Fiction Vs. Non-Fiction
“There are two kinds of nonfiction writers: Those who basically accept the idea that some kind of fictionalizing almost always occurs in narrative nonfiction, and those who cannot accept this idea.” -Lawrence Weschler
We ask the non-fiction writer to approach the facts as closely and honestly as possible. We cannot ask the nonfiction writer to rid herself of every bias, prior experience, and opinion for this would be an impossible task. Thus, to truly understand nonfiction is to engage with the dialectic understanding that a story, even when created with the goal of complete factual accuracy, is still a story. A story is only a story because it is told by someone, the writer. The writer’s perspective makes pure non-fiction an impossibility.
I believe the line between fiction and non-fiction is often blurry and might only really exist for conversational convenience. Like a spectrum, a work of writing can be more factual than not, but both fiction and non-fiction are lunging at the truth in their own way. And the writing of both fiction and nonfiction are creative, personal, and tainted exercises.
In The Lifespan of a Fact, we get to see just how blurry the line between fiction and nonfiction can get. Even when the author does his best to get all the facts right, the process of writing with a voice makes the truth subjective. Even as John D’Agata set out to write a work of honest nonfiction, he inevitably failed to accurately capture every nuance of objective fact while also making it a story. Is his work still nonfiction? Yes. It is a mistake to equate fiction to lies and non-fiction to truths, something done far more often. Often the guise of non-fiction and our own propensity to expect the writer to be rid of any humanity is what gets us into trouble.
Poetry, or in my case music, get away with not marketing themselves as fiction or nonfiction. I get to write sob stories about the saddest real moments in my life and embellish them to no consequence. You don’t expect every lyric to align with a factual reality, but you do expect some level of real self-exposition. The fiction writer and the nonfiction writer do the same exact thing, but to different degrees of factual accuracy. Carolyn Forche’s poetry is an excellent example of where the poet finds true factual freedom. She is recounting true events, but to what extent they are factually accurate, I don’t know. But to her they are true. To me they feel true. In the Colonel, she is telling us a story, a true story. She is coloring the story with her own artistic language. Here, Forche is fictionalizing non-fiction into works of almost autobiographical magical realism. Since she is a poet, nobody is fact checking if the TV was really playing a commercial in Spanish or if the Colonel really threw the ears across the table, but the fear the scene creates must stem from a real place. We expect the details to be inaccurate because she wrote poems. We do not expect the overarching emotional truths embedded in the poems to come from anywhere other than Forche’s reality.
Some kind of fictionalizing will always occur in nonfiction just as reality will always make its way into fiction. In other words, there is no genre of writing that is free from either objective reality or subjective truth.
