In litchat the other day, someone posted a link to the Times list of best nonfiction. 
One of the categories is the nonfiction novel.
That strikes me as very very odd. I mean, by definition, a novel is fiction. How can it be nonfiction? I don’t get it.
But wiki has an article about it and so does the New York Times. Britannica defines it as: “story of actual people and actual events told with the dramatic techniques of a novel.”
I know you can tell a nonfiction story like you would tell a fiction story, but I thought that was narrative nonfiction. If that’s not it, what is narrative nonfiction? Or maybe creative nonfiction – I think narrative nonfiction and creative nonfiction are the same thing.
This is so confusing! Also, contradictory, because I never imagined anything could be described as both nonfiction and a novel. That’s just weird.
In Cold Blood by Truman Capote is supposed to have invented the genre and in the New York Times interview he says he wrote it because he a literary theory about the nonfiction novel. Something about “. . . a narrative form that employed all the techniques of fictional art but was nevertheless immaculately factual . . .“.
I am not entirely sure I understand his theory, but it sounds a lot like narrative nonfiction. Is it the same thing? I am still not sure.
Related articles
- The Nonfiction Account of My Nonfiction (writinglonghand.wordpress.com)
- Dave Cullen’s Narrative Nonfiction Reads Like a Novel (jhunsickerwrites.wordpress.com)
- Creative Nonfiction week 1 (specialdee.wordpress.com)
- Some oppose teaching ‘In Cold Blood’ at Glendale High School (latimesblogs.latimes.com)
- Help Me Pick a Work of LGBT Graphic Nonfiction! (bilerico.com)
- “Blogspiration” (baumannblogs.wordpress.com)
- New Books: Winter’s Tail (youknowforkidsblog.blogspot.com)
