Fiction vs Nonfiction: Rethinking the Divide

Fiction is storytelling that stems from the author’s imagination. It invents characters, events, and worlds to explore its key ideas. Nonfiction, meanwhile, is storytelling taken from reality. It recounts real events and people’s lived experiences with the intent to inform and entertain. 

Although the phrase “fiction vs nonfiction” suggests a neat division, the reality is much more nuanced. While the two differ in important ways, they also overlap in how they convey meaning:

What separates them has less to do with “making things up” and more to do with the author’s intent and storytelling choices. If we stop treating fiction and nonfiction as a dichotomy, a more interesting picture starts to emerge. Let’s take a closer look at how they work in practice. 

​​Why the divide exists

In publishing, the divide between fiction and nonfiction is largely a practical one. It hinges on a simple question: did the events in the book actually happen in the real world? The answer to that governs how a book is shelved, edited, marketed, and read. That’s why fiction and nonfiction are treated as distinct book categories, despite having similar storytelling techniques.

Fiction is built on imagination

In fiction, characters and events only need to feel believable within the world of the story. Even when a novel draws heavily from real life, it makes no claim to factual accuracy– and that distinction matters institutionally. Labeling a work as fiction signals (to readers, publishers, and reviewers) that its purpose is interpretive rather than documentary.

In The Measure by Nikki Erlick, the fantastical premise that every adult receives a string revealing their remaining lifespan is entirely invented, so the book is marketed and read as an exploration of human behavior and choice—not as a claim about reality. The fiction label creates space for symbolism and emotional truth without exposing the author or publisher to factual scrutiny.  

Similarly, although The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas is inspired by real sociopolitical conditions, framing the story as fiction allows it to engage with real-world issues while avoiding the legal, ethical or reputational risks that come with asserting factual authority. 

Nonfiction recounts reality

Nonfiction operates under a different set of institutional expectations. No matter the form (essay, memoir, biography), nonfiction is beholden to real events and is marketed and evaluated with factual accuracy in mind. 

Spare by Prince Harry illustrates this well. While the memoir offers a highly personal perspective on well-documented events, it remains bound to verifiable timelines and facts. Editors, publishers, and readers expect nonfiction to withstand scrutiny precisely because it asks for a higher degree of trust.

How stories create meaning in both

At the heart of both fiction and nonfiction is the same narrative task: deciding what belongs on the page, what doesn’t and how it’s arranged. In storytelling, meaning doesn’t come from capturing everything that happened, but from the choices a writer makes about sequence, emphasis, and coherence. While fiction and nonfiction make different promises to the reader, both rely on narrative structure to convey meaning.

Meaning in fiction 

In fiction, readers look for emotional and thematic depth. The story needs to feel coherent within its own world. Themes are rarely stated outright. Instead, they emerge through character, conflict, and smaller moments that point toward a larger idea. Because the author invents the events themselves, they also control how those events are ordered and revealed.

Meaning in nonfiction 

Nonfiction works with a different constraint, but a similar goal. The facts already exist, but they still need to be organized into a compelling narrative to engage readers. Here, authors decide where the story begins and ends, which details matter most, and how causes and consequences are framed. As a result, meaning in nonfiction also comes from coherence, not from factual exhaustiveness.

Author Amitav Ghosh says,“Fiction and non-fiction are two sides of the same coin. Fiction allows me to explore the inner lives of characters and the emotional truths of history, while non-fiction gives me the space to grapple with ideas and realities in a more direct way.”

This overlap is especially visible in creative nonfiction, which frequently borrows techniques like pacing and structure from fiction. Narrative nonfiction like In Cold Blood by Truman Capote recounts real events, but does so with novelistic rhythm and detailed scenes. The facts remain intact, yet it’s the carefully constructed narrative that reveals the story’s psychological and moral weight. 

What nonfiction can invent while remaining honest

Nonfiction is bound by what actually occurred: events must follow real timelines, outcomes must reflect reality, and dialogue must broadly align with what was said. But that doesn’t mean nonfiction reproduces reality word-for-word.

In nonfiction, the author takes real events and thoughtfully organizes them into a narrative. This involves selecting representative scenes, compressing time for clarity, and reconstructing dialogue (reasonably) when exact records aren’t available. Therefore, thematic meaning in nonfiction emerges from a narratively deliberately constructed for coherence. 

What defines honesty in nonfiction, then, is not literal transcription, but author intent and reader trust. Writers may acknowledge imperfect memory or reconstruct dialogue for narrative flow, as long as the essential facts remain truthful and the work does not mislead the reader about what occurred. Research plays a crucial role here: facts must be verifiable, and inaccuracies can undermine the book’s credibility as well as the author’s.

This balance is especially visible in memoir, where readers expect direct access to the writer’s inner life. In I'm Glad My Mom Died author Jennette McCurdy recounts her childhood through memories and reflection. The scenes and dialogue aim to remain faithful to her lived experience and emotional truth, rather than to provide an exhaustive record of events.

Across memoirs, journalistic essays, and self-help guides, nonfiction can look radically different on the surface, but all these forms are united by their shared commitment to reality.

What fiction can reveal beyond the facts 

Fiction, in contrast, has all the freedom to invent. By stepping away from literal events, it can surface emotional, social, and moral patterns that reality—in all its noise and contingency—often obscures.

That’s why fictional stories can sometimes feel more honest or revealing than factual accounts. Not because they actually occurred, but because they can distill experience into meaning in unique ways. Rather than competing with nonfiction on accuracy, fiction simply deals with a different kind of truth: one concerned less with what happened (empirical truth) and more with how the events were felt, rationalized, or justified (interpretive truth). 

A novel like To Kill a Mockingbird doesn’t document a specific historical trial. Instead, its fictional town and characters illuminate broader truths about prejudice and justice; morality and courage. By inventing Maycomb, author Harper Lee reveals social dynamics with a conviction that straightforward reporting often struggles to achieve.

Fiction’s ability to probe psychological truth becomes even more powerful when turned inward. In Engleby, Sebastian Faulks makes the reader inhabit the mind of an unreliable narrator suspected of murder, through clever manipulation of voice.

Engleby’s narration incorporates passages from the diary of his victim, raising doubts about whose voice the reader is actually hearing. In that moment, fiction reveals something a real-life investigation rarely can: not just what someone did, but how easily reality can be distorted, and how complicit a reader can become in that distortion.

In this way, fiction can expose the limits of empirical evidence and make emotional and psychological realities legible in ways facts alone often cannot.

How to choose the right label for your book 

Fiction and nonfiction each sign an unspoken contract with the reader. At the highest level, fiction and nonfiction are umbrella categories that describe a book’s relationship to truth, while genre and form describe how that relationship plays out on the page. Getting this right can help authors align a book’s intent with their target audience’s expectations.

Labeling fiction 

What unites genres under fiction isn’t subject matter or style, but intent: fiction makes no claim to factual accuracy, even when it draws heavily from real life. Genres and examples of fiction include:

• Literary fiction: Orbital by Samantha Harvey

• Genre fiction: A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah J. Maas (fantasy)

• Short fiction and flash fiction: Double Time for Pat Hobby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Labeling nonfiction 

Nonfiction is typically classified by what it aims to do: inspire, inform, guide, and so on. While these forms look different in practice, they all share a core commitment to reality. Forms and examples of nonfiction include:

• Memoir: I'm Glad My Mom Died by Jennette McCurdy

• Personal essays: The Fall of My Teen-Age Self by Zadie Smith

• Narrative journalism: All By Himself by Ben Terris

• Biographies: Mark Twain by Ron Chernow

• Self-help and how-to books: How to Market a Book by Ricardo Fayet

• Academic or informational writing: Raising Hare by Chloe Dalton

How labeling affects acquisition and discoverability

How a book is labeled affects how it is evaluated at different stages of the publishing journey. 

Nonfiction makes an explicit claim to truth, which carries ethical, reputational, or even legal responsibility. For that reason, it’s often sold on proposal in traditional publishing, particularly when the author brings expertise or an existing platform. Editors need to assess not just the writing, but the authority and credibility behind it.

Meanwhile, fiction is usually acquired as a finished manuscript. Since it doesn’t promise factual accuracy in the same way, it isn’t subject to the same level of scrutiny (although it has its own creative and commercial challenges). Remember that mislabeling a book can damage credibility; a book presented as nonfiction will be read and evaluated differently from one framed as fiction, even if the storytelling techniques overlap.

✍️ Learn more about the differences between traditional and self-publishing in this article.

Genre and form labels also affect your book’s discoverability, and thus, how it’s marketed: in simple terms, where a book appears and who finds it. Nonfiction is typically marketed through targeted channels like professional networks or niche newsletters, while fiction discovery (shaped more by reader taste) is increasingly driven by niche communities and social platforms like TikTok and Instagram.
Ultimately, the "right" label is the one that best supports what your book is trying to do: how it asks to be read, where it will be found, and how much trust it asks of the reader. 

At the end of the day, fiction and nonfiction aren’t polar opposites. They just play by different rules, defined by their relationships to truth and what readers expect from them. For authors, there’s no objectively “better” path here. What matters most is understanding those rules well enough to do justice to your story.