Nonfiction? Nah!

An interesting quote just came up in a book my mom was reading and reviewing. It's from Fannie Flag's Can't Wait to Get to Heaven. (for the full review check out www.book-club-queen.com/fannie-flagg-books.html).

"Scratch any person over the age of sixty, and you have a novel so much better, certainly more interesting than any fiction writer could make up. So why try?" (33)

This got me thinking. I'm a lover of fiction. I can't help it - I just am. I have tried over the years, very unsuccessfully I might add, to read the token nonfiction book because I'm an English major and also English teacher so I figure I need to cover the two main genres.

But what I've found is that I'm NO GOOD at it! I can never seem to get into a nonfiction book. Here and there I've come across the rare literary nonfiction (Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil) that I've found totally fantastic. But really, I just can't get into them.

This quote from Can't Wait to Get to Heaven got me because I actually agree! Real life people are SO much more interesting than made up characters. So why don't I love reading about them?

I think I've figured it out. Real life people that write books about themselves don't generally do so using the same "storyesque" quality that authors who write about made up characters do. Hold on though, what I realized is, most great authors of fiction base their best characters, at least in part, on someone they know. In essence, many of them could be writing a nonfiction but "the names are made up to protect the innocent." This gives the author a full range of freedom. If they write about someone or something they know under the pretense of it being false, they don't have to worry about being totally accurate. I know, when I finally write my book someday, this is what I'll do.

The thing of it is, maybe I do like nonfiction after all. Perhaps the labels are just not up to par...