But the topic stayed with me enough that I got to thinking about it. How do you decide if a novel is fiction or non-fiction? With my own novels, it's easy enough. I write fantasy. I write thing that cannot happen, at least not in our world. But what about novels that take place in the real world full of events that could actually happen? How could you tell by studying the text of the novel if it was fiction or non-fiction?
The answer is simple. You can't. You might be able to make an educated guess, but you could still be wrong. There have been cases that prove this. For example, in the 1980s a writer published a book that he claimed was a slightly edited version of an authentic diary kept by a 19th century Irishman by the name of Gerald Keegan. People accepted this diary as a non-fiction account of Keegan's life. It was studied and used as research by the most respected institutions.
However, it wasn't long before research led to an interesting discovery. The Keegan diary had been published almost a century earlier as a novel, Summer of Sorrow. Many people were fooled into believing that it was a work of non-fiction, accepted it as a work of non-fiction.
So what's the answer, then? Well, I guess that a work is whatever it purports to be, whatever the public accepts it as. Summer of Sorrow was accepted as fiction, claimed to be fiction, and so it was fiction. When it was republished as a diary, it claimed to be non-fiction and was accepted as such. Later, it was again moved back into the realm of fiction.
When determining whether a work is fiction or non-fiction, use this purport test and you'll find the job made much easier. If you care about such things. I read for the pleasure of it, not because a work is either fiction or non-fiction.
