To be considered nonfiction, a book needs to be completely true, although there are some allowances that are allowed to be changed, like dialogue as long as it’s close to the original. Also, I don’t need to know every single detail about what was happening. I’d love to hear the moment you fell in love, but please do not tell me that you wore a green turtleneck, dark washed denim jeans, and the diamond necklace that your grandmother gave to you after she died of pneumonia when you were eighteen.
Half-truths and three-quarter truths aren’t acceptable, but something as close to 100% is a good thing. If it’s 100%, bonus points for the book. For me, I’d say the acceptable range is probably 95-100% true is a good memoir. If you’re telling the book over a long period span of time and it starts when you were born, of course there might be a little discrepancy of the truth and what you wrote. But also, don’t embellish a detail that people have a record of. If you got arrested for something, don’t build it up to be something that it wasn’t. If you steal a candy bar and go to jail for an hour then pay the fine, do not say that you shot someone and blacked out and forgot what happened but as you are about to be killed by the death penalty have a sudden revelation that you killed the person in self-defense and the proceedings get halted and they figure out that yes, what you said is true. That’s an embellishment I can’t deal with. But going back to stealing the candy bar, if you say you were in jail for two hours when it was really an hour and a half, I’m fine with the time difference. It’s almost like the same thing right?
I think that we do need genre lines. There are some books where you can definitely tell that it’s a fiction book because it’s never going to happen in real life (think teenage girl falling in love with a vampire here . . .), but then there are some books where they are proven and credible facts that this happened and everything the author says is 100% true. That’s when you know it’s a nonfiction work.
i agree. if a non fiction book has lies. it might as well be fiction
ReplyDeleteI agree if a non-fiction is lying it shouldn't be non-ficiton and it needs to be true but not all the way true maybe like 95ish%
ReplyDeleteI agree that you shouldn't include every single detail in a story. Too much detail actually takes away from the story rather than adding.
ReplyDeleteI like how you specified between the memior and non fiction. People keep saying that non fiction does not need to be 100% true. As long as it is close. I think that can only count in memiors, like you said.
ReplyDeleteI agree that nonfiction books need to be mostly true with only a few small changes allowed.
ReplyDeleteAs long as the author tells readers what's a lie and what's the truth, they can write whatever they want.
ReplyDeleteI agree because there are some cases that you are not sure about what type of genre the book is and it is hard to distiguish from non-fiction to fiction.
ReplyDeleteI really liked this blog post because I agree that you can make up some parts of the book, as long as they don't change the entire plot. You gave good examples to show what you meant.
ReplyDeleteI also agree with sometimes it being hard to distiguish between fiction and non-fiction
ReplyDeleteI don't completely agree because I think non-fiction could use some leeway so add excitemetn to the book. If the book is 95% true than it should be good. The author has to leer the readers in somehow.
ReplyDeleteI agree that you can't embellish things too much. There is a point where you're like 'okay, now I'd like a bit of truth please...'
ReplyDelete