{"id":3001,"date":"2016-02-10T04:28:21","date_gmt":"2016-02-10T04:28:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.calla.com\/wordpress2\/?page_id=3001"},"modified":"2016-02-10T04:28:21","modified_gmt":"2016-02-10T04:28:21","slug":"fiction-vs-non-fiction","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.calla.com\/wordpress\/writing-tips\/fiction-vs-non-fiction\/","title":{"rendered":"Fiction vs Non-fiction"},"content":{"rendered":"

I originally wrote this piece for Brenda Kearns\u2019 blog here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Most people will say that fiction is fake and non-fiction is true, but have you ever had a news article written about yourself or a topic you\u2019re very familiar with? Was it 100% accurate? Not likely!<\/p>\n

Yet news articles are supposed to be non-fiction. Ditto for textbooks. They\u2019re filled with facts and figures that are based on suppositions of the time but that doesn\u2019t make them true.<\/p>\n

When I write fiction, I use real events, real places, the real food that was eaten and\u2014if I can find it\u2014I\u2019ll even include the real weather. In my newest novel, Dance of the Banished<\/i><\/a>, Zeynep witnesses a solar eclipse that actually did<\/i> take place a hundred years ago on the exact date and time that she witnessed it. All of the history is real in this novel and everything that happened did occur.<\/p>\n

So why isn\u2019t it called non-fiction? Because I\u2019ve made up dialogue and my characters are my creations based on real people, but they\u2019re composites of the real people who lived a hundred years ago.<\/p>\n

Most of the books that I write are categorized as fiction because the characters and dialogue were created by me, but I have also written non-fiction\u2014Last Airlift: A Vietnamese Orphan\u2019s Rescue from War<\/i>, and One Step At A Time: A Vietnamese Orphan Finds Her Way<\/i> are written in a style that\u2019s called \u201cnarrative non-fiction.\u201d What that means is they have a story arc similar to fiction and there are scenes and characters just like in fiction. The difference is that the characters in narrative non-fiction are the actual real people, not composites that I made up. The scenes are recreations of incidents that Tuyet told me about, or if it was an incident she didn\u2019t remember, someone else told me about. I did make up the dialogue, but then Tuyet herself read it and either said it sounded like what she would have said, or she changed it herself.<\/p>\n

For me, writing narrative non-fiction and writing fiction are two ways of being able to tell the truth. Sometimes I don\u2019t know until partway through a story whether I\u2019ll be writing it as fiction or non-fiction. For me as the writer, the research process for both forms is the same, and the accuracy of the events is the same.<\/p>\n

The thing that sets my non-fiction apart from my fiction is whether I can find a person whose story on its own is well-documented enough to write a whole book about. That was the case with Tuyet because she is still alive and so are her siblings and mother. I could interview them, and I could talk to various caregivers and volunteers to paint a good picture of exactly what happened to her.<\/p>\n

But what about Lida in Making Bombs for Hitler<\/i>? She is a composite character and her story is written in novel form. The reason I did this for her story is because most of the slave labourers like Lida in WWII died. It\u2019s hard to interview a person once they\u2019ve died! In order to find her story, I read diaries and documents and government reports, and I interviewed survivors who had lived through one aspect of Lida\u2019s experiences. I pulled incidents from here and there and wove the whole. Everything in that novel did happen, but not specifically to a girl named Lida.<\/p>\n

When I began researching Dance of the Banished<\/i>, I had hoped to write it as non-fiction. I was able to access newspaper clippings, diaries, letters, maps and government reports about a young man\u2019s arrest and internment, and also about what it was like for a girl to be left behind in Ottoman Turkey, in a country plunged in the midst of an ill-planned war.<\/p>\n

But I couldn\u2019t interview a person like Ali, nor anyone like Zeynep because their story happened a hundred years ago. Even though the day-to-day events are well documented, and in my novel they happen at the exact time they did a hundred years ago, if I\u2019d written the book as non-fiction I wouldn\u2019t have been able to breathe life into Ali and Zeynep. I wouldn\u2019t have felt comfortable giving them words and thoughts and wants if I couldn\u2019t ask them, couldn\u2019t interview them.<\/p>\n

But their fictionalized story is the truth.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I originally wrote this piece for Brenda Kearns\u2019 blog here. Most people will say that fiction is fake and non-fiction is true, but have you ever had a news article written about yourself or a topic you\u2019re very familiar with? Was it 100% accurate? Not likely! Yet news articles are supposed to be non-fiction. Ditto … Continue reading “Fiction vs Non-fiction”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":20,"menu_order":9,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-3001","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.calla.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/3001","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.calla.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.calla.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.calla.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.calla.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3001"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.calla.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/3001\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3002,"href":"https:\/\/www.calla.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/3001\/revisions\/3002"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.calla.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/20"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.calla.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3001"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}