was improved by those additions and that none of it mattered much anyway. In the words of the British writer Geoff Dyer: “The contrivances in my nonfiction are so factually trivial that their inclusion takes no skin off even the most inquisitorial nose.” And then there are writers such as W.G. Sebald and more recently Karl Ove Knausgaard who deliberately place their work in the twilight zone between fact and fiction. I won’t argue these writers case for them here, they know what they are doing.

For the memoirist who purports to be telling only the truth and then is caught lying a special kind of fury is reserved. In 2003, at a book festival in Auckland I met a woman named Norma Khouri who had written a memoir called Forbidden Love which told the story of the honor killing of her childhood best friend in their native Jordan at the hand of the friend’s own brother. The girl’s supposed crime was to have fallen in love with a Christian. The book sold half a million copies and at the time we met Khouri had founded and was raising money for an organization to save Jordanian women in danger of being killed for “honor.” We appeared on the same panel, afterwards we drank at the bar. Norma was fun, she seemed to have survived her ordeal well, too well some said later, but I know many people who have faced extreme situations and they are often perfectly cheerful. I didn’t think too much about her American accent either, she told me, or perhaps I assumed, that she had been to the International School in Jordan. All in all I spent maybe two hours in her company.

I flew back to the UK and a month or two later I received an email from the panel chair David Leser, a well known Australian journalist and feature writer. He wrote that he had stayed up with Khouri late into the night after we had left the bar, had been deeply moved by her fragility and courage, even, he admitted later in an article, fallen a little in love with her.

“I began my working career as a journalist, because having grown up in a country where the state controlled the newspapers and the narrative and fed misinformation to the public, truth telling was important to me.”

Khouri was a fraud. She had left Jordan for Chicago at the age of three and had not set foot in her homeland since. The whole story had been a hoax. No best friend, no Christian lover, no honor killing. The rage at Khouri lasted for months. A decade later a filmmaker made a documentary about her: Forbidden Lie$, in which Khouri continues to try to vindicate herself, despite the mountain of seemingly irrefutable evidence including accusations of financial misconduct and her inability to provide evidence to prove the existence of her dead friend and her friend’s family. To Leser she admitted she had lied but, she said, for the right reasons. Those who met her including Leser (and me) never could decide whether she was a trickster, a fantasist or even a woman with some hidden trauma of her own.

Everyone, even Norma Khouri, has their own reasons to write, their own justifications for the choices they make, their contract with their readers, their contract with themselves. I ask my students of both fiction and nonfiction, but most of all those who wish to write personal memoirs (perhaps because of all the forms of writing it is the one most often confused with therapy): Why do people need to hear this story? Not, Why do you want to write this story? i.e Not what’s in it for you. What’s in it for them?

When I come to a begin a book it is usually with a question in mind, something I have been thinking about and I want to ask the reader to think about too. What turns the book into a novel is the arrival of a character. Elias Cole, the ambitious, morally equivocating coward in The Memory of Love came to me through a chance remark by a friend about her father, a successful academic who had somehow survived a villainous regime where his colleagues had not. I hired a man to paint my house who I discovered (on the last day) was a thrice imprisoned violent offender. Out of that encounter came Duro, the handyman Laura unthinkingly allows into her holiday home in The Hired Man .

My nonfiction begins with a question too. The difference, if I can pinpoint it, is that with nonfiction when I start to write I believe I may have come up with an answer, an answer of sorts at least. Don DeLillo once quipped that a fiction writer starts with meaning and manufactures events to represent it; the writer of creative nonfiction starts with events, then derives meaning from them. Gillian Slovo, both a novelist and memoirist, once told me that with nonfiction you always know what your story is, with fiction that isn’t necessarily the case. I think there is truth in both statements. It’s easy to lose sight of your story, meaning the deeper truth you are reaching for in fiction, the more it can be a slippery process. When it comes to nonfiction I discard or store numbers of stories, sometimes because I can’t think of the right way to tell them, but more often because although I know the story in narrative terms, I have not yet arrived at its meaning.

The best stories can arrive quite by chance, replete with meaning and maybe even with a great character through whom to tell them. Some years ago a stray dog I had adopted in Sierra Leone and given to a friend was hit by a car. The story of the effort to save her life, which involved many ordinary people in a country still on its knees after ten years of civil war, introduced me to Dr. Gudush Jalloh who was then the only working vet in the country (the others having all fled or been killed). Here was a man who devoted himself to the lives of the city’s street dogs, who, in the face of an announced cull, had stood up to represent the dogs before the City Council, who had driven around at night rousing the local people into action to save the lives of dogs. I wrote an essay for Granta , “The Last Vet,” about Gudush Jalloh, for to me everything about him represented something to which I had been giving a great deal of recent thought, the gap between Western and West African modes of thought. By writing about him I could reveal something to West Africans about their own culture and reverse the gaze on Western culture.

“The conversation,” I later wrote after spending two weeks in his company, will range over days: “African pragmatism and reality, Western sentiment, the schism between the values of the two and the West’s own conflicted treatment of animals. Of Jalloh’s lot in trying to embrace, negotiate and reconcile so many ways of thinking.”

Sometimes meaning comes later. I lived in Tehran when I was 14. The year was 1979, my mother was married to a diplomat who headed the UN’s development projects in the country. I found myself a teenage witness to one the great revolutions of all time, from its heady flowering in the hands of writers and artists, to the crushing of new found freedoms by the mullahs a year later. The events, their sequence and consequence, made no real sense to me at the time.

In the essay 1979 I wrote: “I was, at that time, an ardent revolutionary. I had a poster of Che Guevara on my wall and a sweatshirt bearing his image. I read his speeches and admitted to no one that I found them impenetrable. I was ardent—all I lacked was a revolution. And now here was a revolution [between the progressive authoritarian Shah and the defiant yet regressive Khomeini] and I had no idea whose side I was on.”

Decades later, watching the hopes and disappointment of the Arab Spring those months in Iran came back to me, this time with a fresh understanding, of the ways, the stepping stones, by which freedoms can also be hijacked and subverted. Of never believing it can be that easy.

At other times a thought process, which has been going on for months or even years, might begin to arrange itself into a sort of pattern. Like a pebble in my pocket I carry the notion around, collecting other pebbles which look similar, until I have a pocketful. I’ll spread them out on the table, these notes and observations, looking for the points of connection. Then there comes the moment, hopefully, when I see it. In that way fiction and nonfiction are not so different, that part of the process is the same. With fiction, though, I will begin to search for a narrative with which to veil those ideas.

Here’s Zadie Smith: “Tell the truth through whichever veil comes to hand—but tell it. Resign yourself to the lifelong sadness that comes from never being satisfied.”

And therein lies the difference. In nonfiction the writer seeks to remove the veils, to strip away and to reveal what is really there. On my noticeboard in my office in London I had pinned the lines: “Nonfiction reveals the lies, but only metaphor can reveal the truth.” I don’t know who said it, I’m afraid. I think it was Nadine Gordimer, but I’ve quoted it so many times that on the internet it is now ascribed to me. The quotation seems to me to be intended to elevate fiction as the higher form, and I agree that fiction allows me to reach for another less literal kind of truth. But there is something about stripping away the myths that veil the lies that is vitally satisfying. There , says the writer of nonfiction, I said it! I said it! And so is thus spared the lifelong sadness of never being satisfied.

After a long spell writing fiction I find I inevitably seek recourse in the clarity, the exactitude of nonfiction, a flight from the coyness of fiction. Then comes a time when I have said what needs to be said, facts become constraining and it’s time to revel in the boundless freedoms of the imagination once more. A novel begins with the thought: What if? A work of creative nonfiction begins with words: What is. The writer says to the reader: Wake up, smell the coffee and look at what is there.

The preceding is from the new  Freeman’s  channel at Literary Hub, which will feature excerpts from the print editions of  Freeman’s , along with supplementary writing from contributors past, present and future. The latest issue of  Freeman’s , a special edition featuring 29 of the best emerging writers from around the world, is available now.

Aminatta Forna

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• Key Differences

Know the Differences & Comparisons

Difference Between Fiction and Nonfiction

Fiction can be understood as the literary work created as per one’s imagination, i.e. the author’s creative thought or made-up stories and characters. On the other hand, reading a nonfictional work means you are reading something that actually happened or someone that actually exist, i.e. it is not a cooked up story, rather it is fact and evidence-based account.

Now, in this article, we are going to look at the differences between fiction and nonfiction

Content: Fiction Vs Nonfiction

Comparison chart, definition of fiction.

Fiction can be understood as an imaginative creation, which does not exist in reality, rather it is produced by the author’s creative thought. It is a type of imaginative prose literature, which can be both spoken or written account containing imaginary characters, events and descriptions.

Writing fiction means that the writer creates their own fantasy world, in their minds and introduce it to the rest of the world through the book. As the story is not real and factual, they cook it up in a way that makes it very interesting and engaging.

From the reader’s point of view, fictional work refers to the creative fabrication of a fantasy world, by the author, i.e. the author imagines the entire story and its characters, the overall plot, dialogues and setting.

The work of fictions is never based on a true story, and so when we go through such works, it visualizes such situation which we may never face in reality or we will come across those characters who we may never get a chance to meet in our real life and also take us to a world where we may never go otherwise.

It is that form of entertainment or art which contains hypothetical plot and characteristics in any format, such as comics, television programs, audio recordings, drama, novel, novella, short story, fairy tales, films, fables, etc. It includes writing related to mystery, suspense, crime thrillers, fantasies, science fiction, romance, etc.

So, fictional writings have the ability to inspire, or change the perspectives towards life, engage in the story, surprise with the twist and turn and also scare or amaze with the ending.

Definition of Nonfiction

Nonfiction is the widest form of literature which contains informative, educational and factual writings. It is a true account or representation of a particular subject. It claims to portray authentic and truthful information, description, events, places, characters or existed things.

Although, the statements and explanation provided may or may not be exact and so it is possible that it provides a true or false narrative of the subject which is talked about. Nevertheless, the author who created the account often believes or claim it to be true, when it is being created.

When a nonfictional work is created, the emphasis is given to the simplicity, clarity, and straightforwardness. It encompasses essays, expository, memoirs, self-help, documentaries, textbooks, biographies and autobiographies, newspaper report and books on history, politics, science, technology, business and economics.

The main purpose of reading nonfictional books is to learn more about a subject and increase the knowledge base.

Key Differences Between Fiction and Nonfiction

Upcoming points will explain the difference between fiction and nonfiction

• Fiction is a literary work which contains the imaginary world, i.e. characters, situation, setting and dialogue. On the flip side, nonfiction implies that type of writing which provides true information or contains such facts or events which are real.
• Fiction is subjective in nature, as the author has the freedom to add his opinion or perspective to the writeup. As well as the writer can elaborate any character, plot or setting as per his imagination. However, nonfiction is objective because the writer cannot add his/her opinion, as it is purely fact-based and authentic and because there is no scope for imagination, the writer needs to be straightforward.
• When writing fiction, the author has the flexibility, to move the story in the direction which make it more exciting and interesting. Conversely, nonfictional writers do not have such flexibility because they have to provide information which is true and real.
• In a fictional work, the writer is of the opinion that the audience will follow and understand the theme which is hidden in the content. In fact, the story can be interpreted by the readers in different ways depending on their level of understanding. As against, in a nonfictional work, there is a simple and direct presentation of the information and facts. So, there is only one interpretation.
• The main purpose of writing fiction is to entertain the readers, whereas nonfiction writing educates the reader about a subject or to further their knowledge about something.
• In fictional writing, references may or may not be provided by the author. On the other hand, in nonfictional writing references are provided compulsorily by the writer wherever required, so as to make the writing more credible.
• Fiction is always from the perspective of the narrator, i.e. the writer, or the character, i.e. the main or supporting character of the story. In contrast, non-fiction is always from the perspective of the author.

By and large, fiction and nonfiction are diametrically opposite to one another. In a fictional work, most of the part is imaginary i.e. scripted by the author. Fictional stories help the readers to take a break from their everyday boring life, and lost in the dreamy world of excitement, for quite some time.

On the contrary, nonfiction is all about factual stories, that emphasize on actual events, characters and places. It tends to teach and explain things to the readers.

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8.7: Writing About Fiction and Creative Nonfiction

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• Heather Ringo & Athena Kashyap
• City College of San Francisco via ASCCC Open Educational Resources Initiative

Writing an analysis of a piece of fiction can be a mystifying process. First, literary analyses (or papers that offer an interpretation of a story) rely on the assumption that stories must mean something. How does a story mean something? Isn't a story just an arrangement of characters and events? And if the author wanted to convey a meaning, wouldn't he or she be much better off writing an essay just telling us what he or she meant?

It's pretty easy to see how at least some stories convey clear meanings or morals. Just think about a parable like the prodigal son or a nursery tale about "crying wolf." Stories like these are reduced down to the bare elements, giving us just enough detail to lead us to their main points, and because they are relatively easy to understand and tend to stick in our memories, they're often used in some kinds of education.

But if the meanings were always as clear as they are in parables, who would really need to write a paper analyzing them? Interpretations of fiction would not be interesting if the meanings of the stories were clear to everyone who reads them. Thankfully (or perhaps regrettably, depending on your perspective) the stories we're asked to interpret in our classes are a good bit more complicated than most parables. They use characters, settings, and actions to illustrate issues that have no easy resolution. They show different sides of a problem, and they can raise new questions. In short, the stories we read in class have meanings that are arguable and complicated, and it's our job to sort them out.

It might seem that the stories do have specific meanings, and the instructor has already decided what those meanings are. Not true. Instructors can be pretty dazzling (or mystifying) with their interpretations, but that's because they have a lot of practice with stories and have developed a sense of the kinds of things to look for. Even so, the most well-informed professor rarely arrives at conclusions that someone else wouldn't disagree with. In fact, most professors are aware that their interpretations are debatable and actually love a good argument. But let's not go to the other extreme. To say that there is no one answer is not to say that anything we decide to say about a novel or short story is valid, interesting, or valuable. Interpretations of fiction are often opinions, but not all opinions are equal.

So what makes a valid and interesting opinion? A good interpretation of fiction will:

• avoid the obvious (in other words, it won't argue a conclusion that most readers could reach on their own from a general knowledge of the story)
• support its main points with strong evidence from the story
• use careful reasoning to explain how that evidence relates to the main points of the interpretation.

The following steps are intended as a guide through the difficult process of writing an interpretive paper that meets these criteria. Writing tends to be a highly individual task, so adapt these suggestions to fit your own habits and inclinations.

Writing an Essay on Fiction in 9 Steps

1. become familiar with the text.

There's no substitute for a good general knowledge of your story. A good paper inevitably begins with the writer having a solid understanding of the work that they interpret. Being able to have the whole book, short story, or play in your head—at least in a general way—when you begin thinking through ideas will be a great help and will actually allow you to write the paper more quickly in the long run. It's even a good idea to spend some time just thinking about the story. Flip back through the book and consider what interests you about this piece of writing—what seemed strange, new, or important?

2. Explore potential topics

Perhaps your instructor has given you a list of topics to choose, or perhaps you have been asked to create your own. Either way, you'll need to generate ideas to use in the paper—even with an assigned topic, you'll have to develop your own interpretation. Let's assume for now that you are choosing your own topic.

After reading your story, a topic may just jump out at you, or you may have recognized a pattern or identified a problem that you'd like to think about in more detail. What is a pattern or a problem?

A pattern can be the recurrence of certain kinds of imagery or events. Usually, repetition of particular aspects of a story (similar events in the plot, similar descriptions, even repetition of particular words) tends to render those elements more conspicuous. Let's say I'm writing a paper on Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein . In the course of reading that book, I keep noticing the author's use of biblical imagery: Victor Frankenstein anticipates that "a new species would bless me as its creator and source" (52) while the monster is not sure whether to consider himself as an Adam or a Satan. These details might help me interpret the way characters think about themselves and about each other, as well as allow me to infer what the author might have wanted her reader to think by using the Bible as a frame of reference. On another subject, I also notice that the book repeatedly refers to types of education. The story mentions books that its characters read and the different contexts in which learning takes place.

A problem, on the other hand, is something in the story that bugs you or that doesn't seem to add up. A character might act in some way that's unaccountable, a narrator may leave out what we think is important information (or may focus on something that seems trivial), or a narrator or character may offer an explanation that doesn't seem to make sense to us. Not all problems lead in interesting directions, but some definitely do and even seem to be important parts of the story. In Frankenstein , Victor works day and night to achieve his goal of bringing life to the dead, but once he realizes his goal, he is immediately repulsed by his creation and runs away. Why? Is there something wrong with his creation, something wrong with his goal in the first place, or something wrong with Victor himself? The book doesn't give us a clear answer but seems to invite us to interpret this problem.

If nothing immediately strikes you as interesting or no patterns or problems jump out at you, don't worry. Just start making a list of whatever you remember from your reading, regardless of how insignificant it may seem to you now. Consider a character's peculiar behavior or comments, the unusual way the narrator describes an event, or the author's placement of an action in an odd context. (Step 5 will cover some further elements of fiction that you might find useful at this stage as well.)

There's a good chance that some of these intriguing moments and oddities will relate to other points in the story, eventually revealing some kind of pattern and giving you potential topics for your paper. Also keep in mind that if you found something peculiar in the story you're writing about, chances are good that other people will have been perplexed by these moments in the story as well and will be interested to see how you make sense of it all. It's even a good idea to test your ideas out on a friend, a classmate, or an instructor since talking about your ideas will help you develop them and push them beyond obvious interpretations of the story. And it's only by pushing those ideas that you can write a paper that raises interesting issues or problems and that offers creative interpretations related to those issues.

3. Select a topic with a lot of evidence

If you're selecting from a number of possible topics, narrow down your list by identifying how much evidence or how many specific details you could use to investigate each potential issue. Do this step just off the top of your head. Keep in mind that persuasive papers rely on ample evidence and that having a lot of details to choose from can also make your paper easier to write.

It might be helpful at this point to jot down all the events or elements of the story that have some bearing on the two or three topics that seem most promising. This can give you a more visual sense of how much evidence you will have to work with on each potential topic. It's during this activity that having a good knowledge of your story will come in handy and save you a lot of time. Don't launch into a topic without considering all the options first because you may end up with a topic that seemed promising initially but that only leads to a dead end.

4. Write out a working thesis

Based on the evidence that relates to your topic—and what you anticipate you might say about those pieces of evidence—come up with a working thesis. Don't spend a lot of time composing this statement at this stage since it will probably change (and a changing thesis statement is a good sign that you're starting to say more interesting and complex things on your subject). At this point in my Frankenstein project, I've become interested in ideas on education that seem to appear pretty regularly, and I have a general sense that aspects of Victor's education lead to tragedy. Without considering things too deeply, I'll just write something like, "Victor Frankenstein’s tragic ambition was fueled by a faulty education."

5. Make an extended list of evidence

Once you have a working topic in mind, skim back over the story and make a more comprehensive list of the details that relate to your point. For my paper about education in Frankenstein , I'll want to take notes on what Victor Frankenstein reads at home, where he goes to school and why, what he studies at school, what others think about those studies, etc. And even though I'm primarily interested in Victor's education, at this stage in the writing, I'm also interested in moments of education in the novel that don't directly involve this character. These other examples might provide a context or some useful contrasts that could illuminate my evidence relating to Victor. With this goal in mind, I'll also take notes on how the monster educates himself, what he reads, and what he learns from those he watches. As you make your notes keep track of page numbers so you can quickly find the passages in your book again and so you can easily document quoted passages when you write without having to fish back through the book.

At this point, you want to include anything, anything, that might be useful, and you also want to avoid the temptation to arrive at definite conclusions about your topic. Remember that one of the qualities that makes for a good interpretation is that it avoids the obvious. You want to develop complex ideas, and the best way to do that is to keep your ideas flexible until you’ve considered the evidence carefully. A good gauge of complexity is whether you feel you understand more about your topic than you did when you began (and even just reaching a higher state of confusion is a good indicator that you’re treating your topic in a complex way).

When you jot down ideas, you can focus on the observations from the narrator or things that certain characters say or do. These elements are certainly important. It might help you come up with more evidence if you also take into account some of the broader components that go into making fiction, things like plot, point of view, character, setting, and symbols.

Plot is the string of events that go into the narrative. Think of this as the "who did what to whom" part of the story. Plots can be significant in themselves since chances are pretty good that some action in the story will relate to your main idea. For my paper on education in Frankenstein , I'm interested in Victor's going to the University of Ingolstadt to realize his father's wish that Victor attend school where he could learn about a another culture. Plots can also allow you to make connections between the story you're interpreting and some other stories, and those connections might be useful in your interpretation. For example, the plot of Frankenstein , which involves a man who desires to bring life to the dead and creates a monster in the process, bears some similarity to the ancient Greek story of Icarus who flew too close to the sun on his wax wings. Both tell the story of a character who reaches too ambitiously after knowledge and suffers dire consequences.

Your plot could also have similarities to whole groups of other stories, all having conventional or easily recognizable plots. These types of stories are often called genres. Some popular genres include the gothic, the romance, the detective story, the bildungsroman (this is just a German term for a novel that is centered around the development of its main characters), and the novel of manners (a novel that focuses on the behavior and foibles of a particular class or social group). These categories are often helpful in characterizing a piece of writing, but this approach has its limitations. Many novels don't fit nicely into one genre, and others seem to borrow a bit from a variety of different categories. For example, given my working thesis on education, I am more interested in Victor's development than in relating Frankenstein to the gothic genre, so I might decide to treat the novel as a bildungsroman.

And just to complicate matters that much more, genre can sometimes take into account not only the type of plot but the form the novelist uses to convey that plot. A story might be told in a series of letters (this is called an epistolary form), in a sequence of journal entries, or in a combination of forms ( Frankenstein is actually told as a journal included within a letter).

These matters of form also introduce questions of point of view, that is, who is telling the story and what do they or don’t they know. Is the tale told by an omniscient or all-knowing narrator who doesn’t interact in the events, or is it presented by one of the characters within the story? Can the reader trust that person to give an objective account, or does that narrator color the story with his or her own biases and interests?

Character refers to the qualities assigned to the individual figures in the plot. Consider why the author assigns certain qualities to a character or characters and how any such qualities might relate to your topic. For example, a discussion of Victor Frankenstein’s education might take into account aspects of his character that appear to be developed (or underdeveloped) by the particular kind of education he undertakes. Victor tends to be ambitious, even compulsive about his studies, and I might be able to argue that his tendency to be extravagant leads him to devote his own education to writers who asserted grand, if questionable, conclusions.

Setting is the environment in which all of the actions take place. What is the time period, the location, the time of day, the season, the weather, the type of room or building? What is the general mood, and who is present? All of these elements can reflect on the story’s events, and though the setting of a story tends to be less conspicuous than plot and character, setting still colors everything that's said and done within its context. If Victor Frankenstein does all of his experiments in "a solitary chamber, or rather a cell, at the top of the house, and separated from all the other apartments by a staircase" (53) we might conclude that there is something anti-social, isolated, and stale, maybe even unnatural about his project and his way of learning.

Obviously, if you consider all of these elements, you'll probably have too much evidence to fit effectively into one paper. Your goal is merely to consider each of these aspects of fiction and include only those that are most relevant to your topic and most interesting to your reader. A good interpretive paper does not need to cover all elements of the story — plot, genre, narrative form, character, and setting. In fact, a paper that did try to say something about all of these elements would be unfocused. You might find that most of your topic could be supported by a consideration of character alone. That's fine. For my Frankenstein paper, I'm finding that my evidence largely has to do with the setting, evidence that could lead to some interesting conclusions that my reader probably hasn't recognized on his or her own.

6. Select your evidence

Once you've made your expanded list of evidence, decide which supporting details are the strongest. First, select the facts which bear the closest relation to your thesis statement. Second, choose the pieces of evidence you'll be able to say the most about. Readers tend to be more dazzled with your interpretations of evidence than with a lot of quotes from the book. It would be useful to refer to Victor Frankenstein's youthful reading in alchemy, but my reader will be more impressed by some analysis of how the writings of the alchemists—who pursued magical principles of chemistry and physics—reflect the ambition of his own goals. Select the details that will allow you to show off your own reasoning skills and allow you to help the reader see the story in a way he or she may not have seen it before.

7. Refine your thesis

Now it's time to go back to your working thesis and refine it so that it reflects your new understanding of your topic. This step and the previous step (selecting evidence) are actually best done at the same time, since selecting your evidence and defining the focus of your paper depend upon each other. Don't forget to consider the scope of your project: how long is the paper supposed to be, and what can you reasonably cover in a paper of that length? In rethinking the issue of education in Frankenstein , I realize that I can narrow my topic in a number of ways: I could focus on education and culture (Victor's education abroad), education in the sciences as opposed to the humanities (the monster reads Milton, Goethe, and Plutarch), or differences in learning environments (e.g. independent study, university study, family reading). Since I think I found some interesting evidence in the settings that I can interpret in a way that will get my reader's attention, I'll take this last option and refine my working thesis about Victor's faulty education to something like this: "Victor Frankenstein’s education in unnaturally isolated environments fosters his tragic ambition."

8. Organize your evidence

Once you have a clear thesis you can go back to your list of selected evidence and group all the similar details together. The ideas that tie these clusters of evidence together can then become the claims that you'll make in your paper. As you begin thinking about what claims you can make (i.e. what kinds of conclusion you can come to) keep in mind that they should not only relate to all the evidence but also clearly support your thesis. Once you're satisfied with the way you've grouped your evidence and with the way that your claims relate to your thesis, you can begin to consider the most logical way to organize each of those claims. To support my thesis about Frankenstein , I've decided to group my evidence chronologically. I'll start with Victor's education at home, then discuss his learning at the University, and finally address his own experiments. This arrangement will let me show that Victor was always prone to isolation in his education and that this tendency gets stronger as he becomes more ambitious.

There are certainly other organizational options that might work better depending on the type of points I want to stress. I could organize a discussion of education by the various forms of education found in the novel (for example, education through reading, through classrooms, and through observation), by specific characters (education for Victor, the monster, and Victor's bride, Elizabeth), or by the effects of various types of education (those with harmful, beneficial, or neutral effects).

9. Interpret your evidence

Avoid the temptation to load your paper with evidence from your story. Each time you use a specific reference to your story, be sure to explain the significance of that evidence in your own words. To get your readers' interest, you need to draw their attention to elements of the story that they wouldn't necessarily notice or understand on their own. If you're quoting passages without interpreting them, you're not demonstrating your reasoning skills or helping the reader. In most cases, interpreting your evidence merely involves putting into your paper what is already in your head. Remember that we, as readers, are lazy — all of us. We don't want to have to figure out a writer's reasoning for ourselves; we want all the thinking to be done for us in the paper.

General Hints

The previous nine steps are intended to give you a sense of the tasks usually involved in writing a good interpretive paper. What follows are just some additional hints that might help you find an interesting topic and maybe even make the process a little more enjoyable.

1. Make your thesis relevant to your readers

You'll be able to keep your readers' attention more easily if you pick a topic that relates to daily experience. Avoid writing a paper that identifies a pattern in a story but doesn’t quite explain why that pattern leads to an interesting interpretation. Identifying the biblical references in Frankenstein might provide a good start to a paper—Mary Shelley does use a lot of biblical allusions—but a good paper must also tell the reader why those references are meaningful. So what makes an interesting paper topic? Simply put, it has to address issues that we can use in our own lives. Your thesis should be able to answer the brutal question "So what?" Does your paper tell your reader something relevant about the context of the story you're interpreting or about the human condition?

Some categories, like race, gender, and social class, are dependable sources of interest. This is not to say that all good papers necessarily deal with one of these issues. My thesis on education in Frankenstein does not. But a lot of readers would probably be less interested in reading a paper that traces the instances of water imagery than in reading a paper that compares male or female stereotypes used in a story or that takes a close look at relationships between characters of different races. Again, don't feel compelled to write on race, gender, or class. The main idea is that you ask yourself whether the topic you've selected connects with a major human concern, and there are a lot of options here (for example, issues that relate to economics, family dynamics, education, religion, law, politics, sexuality, history, and psychology, among others).

Also, don't assume that as long as you address one of these issues, your paper will be interesting. As mentioned in step 2, you need to address these big topics in a complex way. Doing this requires that you don’t go into a topic with a preconceived notion of what you’ll find. Be prepared to challenge your own ideas about what gender, race, or class mean in a particular text.

2. Select a topic of interest to you

Though you may feel like you have to select a topic that sounds like something your instructor would be interested in, don't overlook the fact that you'll be more invested in your paper and probably get more out of it if you make the topic something pertinent to yourself. Pick a topic that might allow you to learn about yourself and what you find important.

Of course, your topic can't entirely be of your choosing. We're always at the mercy of the evidence that's available to us. For example, your interest may really be in political issues, but if you're reading Frankenstein , you might face some difficulties in finding enough evidence to make a good paper on that kind of topic. If, on the other hand, you're interested in ethics, philosophy, science, psychology, religion, or even geography, you'll probably have more than enough to write about and find yourself in the good position of having to select only the best pieces of evidence.

3. Make your thesis specific

The effort to be more specific almost always leads to a thesis that will get your reader's attention, and it also separates you from the crowd as someone who challenges ideas and looks into topics more deeply. A paper about education in general in Frankenstein will probably not get my reader's attention as much as a more specific topic about the impact of the learning environment on the main character. My readers may have already thought to some extent about ideas of education in the novel, if they have read it, but the chance that they have thought through something more specific like the educational environment is slim.

Contributors and Attributions

Adapted from Literature (Fiction) . Provided by: UNC College of Arts and Sciences Writing Center. License: CC BY-NC-ND .

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How Can You Tell Fiction & Nonfiction Apart?

Last Updated: March 20, 2024 Fact Checked

Fiction & Nonfiction in a Nutshell

What is fiction, what is nonfiction.

This article was reviewed by Gerald Posner and by wikiHow staff writer, Aly Rusciano . Gerald Posner is an Author & Journalist based in Miami, Florida. With over 35 years of experience, he specializes in investigative journalism, nonfiction books, and editorials. He holds a law degree from UC College of the Law, San Francisco, and a BA in Political Science from the University of California-Berkeley. He’s the author of thirteen books, including several New York Times bestsellers, the winner of the Florida Book Award for General Nonfiction, and has been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in History. He was also shortlisted for the Best Business Book of 2020 by the Society for Advancing Business Editing and Writing. This article has been fact-checked, ensuring the accuracy of any cited facts and confirming the authority of its sources. This article has been viewed 9,170 times.

So, fiction and nonfiction. What’s the deal with them? They both have “fiction” in them, so they must be the same thing, right? Well, not exactly. Fiction and nonfiction are the 2 main genres we use to tell stories, and although they have some things in common, they couldn’t be any more different. We’ve put the genres head-to-head in this article, so you can learn to tell them apart. Keep scrolling because you may just find that you're a fiction or nonfiction lover.

Things You Should Know

• If something’s make-believe, it’s fiction. If something’s real, it’s nonfiction.
• A story with real-life characters and events depicted factually is nonfiction, whereas a story that stretches the truth of a real-life event is fiction.
• Fiction and nonfiction works can be similar in tone because they can share the same literary devices, such as similes, metaphors, imagery, and more.

• Think of it like this: when you write an essay, you’re writing nonfiction; when you write a short story with you as the main character, you’re writing fiction .

• Fiction is often subjective, meaning it’s greatly influenced by a storyteller’s personal feelings and opinions.
• A fictional story can be given in different points of view (first person, third person, etc.).
• Fictional storytellers use descriptive language and literary devices like similes, metaphors, and personification to put their audience in their story.
• Ted Lasso (2020)
• Law & Order (1990 - present)
• Stranger Things (2022)
• Dune (2021)
• Back to the Future (1984)
• You’ve Got Mail (1998)
• Harry Potter by J.K. Rowling
• Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
• To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

• Nonfiction is generally objective, as facts are given to reach a conclusion.
• A nonfiction piece of work follows the storyteller’s personal point of view or that of another individual.
• Nonfiction books tend to have glossaries, bibliographies, or an index.
• The purpose of nonfiction is to entertain, inform, and/or persuade. [5] X Research source
• Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari
• Educated by Tara Westover
• I’m Glad My Mom Died by Jennette McCurdy
• The Last Dance (2020)
• Tell Me Who I Am (2019)
• Miss Americana (2020)
• “I Have A Dream” by Martin Luther King, Jr.
• “The Ballot or the Bullet” by Malcolm X

Expert Q&A

• There are multiple subgenres of fiction and nonfiction, but the same rules apply: if something’s real, it’s nonfiction; if something’s made up, it’s fiction. Thanks Helpful 0 Not Helpful 0
• If you watch a movie or read a book that says “based on true events,” it doesn’t mean it’s a work of nonfiction. It simply explains that the writer was inspired by something that happened in real life and stretched the truth to fit their narrative. Thanks Helpful 0 Not Helpful 0

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• ↑ https://www.jstor.org/stable/429900
• ↑ https://www.britannica.com/art/fiction-literature
• ↑ https://human.libretexts.org/Bookshelves/Literature_and_Literacy/Writing_and_Critical_Thinking_Through_Literature_(Ringo_and_Kashyap)/04%3A_About_Fiction-_Short_Stories_and_the_Novel/4.01%3A_What_is_Fiction
• ↑ https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/non-fiction
• ↑ https://youtu.be/OZdd5i9qGZk?t=235

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‘Based on a true story’: the fine line between fact and fiction

From Kapuscinski to Knausgaard, from Mantel to Macfarlane, more and more writers are challenging the border between fiction and nonfiction. Here Geoff Dyer – longtime master of the space between, in books such as But Beautiful and Out of Sheer Rage – argues that there is no single path to ‘truth’ while, below, writers on both sides of the divide share their thoughts…

F rontiers are always changing, advancing. Borders are fixed, man-made, squabbled about and jealously fought over. The frontier is an exciting, demanding – and frequently lawless – place to be. Borders are policed, often tense; if they become too porous then they’re not doing the job for which they were intended. Occasionally, though, the border is the frontier . That’s the situation now with regard to fiction and nonfiction.

For many years this was a peaceful, uncontested and pretty deserted space. On one side sat the Samuel Johnson prize , on the other the Booker . On one side of the fence, to put it metonymically, we had Antony Beevor’s Stalingrad . On the other, Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things . Basically, you went to nonfiction for the content, the subject. You read Beevor’s book because you were interested in the second world war, the eastern front. Interest in India or Kerala, however, was no more a precondition for reading Roy’s novel than a fondness for underage girls was a necessary starting point for enjoying Lolita . In a realm where style was often functional, nonfiction books were – are – praised for being “well written”, as though that were an inessential extra, like some optional finish on a reliable car. Whether the subject matter was alluring or off-putting, fiction was the arena where style was more obviously expected, sometimes conspicuously displayed and occasionally rewarded. And so, for a sizeable chunk of my reading life, novels provided pretty much all the nutrition and flavour I needed. They were fun, they taught me about psychology, behaviour and ethics. And then, gradually, increasing numbers of them failed to deliver – or delivered only decreasing amounts of what I went to them for. Nonfiction began taking up more of the slack and, as it did, so the drift away from fiction accelerated. Great novels still held me in their thrall, but a masterpiece such as Shirley Hazzard’s The Transit of Venus made the pleasures of Captain Corelli’s Mandolin seem fairly redundant. Meanwhile, my attention was fully employed by shoebox-sized nonfiction classics such as Richard Rhodes’s The Making of the Atomic Bomb , Robert Caro’s life of Robert Moses, The Power Broker , or Taylor Branch’s trilogy about “America in the King Years”: Parting the Waters , Pillar of Fire , At Canaan’s Edge . I learned so much from books like these – while I was reading them. The downside was that I retained so little. Which was an incentive to read more.

While it’s important not to convert prejudices into manifesto pledges, my experience is in keeping with actuarial norms: middle-aged now, I look forward to the days when I join that gruffly contented portion of the male population that reads only military history. More broadly, my changing tastes were shaped by a general cultural shift occasioned by the internet, the increased number of sports channels and the abundance of made-for-TV drama. Not, as is sometimes claimed, because they’re making us more stupid, rendering us incapable of concentrating on late-period Henry James (which I’d never been capable of concentrating on anyway), but because our hunger for distraction and diversion is now thoroughly sated by all the football, porn and viral videos out there.

As a consequence, the one thing I don’t go to fiction for, these days, is entertainment . Obviously, I still want to have a good time. I share Jonathan Franzen’s reaction to the joyless slog represented (for him) by William Gaddis’s JR but I don’t want the kind of good time that ends up feeling like a waste of time. Chaired by Stella Rimington, the Booker year of 2011 was in some ways the belated last gasp of quality fiction as entertainment – or “readability”, as she called it. It was belated because David Hare had provided the epitaph a year earlier when he wrote that “ the two most depressing words in the English language are ‘literary fiction’ ” (which sometimes feels like the aspirational, if commercially challenged, cousin of genre fiction).

Within the sprawl of nonfiction there is as much genre- and convention-dependency as in fiction. Nicholson Baker has argued persuasively that a recipe for successful nonfiction is an argument or thesis that can be summed up by reviewers and debated by the public without the tedious obligation of reading the whole book. In exceptional cases the title alone is enough. Malcolm Gladwell is the unquestioned master in this regard. Blink . Ah, got it. Some nonfiction books give the impression of being the dutiful fulfilment of contracts agreed on the basis of skilfully managed proposals. The finished books are like heavily expanded versions of those proposals – which then get boiled back down again with the sale of serial rights. Baker’s study of John Updike, U and I , on the other hand, is irreducible in that there is no thesis or argument and very little story. The only way to experience the book is to read it. Which is exactly what one would say of any worthwhile piece of fiction.

Don’t let me be misunderstood . The novel is not dead or dying. But at any given time, particular cultural forms come into their own. (No sane person would claim that, in the 1990s, advances were made in the composition of string quartets to rival those being made in electronic music.) Sometimes, advances are made at the expense of already established forms; other times, the established forms are themselves challenged and reinvigorated by the resulting blowback. At this moment, it’s the shifting sands between fiction and nonfiction that compel attention.

The difference between fiction and nonfiction is quite reasonably assumed to depend on whether stuff is invented or factually reliable. Now, in some kinds of writing – history, reportage and some species of memoir or true adventure – there is zero room for manoeuvre. Everything must be rigorously fact-checked. The appeal of a book such as Touching the Void is dependent absolutely on Joe Simpson being roped to the rock face of what happened. In military history, as Beevor commands, no liberties may be taken. As the author of many nonfiction books which are full of invention, I second this wholeheartedly.

The manipulations and inventions manufactured by Werner Herzog in the higher service of what he calls “ ecstatic truth ” leave the defences of documentary at large dangerously lowered. In my defence I would argue that the contrivances in my nonfiction are so factually trivial that their inclusion takes no skin off even the most inquisitorial nose. The Missing of the Somme begins with mention of a visit to the Natural History Museum with my grandfather – who never set foot in a museum in his life. Yoga for People Who Can’t Be Bothered to Do It was categorised as nonfiction because that’s what the publishers deemed most likely to succeed – ie, least likely to sink without trace. One of these “travel essays” – as the book was packaged in America – involved a psychedelic misadventure in Amsterdam, climaxing with a peculiar occurrence in a cafe toilet. Most of the story – which had originally appeared in an anthology of fiction – is a faithful transcript of stuff that really happened, but that incident was pinched from an anecdote someone told me about a portable toilet at Glastonbury. All that matters is that the reader can’t see the joins, that there is no textural change between reliable fabric and fabrication. In other words, the issue is one not of accuracy but aesthetics. That is why the photographer Walker Evans turned noun into adjective by insisting on the designation “documentary style” for his work. Exporting this across to literature, style itself can become a form of invention. As the did-it-really-happen? issue gives way to questions of style and form, so we are brought back to the expectations engendered by certain forms: how we expect to read certain books, how we expect them to behave. The dizziness occasioned by WG Sebald lay in the way that we really didn’t know quite what we were reading. To adapt a line of Clint Eastwood’s from Coogan’s Bluff , we didn’t know what was happening – even as it was happening to us. That mesmeric uncertainty has diminished slightly since the Sebald software has, as it were, been made available for free download by numerous acolytes, but a similar categorical refusal informs Ben Lerner’s 10.04 , “a work,” as his narrator puts it, “that, like a poem, is neither fiction nor nonfiction, but a flickering between them”. The flicker is sustained on an epic scale – in a thoroughly domestic sort of way – by Karl Ove Knausgaard ’s six-volume My Struggle series. A side-effect or aftershock of Knausgaard’s seismic shakeup was to make us realise how thoroughly bored we had become by plot. Rachel Cusk addressed and exploited this in her wonderfully plotless novel Outline , which was shortlisted for last year’s Goldsmiths prize.

Seeking to reward innovation and experimentation, this prize is a good and timely thing – but it’s unfortunate that it’s limited to fiction. While last year’s Samuel Johnson prize went to Helen Macdonald for her beautifully novel H Is for Hawk , much so-called experimental fiction comes in the tried-and-tested form of the sub-species of historical novel known as modernist. Had they been LPs rather than books, several contenders for last year’s Goldsmiths prize could have joined Will Self’s Shark in that oxymoronic section of Ray’s Jazz Shop : “secondhand avant garde”.

Twenty-four years ago, I was surprised to see But Beautiful – a neither-one-thing-nor-the-other book about jazz – in the bestsellers section of Books Etc on London’s Charing Cross Road. “Is that true?” I asked the manager. “No, no,” he replied consolingly. “We just didn’t know where else to put it.” Nowadays, there’s an increasing need for a section devoted to books that previously lacked a suitable home, or that could have been scattered between four or five different ones, none of which quite fit.

The danger, as genre-defying or creative nonfiction becomes a genre in its own right – with mix-and-match poised to become a matter of rote – is that no man’s land could become predictably congested. It also needs stressing that, as is often the case, a “new” situation turns out to have a long and distinguished prehistory. Where to stock Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1941)? History? Travel (within the subsection of the Balkans or Yugoslavia)? Or perhaps, as she suggested, in a category devoted to works “in a form insane from any ordinary artistic or commercial point of view”. Maggie Nelson must have been very happy when proof copies of her latest book, The Argonauts , advertised it as a work of “autotheory” – happy because Roland Barthes had been saving a place for her in this hip new category. And so, as our proposed new section expands to make room for the diverse likes of Elizabeth Hardwick’s Sleepless Nights , Bruce Chatwin’s The Songlines , Simon Schama’s Dead Certainties , Roberto Calasso’s The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony or Ivan Vladislavic’s Portrait With Keys , the most viable label might well turn out to be an old one: “literature”.

The nonfiction novels of Norman Mailer ( The Executioner’s Song ) or Truman Capote ( In Cold Blood ) changed the literary landscape, but the scope for further innovation was quickly noticed by the young Annie Dillard. “We’ve had the nonfiction novel,” she confided to her journal; “it’s time for the novelised book of nonfiction.” The book she was working on, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek , is a classic instance of the nonfiction work of art. Having won a Pulitzer prize for nonfiction in 1975, it went on to become the source of some controversy when it was revealed that the famous opening paragraph – in which the author awakens in bed to find herself covered in paw prints of blood, after her cat, a fighting tom, has returned from his nocturnal adventures – was a fiction. It’s not that she’d made this story up; she’d adapted it, with permission, from something written by a postgrad student. This was a shower in a teacup compared with the various storms that have swirled around Ryszard Kapuscinski . It’s a problem partly of his own making, since he repeatedly insisted that he was a reporter, that he had to “experience everything for [him]self”, that he didn’t have the freedoms of the imaginative writer, that while he “could embellish” the details of his stories, he decided against doing so on the grounds that it “would not be true”.

Gradually it emerged that this was part of the rhetoric of fiction, that he could not possibly have seen first-hand some of the things he claimed to have witnessed. For some readers this was a thoroughly disillusioning experience; for others it seemed that his exuberance and imaginative abundance were not always compatible with the obligations and diligence of the reporter. He remains a great writer – just not the kind of great writer he was supposed to be. (The potential for confusion was there from the outset; when Jonathan Miller was turning Kapuscinski’s book about Haile Selassie and Ethiopia, The Emperor , into an opera, the author reminded him that it was really a book about Poland.) Kapuscinski did not simply borrow the techniques and freedom of the novel; books such as The Soccer War or Another Day of Life generated the moulds from which they were formed – moulds which then dissolved, Mission Impossible -style, at the moment of the books’ completion. The essential thing – and this was something I discovered when writing But Beautiful as a series of improvisations – is to arrive at a form singularly appropriate to a particular subject, and to that subject alone.

That book was dedicated to John Berger. Habitually identified as a “Marxist”, “art critic” or “polymath”, Berger has an extraordinary capacity for formal innovation which is easily overlooked. The documentary studies – of a country doctor in A Fortunate Man (1967), of migrant labour in A Seventh Man (1975) – he made with photographer Jean Mohr are unsurpassed in their marriage of image and text. The shift from the overt modernist complexities of the Booker prize-winning G to the stories of French peasant life was perceived, in some quarters, as a retreat to more traditional forms. Nothing – to use a phrase that may not be appropriate in this context – could be further from the truth. In its combination of poetry, fiction, documentary essays and historical analysis, Pig Earth (1979) was, even by Berger’s standards, his most formally innovative book – until he surpassed it with the next one, And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief As Photos . Berger was 89 on 5 November, bonfire night. He has been setting borders ablaze for almost 60 years, urging us towards the frontier of the possible.

Geoff Dyer received the 2015 Windham-Campbell prize for nonfiction. His new book, White Sands , will be published by Canongate in June

Aminatta Forna: ‘Fiction allows me to reach for a deeper, less literal kind of truth’

Each time a writer begins a book they make a contract with the reader. If the book is a work of fiction the contract is pretty vague, essentially saying: “Commit your time and patience to me and I will tell you a story.” There may be a sub-clause about entertaining the reader, or some such. In the contract for my novels I promise to try to show my readers a way of seeing the world in a way I hope they have not seen before. A contract for a work of nonfiction is a more precise affair. The writer says, I am telling you, and to the best of my ability, what I believe to be true. This is a contract that should not be broken lightly and why I have disagreed with writers of memoir (in particular) who happily alter facts to suit their narrative purposes. Break the contract and readers no longer know who to trust.

I write both fiction and nonfiction – to me they serve different purposes. On my noticeboard I have pinned the lines: “Nonfiction reveals the lies, but only metaphor can reveal the truth.” I don’t know who said it, I’m afraid. My first full-length work was a memoir of war, the rise of a dictatorship and my own family’s consequent fate. In the 12 years since its publication I have continued to explore the themes of civil war, though almost exclusively in fiction. Fiction allows me to reach for a deeper, less literal kind of truth.

However, when a writer comes to a story, whether fiction or nonfiction, they employ many of the same techniques, of narrative, plot, pace, mood and dialogue. This is one reason I think the distinction between fiction and nonfiction prizes is, well, a fiction. Writers such as Joan Didion, Mary Karr, Roger Deakin, and more recently Helen Macdonald, William Fiennes and Robert Macfarlane, are master craftsmen. These writers have broken the boundaries of nonfiction to reach for the kind of truth that fiction writers covet.

A few years back I judged an award for fiction in which the brief covered a writer’s entire output, but in a single genre. It made no sense. Gabriel García Márquez’s News of a Kidnapping is a furtherance of the line of questioning that began with Chronicle of a Death Foretold . Aleksandar Hemon ’s essays are extensions of his novels and short stories, or vice versa. Marilynne Robinson ’s essays are part of the same inquiry into the meaning of religion as Gilead or Home . There should be a prize quite simply for belles-lettres , as the French call it, for “fine writing” in any form.

Aminatta Forna’s most recent novel is The Hired Man, published by Bloomsbury, £8.99. Click here to order a copy for £7.19

Antony Beevor: ‘We seem to be experiencing a need for authenticity, even in works of fiction’

We are entering a post-literate world, where the moving image is king. The tagline “based on a true story” now seems vital when marketing movies. “Faction-creep” has increased both in television and the cinema. And more novels than ever before are set in the past. This is largely because the essence of human drama is moral dilemma, an element that our nonjudgmental society today rather lacks.

A blend of historical fact and fiction has been used in various forms since narrative began with sagas and epic poems. But today’s hybrid of faction has a different genesis, and is influenced by different motives. There is a more market-driven attempt to satisfy the modern desire in a fast-moving world to learn and be entertained at the same time. In any case, we seem to be experiencing a need for authenticity, even in works of fiction.

I have always loved novels set in the past. I began as a boy with Hornblower and Conan Doyle’s Brigadier Gerard stories because they offered excitement as well as escape into that “other country”. And more recently I have been gripped by Hilary Mantel’s trilogy about Thomas Cromwell . But however impressive her research and writing, I am left feeling deeply uneasy. Which parts were pure invention, which speculation and which were based on reliable sources?

Mantel writes: “For a novelist, this absence of intimate material is both a problem and an opportunity… Unlike the historian, the novelist doesn’t operate through hindsight. She lives inside the consciousness of her characters for whom the future is blank.” (In fact the historian should do both – first explain the world as it appeared to protagonists at the time, and then analyse with hindsight.) The problem arises precisely when the novelist imposes their consciousness on a real historical figure. Helen Dunmore (see below) said that novelists stray into “dangerous territory” when they fictionalise real people. She said that she was “very wary” of putting words into the mouths of characters from history.

Restorers of paintings and pottery follow a code of conduct in their work to distinguish the genuine and original material from what they are adding later. Should writers do the same? Should not the reader be told what is fact and what is invented? But if novelists do not want to make this distinction (say by the use of italics or bold to distinguish the true from the false) then why not change the names slightly, as in a roman à clef, to emphasise that their version is at least one step away from reality? The novelist Linda Grant argued that this also gives the writer much greater freedom of invention. Keeping real names shackles the imaginative writer perhaps more than they realise. In Tolstoy’s War and Peace , the most convincing and interesting characters are those he made up, not the historical figures. The most memorable characters of world fiction have always come from a great writer’s imagination.

Antony Beevor’ s latest book is Ardennes 1944: Hitler’s Last Gamble, published by Viking, £25. Click here to order a copy for £18.75

Alan Johnson: ‘I stuck to a sequence of fiction followed by fact as if it were an unwritten commandment passed down to autodidacts like me’

As a general rule I’ve always read fiction because I wanted to and nonfiction because I felt I had to. For a time I even stuck to a pedantic sequence of fiction followed by fact as if it were an unwritten commandment passed down to autodidacts like me.

There was also a certain amount of piety involved. Reading should be about learning. Pleasure should be a secondary consideration. I still recall the very first nonfiction book I ever read: The Blue Nile by Alan Moorehead. Since then I’ve loved many histories, memoirs, biographies and travel books. However, when choosing the next book to read (and what a wonderful moment that is) I’m still drawn more towards novels than the worthy tomes that I know will be more instructive.

I’ve known a few people who never read fiction but nobody yet who’s never read anything but. Even the most devoted film fan must appreciate the occasional documentary.

For the nonfiction obsessive I’d place True Grit by Charles Portis in their Christmas stocking in an attempt to convert them. As for my own favourite nonfiction book, it would have to be An Immaculate Mistake , an exquisite memoir of childhood by Paul Bailey . I often tell book festival audiences that I want to write fiction myself, to which the cynics in the audience suggest I write the next manifesto.

Alan Johnson’s second volume of memoirs, Please, Mister Postman, is published by Corgi, £8.99. Click here to order a copy for £7.19

Matt Haig: ‘The moment we trust too much in one fixed idea of reality is the moment we lose it’

I like to think myself as anti-genre-labelling. There is nothing more likely to stunt your creativity than to think of walls between genres. I understand that booksellers, and even readers, need to know if a book is a crime novel or literary or commercial or romantic but for a writer, thinking in those terms is limiting.

Also, at the risk of sounding like a pretentious sixth-former, the divide between fiction and nonfiction is inherently false according to the multiverse theory, in that all fiction is true in one universe or other, so when you write a novel you are writing reality that belongs to somewhere else. But there is another reason the divide is false, or at least why it creates false ideas. And that is because things categorised as nonfiction can be inauthentic while fiction can contain more truth. The aim of any writer, even a fantasy writer, is the pursuit of truth.

I have written nonfiction and fiction. I wrote a science fiction novel that was very autobiographical about my experience of depression, and then I wrote a nonfiction book about depression . They were both about the same truth, but from different angles, and I wouldn’t have been able to write the nonfiction without the fiction first. We need both genres, sometimes at the same time, because the moment we trust too much in one fixed idea of reality is the moment we lose it.

But as a reader, I must admit I read more nonfiction than fiction at the moment, because there is so much good stuff around and because I am writing fiction and my mind likes the counterbalance.

Matt Haig’s most recent book for adults is Reasons to Stay Alive, published by Canongate, £9.99. Click here to order a copy for £7.99

Helen Dunmore: ‘Fiction gets under the guard. It creates empathy, changes fixed opinions and contributes to reform’

It might seem logical that nonfiction, with its rigorous foundation in fact, would be a more persuasive instrument of social change than fiction; but I believe this is not the case. When Harriet Beecher Stowe published Uncle Tom’s Cabin in 1852 it became an immediate bestseller in the US and Britain and helped to shatter white people’s complacency about slavery. There are important criticisms of Uncle Tom’s Cabin but, like Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn , the novel demolishes slavery’s belief system, denying that the enslaved are a different order of beings and may justifiably be exploited. More recently, Toni Morrison’s Beloved exposes the cost of slavery with searing brilliance, while Chinua Achebe dramatises the crude irruption of western missionaries and colonists into highly complex, sophisticated Igbo culture. Such novels not only add to a reader’s knowledge: they transform that reader’s internal landscape.

We are feeling creatures, and often it is only our refusal or inability to empathise that allows us to pursue our cruelties. Fiction gets under the guard. It creates empathy, changes fixed opinions and morality, and contributes to reform of law and social practice. When Victorians read Dickens or Elizabeth Gaskell they came to love the characters of Mary Barton, Ruth, Oliver Twist or Little Nell, and through them to know with full imaginative force the cost of industrialisation, the brutality of the workhouse, or the desperation of a “fallen” woman.

The sweatshop is still with us and so are slavery, the denial of rights to women and the sufferings of those swept aside. Read Sunjeev Sahota’s The Year of the Runaways and enter the world of immigrants without papers. Read Emma Healey’s Elizabeth Is Missing , and live inside a dissolving mind. You will not emerge from these books unchanged.

Helen Dunmore’s new novel, Exposure, will be published by Hutchinson in January, £16.99. Click here to order a copy for £13.59

Adam Sisman: ‘Being nosy, I enjoy investigating the lives of others… that they are real people is essential’

It is, I think, generally true that most writers write either fiction or nonfiction, to the exclusion of the other, most of the time; though it is easy to think of exceptions to this rule. Nicholas Shakespeare, for example, is a much-admired novelist, but he has also written an excellent biography of Bruce Chatwin. Before concentrating on thrillers, Robert Harris wrote several works of nonfiction, including Selling Hitler , a brilliant account of the “Hitler diaries” story . And so on.

As a writer, I specialise in biography, which seems to suit my interests and aptitudes. Being nosy, I enjoy investigating the lives of others, like a detective, or perhaps a spy. I relish reading other people’s letters and diaries, and poring over their manuscripts. That these others are real people is an essential part of the process. I can imagine a biography of a fictional character, but it would not be the kind of biography that I should want to write.

Though I write nonfiction, this does not mean that I do not read fiction: on the contrary, I consume more novels than any other type of book. My last biography was of the novelist John le Carré; if I had not gained so much pleasure from reading his work, I doubt if I would have enjoyed writing his life.

I notice that dedicated readers of fiction tend towards new books. I am probably unusual, in that I am as likely to read a novel written 100 years ago as one of those shortlisted for this year’s Booker. I am only slightly embarrassed to admit that the novel I am reading at the moment is by Marcel Proust.

In any case I feel that those readers who restrict themselves to fiction may be denying themselves pleasure as well as instruction. I would argue that biography can be as enriching and as entertaining as fiction. To those who doubt the truth of this, I recommend anything by Michael Holroyd or Richard Holmes , or Selina Hastings .

At its best, biography teaches us about life itself, just as fiction does. “I esteem biography, as giving us what comes near to ourselves, what we can turn to use,” Johnson told Boswell during their tour of the Hebrides. The great man had written almost every type of book, including works of both fiction and biography, so he knew a thing or two.

John le Carré: the Biography by Adam Sisman is published by Bloomsbury, £25. Click here to order a copy for £17.50

Jane Smiley: ‘Readers want to know not only what happened, but also how it looked, sounded, smelled, felt, what it meant then, and what it means now’

The goal of every author of every piece of writing is to get the reader willingly to suspend disbelief. Every piece of writing puts forth some logical argument and some theory of cause and effect for the simple reason that words, especially prose words, are sequential. The author and the reader both know that if the author doesn’t provide the logic, the reader will. But the logic of events and people as they exist in the world isn’t self-evident, and narrators of fiction and narrators of nonfiction have different ways of putting together their logical systems.

Nonfiction, history, is about what is known to be, or generally accepted to be, accurate. Facts are like archeological finds – they must strike us as tangible and real, therefore likely, plausible, attested, but also new and revelatory. The promise of nonfiction is that it is accurate, and therefore, like an archeological site, incomplete – here are the stone walls, here is part of a mosaic, here are two goblets. My theory concerns what these objects might mean, how they might be connected to an earthquake for which there is evidence, but I cannot go too far toward completeness or the reader, who might otherwise enjoy my narrative, will cease to be willing to suspend disbelief in its accuracy. It is certain that after I die, more tangible evidence will surface, some plates, some clay tablets, a skull with a spike pounded into the cranium, and so theories will change, and I will be praised for having stuck to the facts as they were then understood.

But the history of literature shows that listeners and readers want to know not only what happened, but also how it looked, sounded, smelled, felt, and also what it meant then and what it means now. They want to know but also to experience, and therefore they seek completeness, and so they willingly suspend disbelief in fiction ( The Odyssey , the Book of Genesis, Waverley , Flashman ). What they get from these sources is not only pleasure, but emotional education, the exercise of the imagination, an enlargement of the inner life. A writer of fiction also has a theory, a theory about what happened, and also about whether the past and the present are similar, whether people change or remain the same. As with the archaeologist, my theory, if I am a fiction writer, will be found wanting after I die, but pleasure in my stories may linger ( War and Peace ) or surge ( The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner ). Chances are that in order to construct my narrative, I did plenty of research, but just as with historians, I know that as yet undiscovered sources will turn up. The test for my theory will not be whether my narrative is factually accurate. It will be whether my idea of human nature retains immediacy.

As a reader, I love both history and historical novels. What I get from Geoffrey Parker’s Global Crisis is insight into what did go wrong for humans of the 17th century and what could go wrong very soon in our world. What I get from Eleanor Catton’s The Luminaries is a tight, suspenseful formal puzzle combined with the feeling that I know how men in New Zealand in the 1860s are experiencing their world. Both are fascinating and valuable. Why should I forgo either?

Golden Age , the final volume in Jane Smiley’s Hundred Years trilogy, is published by Mantle, £18.99. Click here to order a copy for £14.99

David Kynaston: ‘After four decades of writing history books, I continue to feel a sense of inferiority to those who practise out-and-out literature’

Fiction or nonfiction? I can only answer subjectively and autobiographically. From the start, reading modern history at Oxford in the early 1970s, I knew somehow that I was in the second-class carriage. Those doing English were more interesting, more glamorous, altogether more “it”. Years later, Martin Amis gave some comfort by retrospectively wishing he’d done it the other way round, but deep down, after four decades of writing history books, I continue to feel a sense of inferiority to those who practise out-and-out literature.

Why is fiction (leaving aside poetry and drama) superior? Not just because it reflects an intrinsically more creative process, but because at its best it is capable of getting inside the heads of people with a richness, complexity and profundity that no other genre (written or otherwise) can. I’ve read plenty of history and biography in my time, but never come across anyone who has meant quite as much to me as Pierre or Prince Andrei , Levin or Anna .

Of course, Tolstoy is on a pedestal – assuredly the greatest novelist. Dickens falls short, unable or unwilling to drill down into those heads; Flaubert is too contemptuous of his characters; Joyce takes that fateful wrong turn after Dubliners . But plenty of others do do it – Austen, Eliot, Fontane, Forster, Proust, Grossman, even in my time Pym and Powell – and, not to avoid the unavoidable cliche, enrich immeasurably our awareness of being human, even teach us how to live.

But there is something to be said, by me anyway, on the other side. Those might be my desert island authors – no question – yet it has been nonfiction that has at least as decisively shaped my view of the world, certainly once I was a young adult. George Orwell’s The Lion and the Unicorn gave me a compelling sense of 20th-century Britain; CLR James’s Beyond a Boundary , the greatest ever cricket book, enlarged the possibilities of history; the devastating memoirs of Nadezhda Mandelstam, widow of the poet Osip, belatedly made me realise that liberty ultimately trumps equality; EP Thompson ’s The Poverty of Theory , his brutal but painstaking attack on the French philosopher Louis Althusser, taught me the virtues of empiricism. Now in my mid-60s, I am as happy (like many men my age) to turn to a biography or autobiography – at the moment Adam Mars-Jones’s Kid Gloves – as I try to understand the epoch I have passed through.

Even so, when the chips are down, nothing quite beats the right novel. Three years ago, I happened to be re-reading Anthony Trollope ’s The Warden when I was diagnosed with cancer. During the anxious days and especially nights that followed, it did the job – and I was, and remain, grateful.

Modernity Britain by David Kynaston is published by Bloomsbury, £14.99. Click here to order a copy for £11.99

Caroline Sanderson: ‘Nonfiction can do anything fiction can do; and often does it better’

“So you’re a published writer,” says the person at the party. “What novels have you written?”

Why do we so often think of fiction as the outstanding form? As nonfiction previewer for the Bookseller , and the author of five nonfiction books of my own, I am often moved to question why fiction dominates our conversations about books.

The numbers certainly don’t support fiction’s pre-eminence. Novels are not what the majority of people buy, nor are they where most money is made. According to BookScan, in a printed book market worth £1.24bn between January and October this year, almost 40% of sales came from general (ie, non-academic) nonfiction, compared with 27% from adult fiction. And sales of hardback nonfiction are booming too: up 8.3% on 2014.

The problem is that the very term “nonfiction” is supremely unhelpful; a big, baggy anti-moniker that conceals a multitude of possibilities. It masks the fact that nonfiction can do anything fiction can do; and often does it better. Tell an exuberant, unruly true story of ordinary, conflicted people like Alexandra Fuller’s Leaving Before the Rains Come . Evoke faraway worlds which barely seem of the 21st century, like Colin Thubron’s To a Mountain in Tibet . Help us feel the thick presence of a time when our ancestors lived and breathed, as Yuval Noah Harari does in Sapiens .

The best nonfiction trumps fiction by combining the allure of a true story with the recounting of realities we are better off for knowing. By comparison, fiction is only made-up stuff.

Caroline Sanderson’s Someone Like Adele is published by Omnibus, £12.95

Kerry Hudson: ‘Yes, this is “made up” but this is also the most truthful thing I have to give you’

As a teen I left small town libraries all over the UK with novels stacked up to my chest and under my chin. I’d go home, lie in bed with the books scattered around me and luxuriate in the possibility of disappearing into different worlds, spending time with characters who mostly behaved as I wanted and expected them to and even if they didn’t, the pages could be closed, the book abandoned. Beyond that bed was the council estate, caravan or B&B we were living in, usually in a rough area with all the grim certainties of life on the margins. Fiction was my fantasy island and I avoided nonfiction – reality was something I had plenty of, thank you very much.

But reality bites and holds on tight and, as a writer, though it felt natural I would write fiction I still need an absolute truth, something ‘real’ to begin from. I will stretch and twist that reality, filter it through various fictional smoke and mirrors, expand and compress its meaning but at the centre of each book there is that grain of “this really happened”. Everything is built around that and I hope my readers feel that honesty. Yes, this is “made up” but this is also the most truthful thing I have to give you.

I finally discovered nonfiction when I was in my 20s and far from the life I’d had. I read [the slave memoir] The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano , Primo Levi’s If This Is a Man and Janice Galloway’s This Is Not About Me and realised it was time to leave my island and start exploring new worlds. I finally understood at the heart of most narratives, fiction or fact, there is human complexity and us readers trying to understand our own stories through the telling of others’. And then I wrote my own.

Kerry’s Hudson’s latest novel, Thirst, is published by Vintage, £8.99. Click here to order a copy for £6.99

• The Observer
• Autobiography and memoir
• History books
• Biography books
• Antony Beevor

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Introduction

Most of your familiarity with essays probably comes from your own coursework. When you are assigned an essay for a class, perhaps you’ve been assigned an expository essay or a persuasive essay. In other words, you may have been assigned an essay with a clear purpose.

Literary essays are an exciting departure from those essays that many of us have been assigned. Employing techniques akin to those used by novelists, poets, and short story writers, essayists work to explore an idea. In fact, the word “essay” is etymologically linked to the notion of experimenting, weighing, or testing out. Essayists rarely produce straightforward manifestos or polemics. Instead, they entice the reader to care or understand or learn by using elements and techniques common to and found in literature. The more adept you are at recognizing those elements, the better you’ll be able to appreciate a work of creative nonfiction.

In order to analyze creative nonfiction, you should be aware of the different rhetorical structures writers use. Most of these structures will be familiar to you. What is important to consider, though, is how creative nonfiction writers use literary structures and techniques to achieve a particular effect.

Analyzing Nonfiction

Analysis of Nonfiction

Like analysis of fiction, poetry, and drama, analysis of a nonfiction requires more than understanding the point or the content of a nonfiction text. It requires that we go beyond what the text says explicitly and look at such factors as implied meaning, intended purpose and audience, the context in which the text was written, and how the author presents his/her argument. Before you can analyze, however, you must first comprehend the text and be able to provide an objective summary.

When working with a complex text, it is best to start with short excerpts, go through several reads of the piece if possible, and focus on moving from basic comprehension on the first read, to deeper, more complex understandings with each subsequent reading. For an example of an effective strategy, use the “SOAPSTone” strategy, which consists of a series of questions that provide a basis for analysis. Remember that regardless of analysis strategy, you must always provide evidence taken directly from the text to prove their point.

Subject: What is the subject? This is the general topic, content, and ideas contained in the text. Try to state the subject in only a few words or a short phrase so as to concisely summarize the topic for your own comprehension purposes.

Occasion: What is the occasion? It is the time and place of the piece; the context that encouraged the writing to happen. This can be a large occasion (an environment of ideas and emotions that swirl around a broad issue) or an immediate occasion or specific event.

Audience: Who is the audience? The audience is the group of readers to whom the piece is directed. The audience may be an individual, a small group, or a large group of people. It may be specific or more general.

Purpose: What is the purpose? It is the reason behind the text. What does the author want the audience to think or do as a result of this text? Does the author call for some specific action or is the purpose to convince the reader to think, feel or believe in a certain way? Too often readers do not consider this question, yet understanding the purpose of a nonfiction text is crucial in order to critically analyze the text.

Speaker: Who is the speaker? This is the voice that tells the story. What is their background? Is there a bias? Does that impact how the text is written and the points being made? Typically in nonfiction, the speaker and the author are the same; however, when we approach fiction, we must realize that the speaker and the author are often NOT the same. In fiction the author may choose to tell the story from any number of different points of view. In fact, the method of narration and the character of the speaker may be a crucial piece in understanding the work, particularly in satire. However, in nonfiction, the speaker and the author of the text are most likely going to be the same, which allows us a different avenue for analysis, as we can critique a text alongside what we know about the author.

Tone: What is the tone? This is the attitude a writer takes towards the subject or character: It can be serious, humorous, sarcastic, or even objective. Examine the author’s choice of words, sentence structure, and imagery. Consider providing students with a list of tone words to help them find the exact word. Often in informational text, the tone is objective because the author is simply relaying information and is not trying to sway the audience; however, in literary nonfiction as with fiction, the author may want his/her audience to feel a certain way about the situation, characters, etc.

“Text-Dependent Analysis: Nonfiction.” Licensed under Standard Youtube License https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VzMzHrroZGM

“Analyzing Nonfiction.” Licensed under Standard Youtube License https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f_k6RXWMHas

“How to Analyze Non-Fiction.” Licensed under CC BY SA 4.0 http://www.rpdp.net/literacyFiles/literacy_101.pdf

The world of creative nonfiction is broad, but learning to analyze the techniques used by literary and personal essayists is a good way to understand how much crafting goes into making a true story, told well. And though the word “essay” may have once been associated with homework assignments and tests, rest assured, there’s much more to the form.

Like fiction, creative nonfiction relies on the careful choices made by a writer. What separates creative nonfiction from fiction, of course, is the writer’s tacit promise to be conveying a story or set of events that is purported to be true. In order to accentuate that truth or present it in its most compelling fashion, creative nonfiction writers use a variety of literary elements and techniques. Everything from the structure of an essay to its shape to its tone influences how a reader makes sense of the content.

ENG134 – Literary Genres Copyright © by The American Women's College and Jessica Egan is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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What is creative nonfiction? Despite its slightly enigmatic name, no literary genre has grown quite as quickly as creative nonfiction in recent decades. Literary nonfiction is now well-established as a powerful means of storytelling, and bookstores now reserve large amounts of space for nonfiction, when it often used to occupy a single bookshelf.

Like any literary genre, creative nonfiction has a long history; also like other genres, defining contemporary CNF for the modern writer can be nuanced. If you’re interested in writing true-to-life stories but you’re not sure where to begin, let’s start by dissecting the creative nonfiction genre and what it means to write a modern literary essay.

What Creative Nonfiction Is

Creative nonfiction employs the creative writing techniques of literature, such as poetry and fiction, to retell a true story.

How do we define creative nonfiction? What makes it “creative,” as opposed to just “factual writing”? These are great questions to ask when entering the genre, and they require answers which could become literary essays themselves.

In short, creative nonfiction (CNF) is a form of storytelling that employs the creative writing techniques of literature, such as poetry and fiction, to retell a true story. Creative nonfiction writers don’t just share pithy anecdotes, they use craft and technique to situate the reader into their own personal lives. Fictional elements, such as character development and narrative arcs, are employed to create a cohesive story, but so are poetic elements like conceit and juxtaposition.

The CNF genre is wildly experimental, and contemporary nonfiction writers are pushing the bounds of literature by finding new ways to tell their stories. While a CNF writer might retell a personal narrative, they might also focus their gaze on history, politics, or they might use creative writing elements to write an expository essay. There are very few limits to what creative nonfiction can be, which is what makes defining the genre so difficult—but writing it so exciting.

Different Forms of Creative Nonfiction

From the autobiographies of Mark Twain and Benvenuto Cellini, to the more experimental styles of modern writers like Karl Ove Knausgård, creative nonfiction has a long history and takes a wide variety of forms. Common iterations of the creative nonfiction genre include the following:

Also known as biography or autobiography, the memoir form is probably the most recognizable form of creative nonfiction. Memoirs are collections of memories, either surrounding a single narrative thread or multiple interrelated ideas. The memoir is usually published as a book or extended piece of fiction, and many memoirs take years to write and perfect. Memoirs often take on a similar writing style as the personal essay does, though it must be personable and interesting enough to encourage the reader through the entire book.

Personal Essay

Personal essays are stories about personal experiences told using literary techniques.

When someone hears the word “essay,” they instinctively think about those five paragraph book essays everyone wrote in high school. In creative nonfiction, the personal essay is much more vibrant and dynamic. Personal essays are stories about personal experiences, and while some personal essays can be standalone stories about a single event, many essays braid true stories with extended metaphors and other narratives.

Personal essays are often intimate, emotionally charged spaces. Consider the opening two paragraphs from Beth Ann Fennelly’s personal essay “ I Survived the Blizzard of ’79. ”

We didn’t question. Or complain. It wouldn’t have occurred to us, and it wouldn’t have helped. I was eight. Julie was ten.

We didn’t know yet that this blizzard would earn itself a moniker that would be silk-screened on T-shirts. We would own such a shirt, which extended its tenure in our house as a rag for polishing silver.

The word “essay” comes from the French “essayer,” which means “to try” or “attempt.” The personal essay is more than just an autobiographical narrative—it’s an attempt to tell your own history with literary techniques.

Lyric Essay

The lyric essay contains similar subject matter as the personal essay, but is much more experimental in form.

The lyric essay contains similar subject matter as the personal essay, with one key distinction: lyric essays are much more experimental in form. Poetry and creative nonfiction merge in the lyric essay, challenging the conventional prose format of paragraphs and linear sentences.

The lyric essay stands out for its unique writing style and sentence structure. Consider these lines from “ Life Code ” by J. A. Knight:

The dream goes like this: blue room of water. God light from above. Child’s fist, foot, curve, face, the arc of an eye, the symmetry of circles… and then an opening of this body—which surprised her—a movement so clean and assured and then the push towards the light like a frog or a fish.

What we get is language driven by emotion, choosing an internal logic rather than a universally accepted one.

Lyric essays are amazing spaces to break barriers in language. For example, the lyricist might write a few paragraphs about their story, then examine a key emotion in the form of a villanelle or a ghazal . They might decide to write their entire essay in a string of couplets or a series of sonnets, then interrupt those stanzas with moments of insight or analysis. In the lyric essay, language dictates form. The successful lyricist lets the words arrange themselves in whatever format best tells the story, allowing for experimental new forms of storytelling.

Literary Journalism

Much more ambiguously defined is the idea of literary journalism. The idea is simple: report on real life events using literary conventions and styles. But how do you do this effectively, in a way that the audience pays attention and takes the story seriously?

You can best find examples of literary journalism in more “prestigious” news journals, such as The New Yorker , The Atlantic , Salon , and occasionally The New York Times . Think pieces about real world events, as well as expository journalism, might use braiding and extended metaphors to make readers feel more connected to the story. Other forms of nonfiction, such as the academic essay or more technical writing, might also fall under literary journalism, provided those pieces still use the elements of creative nonfiction.

Consider this recently published article from The Atlantic : The Uncanny Tale of Shimmel Zohar by Lawrence Weschler. It employs a style that’s breezy yet personable—including its opening line.

So I first heard about Shimmel Zohar from Gravity Goldberg—yeah, I know, but she insists it’s her real name (explaining that her father was a physicist)—who is the director of public programs and visitor experience at the Contemporary Jewish Museum, in San Francisco.

How to Write Creative Nonfiction: Common Elements and Techniques

What separates a general news update from a well-written piece of literary journalism? What’s the difference between essay writing in high school and the personal essay? When nonfiction writers put out creative work, they are most successful when they utilize the following elements.

Just like fiction, nonfiction relies on effective narration. Telling the story with an effective plot, writing from a certain point of view, and using the narrative to flesh out the story’s big idea are all key craft elements. How you structure your story can have a huge impact on how the reader perceives the work, as well as the insights you draw from the story itself.

Consider the first lines of the story “ To the Miami University Payroll Lady ” by Frenci Nguyen:

You might not remember me, but I’m the dark-haired, Texas-born, Asian-American graduate student who visited the Payroll Office the other day to complete direct deposit and tax forms.

Because the story is written in second person, with the reader experiencing the story as the payroll lady, the story’s narration feels much more personal and important, forcing the reader to evaluate their own personal biases and beliefs.

Observation

Telling the story involves more than just simple plot elements, it also involves situating the reader in the key details. Setting the scene requires attention to all five senses, and interpersonal dialogue is much more effective when the narrator observes changes in vocal pitch, certain facial expressions, and movements in body language. Essentially, let the reader experience the tiny details – we access each other best through minutiae.

The story “ In Transit ” by Erica Plouffe Lazure is a perfect example of storytelling through observation. Every detail of this flash piece is carefully noted to tell a story without direct action, using observations about group behavior to find hope in a crisis. We get observation when the narrator notes the following:

Here at the St. Thomas airport in mid-March, we feel the urgency of the transition, the awareness of how we position our bodies, where we place our luggage, how we consider for the first time the numbers of people whose belongings are placed on the same steel table, the same conveyor belt, the same glowing radioactive scan, whose IDs are touched by the same gloved hand[.]

What’s especially powerful about this story is that it is written in a single sentence, allowing the reader to be just as overwhelmed by observation and context as the narrator is.

We’ve used this word a lot, but what is braiding? Braiding is a technique most often used in creative nonfiction where the writer intertwines multiple narratives, or “threads.” Not all essays use braiding, but the longer a story is, the more it benefits the writer to intertwine their story with an extended metaphor or another idea to draw insight from.

“ The Crush ” by Zsofia McMullin demonstrates braiding wonderfully. Some paragraphs are written in first person, while others are written in second person.

The following example from “The Crush” demonstrates braiding:

Your hair is still wet when you slip into the booth across from me and throw your wallet and glasses and phone on the table, and I marvel at how everything about you is streamlined, compact, organized. I am always overflowing — flesh and wants and a purse stuffed with snacks and toy soldiers and tissues.

The author threads these narratives together by having both people interact in a diner, yet the reader still perceives a distance between the two threads because of the separation of “I” and “you” pronouns. When these threads meet, briefly, we know they will never meet again.

Speaking of insight, creative nonfiction writers must draw novel conclusions from the stories they write. When the narrator pauses in the story to delve into their emotions, explain complex ideas, or draw strength and meaning from tough situations, they’re finding insight in the essay.

Often, creative writers experience insight as they write it, drawing conclusions they hadn’t yet considered as they tell their story, which makes creative nonfiction much more genuine and raw.

The story “ Me Llamo Theresa ” by Theresa Okokun does a fantastic job of finding insight. The story is about the history of our own names and the generations that stand before them, and as the writer explores her disconnect with her own name, she recognizes a similar disconnect in her mother, as well as the need to connect with her name because of her father.

The narrator offers insight when she remarks:

I began to experience a particular type of identity crisis that so many immigrants and children of immigrants go through — where we are called one name at school or at work, but another name at home, and in our hearts.

How to Write Creative Nonfiction: the 5 R’s

CNF pioneer Lee Gutkind developed a very system called the “5 R’s” of creative nonfiction writing. Together, the 5 R’s form a general framework for any creative writing project. They are:

• Write about r eal life: Creative nonfiction tackles real people, events, and places—things that actually happened or are happening.
• Conduct extensive r esearch: Learn as much as you can about your subject matter, to deepen and enrich your ability to relay the subject matter. (Are you writing about your tenth birthday? What were the newspaper headlines that day?)
• (W) r ite a narrative: Use storytelling elements originally from fiction, such as Freytag’s Pyramid , to structure your CNF piece’s narrative as a story with literary impact rather than just a recounting.
• Include personal r eflection: Share your unique voice and perspective on the narrative you are retelling.
• Learn by r eading: The best way to learn to write creative nonfiction well is to read it being written well. Read as much CNF as you can, and observe closely how the author’s choices impact you as a reader.

You can read more about the 5 R’s in this helpful summary article .

How to Write Creative Nonfiction: Give it a Try!

Whatever form you choose, whatever story you tell, and whatever techniques you write with, the more important aspect of creative nonfiction is this: be honest. That may seem redundant, but often, writers mistakenly create narratives that aren’t true, or they use details and symbols that didn’t exist in the story. Trust us – real life is best read when it’s honest, and readers can tell when details in the story feel fabricated or inflated. Write with honesty, and the right words will follow!

Ready to start writing your creative nonfiction piece? If you need extra guidance or want to write alongside our community, take a look at the upcoming nonfiction classes at Writers.com. Now, go and write the next bestselling memoir!

Sean Glatch

Thank you so much for including these samples from Hippocampus Magazine essays/contributors; it was so wonderful to see these pieces reflected on from the craft perspective! – Donna from Hippocampus

Absolutely, Donna! I’m a longtime fan of Hippocampus and am always astounded by the writing you publish. We’re always happy to showcase stunning work 🙂

[…] Source: https://www.masterclass.com/articles/a-complete-guide-to-writing-creative-nonfiction#5-creative-nonfiction-writing-promptshttps://writers.com/what-is-creative-nonfiction […]

So impressive

Thank you. I’ve been researching a number of figures from the 1800’s and have come across a large number of ‘biographies’ of figures. These include quoted conversations which I knew to be figments of the author and yet some works are lauded as ‘histories’.

excellent guidelines inspiring me to write CNF thank you

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Is Fiction Better Than Nonfiction: an In-Depth Look

By: Author Paul Jenkins

Posted on March 16, 2023

Categories Reading

Have you ever wondered if fiction is better than non-fiction? We all have different preferences when it comes to the type of literature we consume, and that one question can spark hours of debate. Whether we choose fantasy or memoir, adventure novels or biographies, there is something special about immersing ourselves in a story that touches us on a deeper level.

But what exactly makes fiction so compelling? Could it be our subconscious desire for freedom? Is it simply because it’s easier to empathize with characters who are struggling with similar problems to our own? Or do some stories just get to us in a way that nonfiction never could?

In this article, I will explore the pros and cons of both genres and attempt to answer these questions and more. From analyzing the emotional impact of the two genres on readers to how they shape our culture, come with me as I explain why fiction may be better than nonfiction after all!

Definition Of Fiction And Nonfiction

Fiction and nonfiction are two sides of the same coin. Fiction brings to life stories that explore imaginary worlds, while nonfiction relies on facts and reality. But what do these terms really mean? Let us take a look at their definitions.

When we say fiction, we mean books, stories, or other works that spring from a person’s imagination. From novels to short stories, plays, and even movies, if they are made up by someone, they fall into the category of fiction. They can be stories with fantastic elements, as well as more realistic dramas set in our contemporary world.

Nonfiction, on the other hand, is about real people and events based on fact rather than invented content. These include biographies or autobiographies that tell the story of a person’s life, reference books filled with helpful information such as dictionaries or encyclopedias, travel guides that describe places around the globe, or even textbooks filled with educational knowledge. The possibilities of nonfiction books are endless!

No matter how you slice it, when comparing fiction to nonfiction, both offer a wealth of opportunities for readers of all ages to learn something new and expand their horizons through literature.

Benefits of Reading Fiction

Reading fiction can be a great way to escape reality, gain clarity and knowledge, and make meaningful emotional connections. Fiction gives readers the opportunity to explore imaginary worlds that allow them to explore different perspectives and life experiences without actually experiencing them firsthand.

Creative writing also allows writers to express their feelings in ways that may not be properly expressed in normal language.

Fiction can also help readers develop empathy by allowing them to put themselves in someone else’s world and see things from another person’s point of view. This type of storytelling encourages readers to think critically about the characters, plotlines, motivations, conflicts, and resolutions presented in these stories.

In addition, reading fiction helps expand vocabulary because it often introduces new words or expressions not known elsewhere.

Finally, reading fiction is an enriching activity for people who enjoy escaping real-world problems while exploring exciting ideas through creative writing. It has been shown to lower stress levels and increase brain power by engaging readers on a deeper emotional level than nonfiction books ever could.

Reading fiction offers both adults and children a unique opportunity to engage with literature that opens up conversations about complex topics such as relationships, morality, identity, race, gender roles, and others.

Benefits of Reading Nonfiction

Although it may seem that fiction books have the most entertainment value, reading nonfiction can be just as entertaining. One of the main benefits of reading nonfiction is that it not only provides an insightful perspective on certain topics, but also develops and strengthens critical thinking skills.

When engaging with a nonfiction book or other text, readers are encouraged to ask questions about the facts presented and to consider how various sources are related. This process helps individuals become better informed consumers of information in their daily lives.

Another benefit that comes from engaging with nonfiction is the potential to develop empathy. By gaining insight into unfamiliar contexts through well-written stories, readers can develop new perspectives that enable them to better understand others:

• Reading nonfiction can help broaden our understanding of people from diverse backgrounds by examining cultural norms and values.
• Learning about historical events and societies can help us empathize with those who faced difficult circumstances in past eras.
• Reading accounts written by marginalized groups heightens our awareness of issues such as racism, sexism, ableism, etc., that we may have previously overlooked.
• Examining scholarly studies allows us to learn about different points of view on controversial issues and better understand conflicting opinions on these topics.

By taking the opportunity to regularly read both fiction and nonfiction, we can expand our knowledge while making meaningful connections between what we already know and what we’re learning – allowing us to make more informed decisions as we navigate the complexities of life.

Engaging with different types of texts should therefore be an essential part of any reader’s journey to develop themselves and their personalities.

Types Of Fiction Books

Fiction books offer readers the opportunity to escape reality and discover new worlds. Whether it’s the thrilling plot of a mystery novel, the futuristic setting of science fiction, or the fantastical elements of fantasy literature, these genres offer readers the opportunity to let their imaginations run wild.

Crime fiction is often full of twists and turns that keep readers guessing until the very end. Characters encounter unexpected clues as they try to solve a crime or uncover hidden secrets. Science fiction is about exploring advanced technologies, space exploration, and dystopian futures, while fantasy takes readers on epic journeys filled with mythical creatures, spells, and alternate universes.

No matter which genre you choose, there’s something for everyone in the world of fiction. With a wide selection of stories to choose from – both classic tales and modern bestsellers – readers can inspire their creativity with every turn of the page. Reading fiction isn’t only entertaining and thought-provoking, but it also fosters important skills such as problem solving and critical thinking.

Whether you’re immersed in another world or learning more about yourself through the characters’ feelings and experiences, fiction has a lot to offer children and adults alike. So if you’re looking for adventure or just need a break from the daily grind, consider a trip to fictional worlds – you never know what wonders await you!

Types Of Nonfiction Books

Non-fiction books are a great way to gain knowledge, learn new things, and become more informed. There are quite a few types of nonfiction books for readers to choose from – all offering something different in terms of content, style, and purpose. Here are some common types of nonfiction books:

• Travel guides: they provide detailed information about destinations around the world, including history, landmarks, culture, and more.
• Textbooks: used by students and teachers alike, they often include diagrams, tables, and other illustrations to explain concepts clearly.
• Autobiographies: Written by people themselves or with the help of another author/editor, autobiographies recount personal experiences or life events.

These three types of nonfiction books represent only a portion of what is available; there are many others, such as biographies, self-help books, technical manuals, and so on. No matter which type of book you pick up first, you’re sure to learn something new! Now let’s examine the differences between fiction and nonfiction.

Differences Between Fiction And Nonfiction

It’s a classic debate: fiction vs. nonfiction. Like two sides of a coin, both offer unique benefits to the reader. Symbolic of life itself, fiction and nonfiction both offer their own experiences; one for entertainment and one for education.

Nonfiction books are focused on providing facts that objectively inform the reader about real world events or issues. There are biographies, history books, self-help guides, and more. Without relying on imagination or creative license, as is the case with fiction, these types of books provide readers with information they can use in their daily lives.

Fiction offers stories that spring from the author’s imagination, giving readers access to a world where anything is possible. Here you’ll find short stories, novels, and plays that delve deeply into the emotions and issues of humanity, as well as fantasies that are beyond our reach.

One benefit of reading such works is the development of critical thinking skills through the interpretation of difficult plot points in the context of complex characters living their lives in a vivid environment.

No matter what type of reading you choose, it’s clear that both fiction and nonfiction offer unique benefits for anyone looking to expand their knowledge base or immerse themselves in new universes filled with hope and adventure.

Critical Thinking Skills Gained From Reading Fiction And Nonfiction

It can be argued that reading both fiction and nonfiction has its own benefits. Both genres provide opportunities to sharpen critical thinking skills so that readers can make informed decisions in their daily lives.

When reading fiction, there are several benefits that come from engaging with a story. For one, readers can practice logical thinking as they think through each plot twist or character development.

Also, readers have the opportunity to exercise their creative problem-solving skills as they figure out how the characters will handle various scenarios. Finally, readers of fiction are often presented with moral dilemmas that help them weigh different consequences and think about ethical issues:

• Logical and critical thinking
• Creative problem-solving skills
• Exploration of moral dilemmas

Reading nonfiction also provides opportunities to strengthen critical thinking skills. In this genre, readers can conduct research, such as seeking evidence from a variety of sources and then synthesizing it into a coherent argument or conclusion. Nonfiction books encourage readers to think about ideas by asking thought-provoking questions such as “What if?” and “Why do we believe what we believe?”

When we engage with complex topics such as history or science, developing analytical skills helps us understand not only what happened, but why it happened:

• Researching and synthesizing evidence
• Asking thought-provoking questions
• Analysis of complex topics

By reading both forms of literature-whether for pleasure or for educational purposes-people can effectively and efficiently hone their mental skills over time. With the enhanced cognitive skills honed by exposure to these two different mediums, readers gain invaluable insight into the world around them and develop greater empathy in the process.

Empathy Developed Through Reading Fiction And Nonfiction

A recent study found that people who read fiction are better able to understand the emotions of others than those who read only nonfiction. This statistic shows how useful reading both genres can be for developing empathy and emotional intelligence.

Fiction often presents characters in unique situations or with complicated stories. By following the characters’ journey, readers experience their different emotional states as if they were an integral part of the narrative. They gain insight into the reasons behind certain decisions and can better empathize with different perspectives.

Meanwhile, nonfiction offers a broader range of life experiences-whether historical accounts or personal memoirs-which helps readers understand different perspectives on a given topic.

Nonfiction also brings real-world issues to light, providing readers with facts and statistical information that support the author’s arguments. Through this knowledge, readers can understand the context behind another person’s feelings and reactions to events to become more compassionate people overall.

These two literary forms have much to offer in terms of fostering greater understanding between people. Given this potential, we need to further explore how fictional writing techniques, as compared to non-fictional writing techniques, generate empathy in audiences…

Fictional Writing Techniques Compared To Nonfictional Writing Techniques

Having examined the development of empathy through reading fiction and nonfiction, let’s now compare fictional and nonfictional writing techniques. There are many differences between the two genres in terms of structure, language use, dialog, and more.

Fiction is usually associated with creative writing; it often involves narrative devices such as plot, characters, settings, symbolism, and metaphors. Fiction writers typically focus on writing a story that engages the reader by bringing their stories to life through vivid imagery and description.

Fiction writing also allows authors to create unique perspectives or explore alternate worlds without being tied to reality. This allows them to take risks that would be impossible in the real world.

Nonfictional writing is based on facts and actual people or events. It requires research on topics such as history or current events so that the author can accurately report what happened or provide insight into why an event occurred.

There isn’t the same creative freedom in writing nonfiction as there is in writing fiction because it’s intended to inform rather than entertain. Authors must follow certain guidelines when writing their work, such as citing sources correctly and avoiding bias in certain circumstances.

Book Sales Of Fiction Versus Nonfiction

As the saying goes, “A reader lives a thousand lives.” The books we read offer us an escape into unknown worlds and strong emotions. But is fiction really better than nonfiction when it comes to book sales?

The answer might surprise you! According to recent data from Nielsen BookScan, fiction accounts for nearly two-thirds of all print book sales in the United States — proof that readers still prefer stories to facts, despite the differences.

But why are people so drawn to works of fiction? Perhaps it’s because reading allows us to explore different perspectives without having to experience them ourselves. In other words, fiction gives readers a sense of freedom by allowing them to step outside of themselves for a while. It also provides an opportunity for self-reflection and growth as characters grapple with moral dilemmas or difficult choices.

But the benefits of reading go even further: research has shown that consuming literature can help improve writing skills and increase empathy. And that’s equally true in both genres – whether it’s exploring complex topics in fiction or learning about real-world issues in nonfiction.

Writing Skills Gained From Fiction Versus Nonfiction

The debate between fiction and nonfiction has been around for many years. It can be argued that both genres have their own advantages, with the main difference being that fiction offers more creative opportunities than nonfiction. When it comes to writing skills, there are a few things to keep in mind when choosing a particular type of writing.

Fiction writers use a variety of literary techniques to tell stories that range from fantasy to realism. These techniques include descriptions of setting, character development, dialog, plot twists, symbolism, and more.

By mastering these elements of storytelling, writers learn how best to craft compelling stories for readers. They also learn how to create an exciting plot and emotionally compelling characters-all essential components for any successful storyteller.

On the other hand, nonfiction presents authors with different challenges than fiction. Nonfiction is usually based on facts and research, rather than imaginative narratives or metaphors as in fiction. Therefore, nonfiction writers need to improve their research skills and their ability to express complex ideas in simple language without losing accuracy or integrity.

Because nonfiction places more emphasis on evidential arguments compared to fiction, the ability to summarize information quickly but thoroughly is also paramount to effective communication in this genre.

All in all, while there are distinct differences between the two writing styles, each has its own benefits and rewards that can help aspiring writers grow in different areas of their craft-whichever path they choose!

Keith Oatley’s theory about the real person in fictional stories illustrates why people often connect deeply with imaginary characters who have sprung from the imagination of others.

Keith Oatley’s Theory On The Real Person In Fictional Stories

Keith Oatley, a professor and novelist, developed an interesting theory about the presence of a real person in fictional stories. He suggested that readers who become immersed in literature begin to identify with characters on an emotional level.

This identification, whether conscious or unconscious, allows them to experience situations vicariously through the fictional character. In this way, readers become connected to both their own experiences and those of the story’s protagonist.

Oatley’s theory assumes that there is something inherently true about any work of fiction – namely, that it contains elements that correspond to some aspect of reality. It holds that each reader has direct access to what is real and meaningful in a story and can make personal connections between it and his or her own life experiences.

This concept makes sense when one considers how often works of fiction contain themes derived from universal human truths such as beauty, love, loss, pain, and grief.

The idea of discovering a ‘real person’ through reading underscores the power of storytelling to transport us to another world; a world where our imaginations are fired by the words on the page and we are free to explore our innermost thoughts without judgment or consequence.

Fiction provides space for imaginative exploration while being rooted in reality.

Fairy Tales, Real Events, And True Stories Within Both Genres

Fairy tales and real events have been interwoven for centuries, forming a tapestry of fantasy and reality. Over the centuries, stories from different cultures often contained elements of both fiction and nonfiction, blurring the lines between what is true and what can be imagined.

Fairy tales offer us a glimpse into realities that may not exist in our own world, while real events show us how these fantasies can affect our lives today. True stories from both genres are important for understanding the impact of fictional characters on our real lives.

The power of fairy tales lies in their ability to transport the reader to another world where anything is possible. Although they may contain some truths about human nature or societal problems, they allow us to explore worlds beyond our own experience.

By embodying themes of courage and perseverance through magical creatures and mythical lands, these stories help us become better versions of ourselves in the face of adversity. At the same time, we gain insight into how certain aspects of life would change if we lived in a different place – a thought that is especially relevant at times when we feel things are stagnant or not changing.

Real events bring these ideas back down to earth by showing us how people respond to change and challenge themselves with new circumstances. Whether it’s a natural disaster or political unrest, accounts of real events force us out of our comfort zone and remind us that while there will always be difficulties, there are still ways to find hope in the midst of chaos.

Combine them with stories from other sources, such as news reports or historical documents, and a richer narrative emerges – one that speaks directly to who we are now and how we got here.

By learning more about fairy tale realities and real events, we can understand the complexity of true stories in all genres-whether told in books or movies-and also their lasting impact on our daily lives. With this knowledge, we gain greater insight into issues such as morality and justice-two concepts that shape much of modern society, but evolve over time based on our collective experiences with them in media forms such as literature and cinema.

Ultimately, this helps provide a more complete picture of why certain narratives continue to resonate so strongly with audiences around the world today – and allows everyone’s voice to be heard regardless of circumstance or background.

The Impact Of Fictional Characters On Our Real World Lives

Fictional characters have long been a source of inspiration and comfort for readers. They offer us an escape from reality and the opportunity to explore other worlds and cultures through their stories. But beyond just entertainment, fictional characters can also have a real impact on our lives.

Whether they teach us lessons about morality or give us hope in difficult times, fictional characters often play an important role in shaping who we’re.

One way fictional characters can influence our real lives is by inspiring us to become better people. We may not always be aware of it, but many of the values we hold dear come from cult characters like Spiderman or Harry Potter. These heroes give us something to strive for and show us that it’s possible to make a difference, even when we’re faced with great difficulty.

Similarly, villains can help us learn valuable lessons about how to avoid bad behavior or consequences by showing what happens when someone chooses the wrong path.

The experiences of these characters can also remind us how powerful our emotions can be, both positive and negative. Characters going through hard times can remind us all that no matter how bleak things seem, there is still light at the end of the tunnel if we keep pushing forward.

Conversely, moments of joy between two beloved characters can encourage us to allow for more happiness in our own lives as well.

No matter which character you most closely identify with, they’ll undoubtedly leave a lasting impression on your life. Fictional literature offers so many insights into our own world that it’s impossible to leave the house unchanged after reading a book or watching a movie that features a character – whether you realize it or not!

Novels, short stories, and other forms of fiction, more than any other medium, offer the opportunity to evolve and give audiences new perspectives on life while having fun at the same time.

Novels, Short Stories, And Other Forms Of Fictional Literature

Novels, short stories, and other forms of fictional literature offer readers a compelling escape from reality. With the opportunity to explore different worlds populated by larger-than-life characters, it’s no wonder so many people are drawn to fiction. From the sweeping epics of fiction to the thrilling action of genre novels, there’s something for everyone in the realm of fantasy.

For those looking for a compelling narrative, novels have a lot to offer. These books are some of the longest works in print today, offering a comprehensive look at each setting and character. Authors often use this format to tell complex stories that span multiple generations or reveal hidden truths about humanity.

In addition, these stories can be experienced over days or weeks, creating unforgettable journeys for anyone who engages with them.

Short stories are another popular form of entertainment in the world of fiction. They’re often told in concise but meaningful stories and give authors the opportunity to explore ideas without having to commit too much to a particular plot line or character.

Although shorter than novels, these works still manage to evoke strong emotions by painting vivid pictures with a few carefully chosen words. In addition, they provide a good introduction to various genres for readers who might not otherwise have had much exposure to the genre.

Fiction literature offers people all over the world the opportunity to explore new realms and possibilities beyond our own limited understanding. Whether you’re looking for adventure or enlightenment – or both – there is much to discover!

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the difference between fiction and nonfiction.

When it comes to the differences between fiction and nonfiction, there is more than meets the eye. The two different styles of writing each have their own characteristics that set them apart from the others. Let’s take a closer look at the differences between these two genres.

Fiction is an imaginative story written for entertainment purposes. It often contains elements such as dialog, characters, settings, and plots created by the author. Fiction is usually told in the form of a narrative with a beginning, middle, and end that propels the reader through the text.

Nonfiction, on the other hand, is fact-based and can take many forms, including informational texts such as biographies or autobiographies, essays, travelogues, how-to guides, historical documents, interviews, etc.

Nonfiction texts don’t necessarily have to be arranged chronologically, but instead provide factual information about a particular subject or topic.

A key difference between fiction and nonfiction is their purpose – while fiction entertains us through stories, nonfiction provides us with educational content that focuses on real-life events or issues. This means that while we may learn something after reading a work of fiction (e.g., moral lessons), this isn’t always intentional, unlike reading nonfiction, where the main goal is to gain knowledge about specific fields or topics.

Also, since novels are works of fiction, we have no expectations about the content before we delve into them, whereas with nonfiction we expect a certain level of accuracy and truthfulness.

In terms of style, both types of writing require careful consideration in formulation, but differ slightly based on their intended audience – while fiction allows authors more creative freedom to explore ideas with vivid language and descriptions, non-fiction works rely heavily on fact-checking and research to be credible sources for readers looking for truthful facts rather than fabrications based solely on fantasy.

In essence, both types of literature serve an important purpose that depends not only on the content itself, but also on how each author frames it in their own way.

Whether you’re escaping reality with a compelling novel or looking for answers in professional online articles, knowing exactly what kind of material you’re dealing with can help you narrow your search until you find exactly what you’re looking for!

Are There Certain Types Of Books That Are More Suitable For Fiction Or Nonfiction?

When it comes to deciding between fiction and nonfiction, the type of book you choose can be just as important. Even though some people prefer one genre over the other, there are certain types of books that are better suited for fiction or nonfiction.

Historical fiction is a good example of this. In this type of novel, real-world events are woven into fictional stories for readers to enjoy. This allows readers to become deeply immersed in history while being entertained by a compelling story. On the other hand, those looking for a factual account of past events might opt for a nonfiction history book.

Crime fiction has been popular for decades and includes various genres such as detective stories and suspense novels. In crime fiction, an author creates his or her own world with rules and regulations that characters must follow throughout the story.

There’s no need to worry about accuracy, as everything is made up – making it perfect material for crime writers! But if someone wants more information about how actual crime cases were solved, they can find plenty of options in the non-fiction section as well.

Fantasy literature is arguably one of the most well-known forms of storytelling today; from Harry Potter to Lord of the Rings, fantasy worlds have continued to capture our imagination:

– Incredible creatures come to life – Heroes embark on epic adventures – Magical forces enchant

These elements wouldn’t be possible without the works of fantasy literature!

However, if you’re looking for something rooted in reality, nonfiction such as biographies and science texts may be a better choice.

When choosing between these two literary forms, it’s worth thinking carefully about which type of text best suits your needs – whether you want to escape into another world or back up facts with evidence, both offer fantastic opportunities to learn new things and explore different ideas!

Does Reading Fiction Or Nonfiction Impact Critical Thinking Skills?

Does reading fiction or nonfiction affect critical thinking skills? Studies suggest that the answer is yes. To illustrate this point, consider a recent study at Stanford College. It showed that students who read both fiction and nonfiction performed better on tests of analytical thinking than those who read only one type of text.

This suggests that we can improve our critical thinking skills in meaningful ways when we engage with different types of literature.

So what are the key elements that make for effective critical thinking?

According to experts, they include problem solving, analysis, reasoning, and evaluation. However, many people believe that reading either genre alone isn’t enough to fully develop these skills – rather, they must be combined for maximum impact.

For example, when reading a work of fiction, readers must learn to interpret symbols and metaphors, while nonfiction texts require them to practice interpreting data and objectivity. By combining the two genres, readers can have the best possible experience to sharpen their critical thinking skills.

Bottom line: reading fiction and nonfiction provides us with the opportunity to broaden our horizons and improve our cognitive skills-especially when it comes to developing our critical thinking skills!

Since both novels and nonfiction, such as newspapers and magazines, impart so much knowledge, there is no better way to engage in deep thinking processes than a mix of exploring different topics within each genre.

Does Reading Fiction Or Nonfiction Develop Empathy?

Reading fiction or nonfiction is an essential part of developing our empathy. It helps us understand different perspectives and points of view and gain insight into the experiences of others. When we read about characters in stories, we can relate to their struggles and triumphs, allowing us to grow with them as they learn from life’s lessons.

How reading fiction or nonfiction affects the development of empathy depends on the individual reader’s perspective and how much time they devote to reading.

Readers of fiction are often drawn into a story to the point that they feel connected to the characters while gaining valuable insight into human behavior.

Readers of nonfiction may not be able to form the same emotional bonds, but still benefit greatly from understanding facts and figures about people and events around the world.

To summarize:

– Reading both fiction and nonfiction increases the ability to develop empathy. – Both genres offer unique opportunities to learn more about oneself, others, and the world at large. – In fiction, you can form a deep bond with fictional characters and learn truths about life through their journey. – Nonfiction books offer factual information that provides context for real-life situations and stories.

Whether you pick up a book of short stories or read up on current events, both have the potential to increase your empathy!

Are There Different Techniques For Writing Fiction And Nonfiction?

There are two very different approaches to writing fiction and nonfiction, so it’s important to know the techniques for both. From outlining stories to presenting facts in an organized manner, there are different writing techniques you should consider for both types of content creation.

In examining the differences between fiction and nonfiction, one should begin with their intentions: Fiction is invented, while nonfiction is true-meaning that the way they’re written must differ accordingly. For example, fiction requires imagination, creativity, and a well-structured plot, while nonfiction relies more on accuracy and research.

Below are some important points to keep in mind when considering these two genres:

1. Writing Techniques for Fiction – Fiction stories usually require complex characters, vivid settings, and a strong narrative structure. When crafting your story, pay attention to the choice of dialog and the way certain scenes unfold or connect with each other. 2. Nonfiction Writing Techniques – Nonfiction often requires extensive research on topics such as history or politics before putting it down on paper. You can further break down your material by creating bullet points or short summaries of each idea covered in the article. 3. Editing – Editing plays an important role in both types of writing, because readers want quality content that reads smoothly from start to finish. Make sure you don’t make any grammatical or typographical errors when you finish your work! 4. Audience – Before you embark on a project, be clear about who your audience is, as this will set the tone of your writing (formal or informal). Imagining yourself sitting across a table from them discussing what you’ve written about can give you clearer direction on what kind of language would be appropriate for publication!

Whether you choose fiction or nonfiction will depend on your personal preferences and what feels most natural for expressing ideas clearly and concisely without sacrificing detail or accuracy.

When it comes to which type of literature is better, fiction or non-fiction, there is no clear-cut answer. It all depends on what you want out of your reading experience and what your goals are. If you want to explore new worlds and experiences without leaving home, then fiction may be the right choice for you.

On the other hand, if you’re looking for real-life stories that teach you about history or culture, then nonfiction may be more for you. Each genre has its own advantages and disadvantages, so readers should consider their individual needs when choosing books.

Regardless of which genre you choose, everyone can benefit from engaging with both fiction and nonfiction. Reading fiction fosters empathy by helping readers understand different perspectives while enhancing their critical thinking skills as they interpret symbols and themes in texts.

In contrast, nonfiction provides facts and information that help readers gain knowledge about specific topics or events. By engaging with both genres, readers can develop a comprehensive understanding of literature that enables them to make informed decisions about their reading choices.

In summary, there is no definitive answer to the question of whether fiction or nonfiction is “better” than the other-it really depends on the individual’s preferences and goals! However, broadening one’s literary horizons through exposure to both genres can help foster intellectual development and provide valuable insight into our world today.

Imprinted by Belief

Does It Seem Like the End Times Are Here? These Novels Know Better.

What can fiction tell us about the apocalypse? Ayana Mathis finds unexpected hope in novels of crisis by Ling Ma, Jenny Offill and Jesmyn Ward.

Credit... Day Brièrre

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By Ayana Mathis

Ayana Mathis’s most recent novel, “The Unsettled,” was published in September.

• April 11, 2024

On the day my mother died, I sat by her bedside and read the Psalms. The room was quiet — the need for machines had passed — save for the sound of my voice and my mother’s labored breathing. Outside her room, the hospital went about its business: Lunch trays were delivered, nurses conferred, a television played too loudly down the corridor. Out there, time passed in its usual, unremarkable way. In her room, my mother and I had stepped off time’s familiar track.

Everything inessential vanished in her final hours. I read the Psalms because they comforted her. I told her I loved her. She squeezed my hand, which, in that afternoon when she was no longer able to speak, was as profound an expression of love as any words had ever been. When she died hours later, I knew that on the other side of her hospital room door there awaited, at least for me, an altered world.

The subject of this essay is apocalypse, and so I have begun with an ending. If you have lost a deeply beloved, then you have experienced the obliterating finality of death, that catastrophe in the small universe of an individual life. The loss also brings a realization: The “worst thing” that could happen is no longer a future projection; it has exploded into the present.

Apocalypse is generally understood as a future event: widespread suffering, extinctions, various iterations of end-time destruction gunning for us from some tomorrow. Out there, in the vast, unknowable not-yet, apocalypse roars. It paralyzes us with fear, deadens us into numbness or provokes us to hysteria. We are powerless in its face.

But what if we could change our relationship with the end by shifting our perspective on it? The first step might be dwelling more profoundly in the here and now where our crises amass, rather than focusing on the boogeyman future. We already know something about how to do this: We are creatures of loss; we have confronted, or will confront, the “worst things” in the real time of our lives. There is a precedent, then, for how, in this moment, we might collectively approach the apocalyptic worst things. While our beloved still lives, there is possibility: We can give her our attention; we can hold her hand.

I won’t downplay the current horrors — tens of thousands dead in Gaza, conflict in Ukraine, the high-stakes presidential election on the horizon — or imply that all will turn out right. The novels in this essay don’t do that either. Instead, they suggest new ways of seeing: a shift to deeper present-time awareness, even wonder, as the times grow ever more dire. The theologian Catherine Keller calls this “apocalyptic mindfulness.” “A cloud of roiling possibility seems to reveal itself,” she writes in “Facing Apocalypse” (2021). “It guarantees no happy ending. It may, however, enhance the uncertain chance of better outcomes.”

Many of our end-time notions are inflected by the biblical Book of Revelation. Its phantasmagoric visions and lurid scenes of destruction have thoroughly infiltrated Western talk of the end: the Four Horsemen, the beast we call the Antichrist (though Revelation doesn’t use the term), fires, plagues and raging pestilence. It may come as a surprise, then, that apokalypsis, the Greek word for “revelation,” means not “ending” but “unveiling.” As Keller writes, “It means not closure but dis-closure — that is, opening. A chance to open our eyes?” But, to what?

In Ling Ma’s novel “ Severance ” (2018), newly pregnant Candace Chen wanders a near-deserted New York City in the midst of a pandemic caused by a disease called Shen Fever. The majority of the city’s residents have fled or become “fevered,” a zombielike state that leaves victims stuck on repeat: a family endlessly setting the table and saying grace; a saleswoman, her jaw half eaten by decay, folding and refolding polo shirts at an abandoned Juicy Couture store on Fifth Avenue. The fevered are the least threatening zombies imaginable: so busy with their mindless performance of mundane tasks that they don’t notice the living. Ma has a knack for nuanced satire.

Candace sticks around because she’s got nowhere else to go; she’s the orphaned child of Chinese immigrants who died years before. Inexplicably, and perhaps somewhat to her dismay, she remains virus-free. As the pandemic shuts down the city, she doggedly persists with her job in the Bibles department at Spectra, a book production company: “I clicked Send, knowing it was fruitless,” she says. When public transportation stops entirely, she moves into her office on the 32nd floor, overlooking an empty Times Square.

It doesn’t take long to understand that a vast grief underlies Candace’s workaholic paralysis. So intense is her mourning for her parents that for a while the pandemic hardly registers. She needs to hold on to something, even pointless work at Spectra. The office setting is no coincidence: In some sense, Candace, too, is fevered, and her job’s rote repetition is a kind of anesthetic.

The dull but familiar grind of late-capitalist working life acts as a numbing agent, or perhaps a blindfold. When work dries up because the rest of the world is no longer at its desk, Candace rambles around the city utterly alone, taking pictures of derelict buildings that she posts on a blog she calls “NY Ghost.” One afternoon she enters a flooded subway station. “You couldn’t even see the water beneath all the garbage,” Ma writes. “The deeper you tunneled down, the bigger the sound, echoed and magnified by the enclosed space, until this primordial slurp was all that existed.” Grieving Candace is adrift, her internal landscape aligned with the desolation of the external world.

Published two years before the Covid pandemic, “Severance” offers an eerily prescient description of a nation shocked and exhausted. For so many, 2020 was a kind of apocalyptic unveiling. The pandemic revealed the fault lines in our health care and our schools, as well as the fact that so many of us were living in perpetual economic precarity. Then there were the deaths, which as a country we have hardly begun to mourn. Painfully and all at once, we understood the fragility of the systems we relied on, and the instability of our own lives.

Yet alongside the devastation there was transient beauty: In many places, air and water quality improved during lockdown and wildlife resurged. Health-care and essential workers were acknowledged and more respected; we realized the extent of our dependence on one another. If only for a little while, we were thrown into Keller’s “apocalyptic mindfulness.” But the eye snapped shut. We “recovered,” and, like Candace, we find ourselves once again in a collective disquiet, punctuated by bouts of terror as we contemplate the future.

On the final afternoon of her wandering, Candace ventures into the same Juicy Couture store she’d photographed weeks before. Ominously, the fevered saleswoman has been bludgeoned to death. Candace’s unborn child seems frightened too: “The baby moved inside of me, fluttering frantically.” Candace leaves Manhattan through the Lincoln Tunnel in a yellow taxi she’s commandeered from a fevered driver. She joins a band of survivors led by a creepy zealot named Bob, a former I.T. guy who wears a brace for carpal tunnel syndrome, that most banal of white-collar work maladies. They journey to the Chicago suburbs to homestead in a deserted mall. (I told you Ma has a knack for satire.)

In this semi-cult, Candace’s grief intensifies. She begins to have visions of her mother, who warns her that she and her unborn baby aren’t safe with Bob. Candace’s mother is right. Bob has a penchant for shooting the fevered in the head if he encounters them when he and the others go “stalking” for food and supplies. We squirm at these killings, even if the victims are not quite alive, at least not in the usual sense. Bob’s violent demagoguery opens Candace’s eyes to her metaphorically fevered state, and as we look into the mirror the novel holds up to us, we begin to wonder about our relationship to our own beleaguered world.

At last, Candace’s fever breaks and, fully alive, she escapes Bob and the others in a Nissan stolen from the group’s mini-fleet. She drives into once grand Chicago, swerving to avoid abandoned cars clogging Milwaukee Avenue. Finally, she runs out of gas. “Up ahead there’s a massive littered river, planked by an elaborate, wrought-iron red bridge,” she recounts. “Beyond the bridge is more skyline, more city. I get out and start walking.”

The “end” for Candace and her baby is not, in fact, an ending, but rather, an awakening that follows revelation.

If “Severance” chronicles its protagonist’s end-time stirrings from the stupor of grief, Jenny Offill’s novel “ Weather ” (2020) is its manic cousin, a diaristic account of climate anxiety. Narrated in the first person, aggressively present tense and composed of short chapters that leap from association to observation, the book is like a panicked brain in overdrive.

“Weather”’s protagonist, Lizzie, works as a university librarian in New York City. Her former professor, Sylvia, a climate change expert, finagled the gig for her though Lizzie isn’t really qualified. “Years ago, I was her grad student,” Lizzie explains, “but then I gave up on it. She used to check in on me sometimes to see if I was still squandering my promise. The answer was always yes.”

Lizzie is all wry self-deprecation. As the book progresses, we understand that she is less an underachiever than an empath, so often overwhelmed that her focus scrambles. Or perhaps it’s that she is deeply attentive to things we try to ignore. Her experience of the world is the opposite of Candace’s near-impenetrable grief. Lizzie is porous. Too much gets in: grave news about the environment, the plights of relative strangers — like kindly Mr. Jimmy, a car-service owner being run out of business by Uber. Lizzie “helps” by taking Mr. Jimmy’s car to various appointments, though she can’t afford it and the traffic makes her late.

The novel doesn’t so much unfold as tumble out over the course of a turbulent year that encompasses Donald Trump’s election in 2016. After Trump’s win, tensions rise in Lizzie’s Brooklyn neighborhood. Even Mr. Jimmy is spewing casual vitriol about Middle Eastern people and car bombs. Lizzie’s husband, Ben, retreats to the couch, to read a “giant history of war.” And I haven’t even mentioned Henry, Lizzie’s depressive, recovering-addict brother, who meets a woman, marries and has a baby, all at whiplash speed. When the marriage implodes, Henry winds up on Lizzie and Ben’s couch, using again and barely able to parent his daughter.

For Lizzie, as for most of us, personal and collective catastrophes run parallel. Her vision of the future grows ever darker. She talks to Sylvia about buying land somewhere cooler, where Eli, her young son, and Iris, her newborn niece, might fare better in 30 years or so. “Do you really think you can protect them? In 2047?” Sylvia asks.

“I look at her,” Lizzie thinks. “Because until this moment, I did, I did somehow think this.” The realization of her helplessness is unbearable, but Lizzie knows she must bear it: This bleak state of affairs is her son’s inheritance.

Lizzie is gripped by grief and despair — she spends far too much time on doomsday prepper websites — both complicated responses to a planet in the midst of radical, damaging change. “In a world of mortal beings,” Keller writes in “Facing Apocalypse,” “it would seem that without some work of mourning, responsibility for that world cannot develop.” Lizzie’s sense of loss and futility is wrenching, but her response attaches her that much more deeply to this world. Her anxiety is acute because the time in which to act is limited and shot through with urgency.

Lizzie experiences her moment as unprecedented; her end-time sensibility suggests an analogy, albeit to a starkly different context. The Apostle Paul also understood himself to be living through an extraordinary rupture in time. Paul's zeal to spread the Gospel through the ancient world was fueled by his conviction that ordinary time, and life, had been profoundly derailed by Christ’s crucifixion, and was soon to end with his imminent Second Coming. Paul believed he was living in an in-between time that the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben has aptly called “ the time that remains ,” a phrase borrowed from Paul’s letter to the fledgling church at Corinth. “The time is short,” Paul wrote. “From now on those who have wives should live as if they do not; those who mourn, as if they did not; those who are happy, as if they were not.”

The old world and its rules had not yet passed away but the prospect of Christ’s return cast an altering light on the present, highlighting the impermanence of all things. Everything was revealed to be in flux and therefore subject to reversals and change.

In “Weather,” Lizzie’s frazzled report from the event horizon of impending disaster, the time that remains means that moments are more precious, less bound by previous rules of engagement and more open to radically new ones. Near the end of the novel, Henry reclaims his sobriety, and Lizzie finds renewed, if melancholic, love for this imperiled world. She wants to find a new way to engage, even as she is uncertain what that might be. “There’s the idea in the different traditions. Of the veil,” Lizzie says. “What if we were to tear through it?” The image recalls Keller’s apokalypsis — a revelatory “ dis-closure .”

Jesmyn Ward’s “ Salvage the Bones ” (2011) takes a very different approach to apocalypse. The novel is set over 12 days, before and just after Hurricane Katrina strikes the Gulf Coast. The 15-year-old narrator, Esch, her father and three brothers live in the Mississippi Delta, outside a coastal town Ward calls Bois Sauvage. Unlike other characters we have encountered, Ward’s need no awakening; and time is far too short for existential anxiety or long-term planning.

The novel opens as China, a pit bull belonging to Esch’s brother Skeetah, is giving birth. Moody, commanding China is the love of Skeetah’s young life and as vivid as any human character in the book. “What China is doing is fighting, like she was born to do,” Ward writes. “Fight our shoes, fight other dogs, fight these puppies that are reaching for the outside, blind and wet.” Skeetah hopes to sell China’s puppies for big money. Enough to send his older brother, Randall, to basketball camp, where, the family hopes, he’ll be noticed by college scouts. Enough, perhaps, to help Esch take care of her baby. Esch is pregnant, though not far enough along to show, and she is in love with the baby’s father, her brother Randall’s friend Manny, who keeps her a secret and won’t kiss her on the mouth.

The novel is full of mothers: mothers to be, absent mothers (Esch’s mother died in childbirth years before), animal mothers, even mythical mothers (Esch is fixated on the avenging Medea, whom she’s read about in school). And, of course, Mother Nature is flying across the gulf, heading straight for Bois Sauvage. Mothers in this novel are makers and destroyers. In some cases, they are also unprepared to occupy the role; they are in jeopardy or else the circumstances of their motherhood run afoul of certain proprieties.

Esch’s pregnancy isn’t easy. It may also be hard for readers to accept: Esch is in dire financial straits and young enough to scandalize some of us. Does the prospect of her motherhood elicit the same empathy as Lizzie’s or Candace’s? Whose children do we think of as the hope for the future when the end is nigh? Which mothers are most valued in the collective perception? Not, generally speaking, an impoverished Black girl barely into her teens.

Ward’s concerns are with those who will bear the brunt of the coming storms, both natural and metaphoric, on the page and in the world. Esch and her family face Katrina with nothing besides a few canned goods they’ve scared up, and some plywood nailed over the doors and windows. Esch herself is the sort of vulnerable person Scripture might refer to as “the least of these.” Each time I read the novel, my mind leaps to the biblical Mary, mother of Jesus, a poor, brown, teenage girl who gave birth in a barn because no safer provision was made for her. In that story, the life least protected turns out to be the most essential.

So it is in “Salvage the Bones”: Esch and her unborn child, along with fighting China and her puppies, are the beating heart of this universe. Here, Esch considers which animals flee before a coming storm: “Maybe the bigger animals do,” she reflects. “Maybe the small don’t run. Maybe the small pause on their branches, the pine-lined earth, nose up, catch that coming storm air that would smell like salt to them, like salt and clean burning fire, and they prepare like us.”

With “the small,” or those treated as such, as focal points, Ward’s novel is also an indictment. It’s true that Katrina was a natural disaster, but its effects were preventable, or might have been mitigated. Most of us remember the levees breaking. The disaster’s aftermath — thousands, mostly poor, stranded without food or water; critically ill patients dying in storm-ravaged hospitals ; desperate, unarmed civilians shot by police officers — was entirely the fault of humans.

We might extend Ward’s insight to end-time crises in general, in which other Esches are similarly left with the greater share of suffering. We may not be able to reverse the crises themselves, but we can intervene in the devastation they cause, and to whom.

We have been down a harrowing road; there isn’t much comfort here. But perhaps at this critical juncture in our human story, it is not comfort that will aid us most. Perhaps what will aid us most is to enter more fully into dis comfort. To awaken to our grief, like Candace. To try to tear through the veil, like Lizzie. In this way we might begin to believe that the future is not foreclosed upon, whatever it might look like.

I leave us with Esch’s declaration of hope at the end of Ward’s novel. Esch’s family has survived, but Skeetah is searching for China, who disappeared in the storm: “He will look into the future and see her emerge into the circle of his fire, beaten dirty by the hurricane so she doesn’t gleam anymore … dull but alive, alive, alive.”

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The 2024 Petrichor Prize for Finely Crafted Fiction

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