Book 2 Trailer: Silver Linings Playbook

Book Talk

Should Fiction and Non-Fiction Be Seperated?

Is this even a question? Fiction and nonfiction, by all means, should stay separate. If we start blurring the lines, there would be no standard to differentiate the two. How could we trust each other, if we were allowed to exaggerate the facts? If we let the two overlap, the future of literary works could be in jeopardy. The difference between the two, for me and almost everyone else, is that fiction is my go to for entertainment. Nonfiction is my go to for all things facts.  If there were nothing to separate the two, I could cite Disney fairytales as a credible source when writing papers on marine biology. (Obviously, this would never happen, but we rely so much on the connotation with the titles ‘fiction’ and ‘nonfiction’ that I wonder how we would react if they were no longer there.) Point being, books that are non-fiction have to be one hundred percent true. We rely on facts for so much of our lives. We learn from each other, and the information given to us should be reliable. Which leads me to think it’s not the genres that need to be changed, but maybe the books that are classified within them. Textbooks, informational books, cookbooks, etc., things that have concrete information; those are nonfiction. As for memoirs, well, if they’re all from memory, maybe they go into realistic fiction, or they get a genre of their own. They can’t be classified as factual if they’re not.  If it’s a good story, great! But if it’s not true, it’s not nonfiction.