Nonfiction? What’s nonfiction?

As a foreword, if you dislike long paragraphs and substantial amounts of text, I wholeheartedly recommend going back to Twitter. (After writing: Apologies for the tone of this particular passage, I did not intend to sound offensive, merely warn that the contents may take substantial amount of time to go through, and I realize it may come across as too harsh. I’ll refrain from outright cutting it as it is already made public, but I’ll attempt to avoid this mistake in the future.) Also as a foreword, this is a request, or a question, or a prompt from one of my friends. Following from the idea that I am permanently in an AMA state.

So, nonfiction. Before replying to the question itself, I suppose it’s necessary to explain my view on the subject as a whole. To be blunt, I dislike nonfiction as a concept. Not on the merits of any particular book, but the idea of nonfictional literature strikes me as hilarious at best. Don’t worry, I’ll explain.

First comes the implicit agreement between reader and writer. There is such a thing in any one medium of any one segment of any creative process, but let’s focus on the literature. Once something is written, the interpretation and comprehension fall on the shoulders of the reader. A written work that’s never read has little point to it. I have alluded to this bias in my previous post, a tie to my decision to make a public blog instead of keeping a diary.

But it’s in that interpretation that lies the problem.

Everyone and their sisters has wondered which of the four houses of Hogwarts they’d be in. In the real world, we have no such wonder. If what you read is not fictional, then your place in relation to that story is exactly where you are seated while reading it. That alone is enough for me to lose interest on the collective of nonfiction, but again, not getting into the merits of particular books.

However, that’s not the only problem that comes from the reader’s point of view. Any one of us could make a case in the name of Sauron and complain about how misunderstood the Orcs are. Interpretation is flexible, because in the case of fiction, it is inconsequential. It might warrant a discussion, it may cause fights and break up friendships, but to put the glaringly obvious in the spotlight, think of World War II. Can anyone look back and defend the holocaust?

Yeah, I didn’t think anyone would volunteer. But for Middle Earth the deaths of the orcs and the deaths of men, elves and dwarves are of no consequence. It is, by definition, fictional. Imaginary. I’m not accounting for the emotional engagement, however. That’s close, but they don’t exist in the same way we do, you can simply imagine them all alive again and there they are. Or just flip back to the first pages and they are clueless, starting their adventures again.

This requires emphasis because the difference is subtle enough, but say you stop reading the first Harry Potter book after the first few chapters. Harry is this nerdy malnourished kid who lives a crappy life with his relatives. End of story. He doesn’t fulfill his destiny, there’s no grand adventure, because for him to exist, he has to be given life inside your head through reading the books. By being a fictional work, the consequences of the character’s choices hold no effect if you decide not to read it. But if you stop reading a nonfictional story, it doesn’t matter if you know it or not, if you are aware of it or not, a “character” death in that nonfiction is still a very real death that left a very real family in mourning in the same real world you live in.

From the moment you say something is nonfictional, you restrict me, as your reader, in how I can react to your work. You deliberately set a bias. It doesn’t matter if I like the genre or not. By stating that something is real, you force me to react to it as such. Trust me, I don’t like restrictions. One more reason I avoid nonfiction in general.

Fiction is safe, nonfiction is for the daring. I’m afraid I am very much a coward as far as this subject goes.

And is there anything that’s really nonfictional? Take this blog for example, is it not my own story? Something that a person in the real world thinks and how said person acts?

If you trust me, yes. But also if you trust me, you would have noticed that when I describe my decision to write a blog, I make note of the need for some manner of censorship. It’s not as if my thoughts, as they really are when unfiltered, make it here. I have to make it orderly and understandable, for starters. Not a chaotic visual map of interconnected concepts and ideas that instantly convey meaning (Mind Map, you should look it up, it’s amazing. I’ll write on it sometime (Someone hold me to that promise!)). If language was perfect, we wouldn’t have, what do we call them, oh, right, misunderstandings.

Thus, whoever writes, be it based on fact or imagination, writes with the intent that the reader will see what he wants the reader to see. Even if an event happened, different people would describe differently, and different readers would visualize it differently. Is it even nonfictional at that point?

But enough of the irks I have regarding the genre. There are upsides too. Which is part of the reason I write making myself extrapolate and exemplify each particular point, that way I can make sure I see as many perspectives as I can imagine possible. Perhaps not all, I’m not perfect, but hey, I’m trying.

Without records of real happenings, we would never have history, we’d have archaeological fiction. It’s true that today we have video and audio and all those fancy recording mechanisms, but are they even suitable? Topic for another time, I suppose. The point remains, though, without writings of real events and the lives of real people, we wouldn’t be able to know how the world was.

Problems for problems, the benefit is still there, we have what we can call culture. No one needs to relive the same problems, the knowledge and experience can be passed on. It’s how we grow. If the men during the industrial revolution only wrote on their dreams of flight, we might still not have cars, much less planes.

Technical. You might argue.

Same difference. I would reply. Sociology, philosophy, politics, anthropology, all areas that deal with humans and how they behave. How they should behave, how they pretend to behave, how they are wired to behave. It’s still knowledge. The gain, in knowledge, remains. And regardless of my own personal bias against it, nonfiction is indeed a valid and useful genre.

Finally we reach ethics. Is it right or wrong? What are the responsibilities of the writer? Who can and who can’t write on the real world and on real lives? What about reading it? Who can and who can’t read nonfiction?

Well, to the reader side I’d say it’s simple: anyone. If it was legally made public, it is thus, ethical to read. Be it a grandmother’s story about growing flowers and cooking with love, or a teenager’s sexual exploits. From a reader perspective, if someone wrote, edited and published it under a sharing license of any sort, it’s no longer your problem if the content itself is ethical or not. The question there is the same as with fiction. Do you enjoy the story? If not, avoid it. But the right to read it is there.

The problem of the content, from what I see, lies on the writer, on the editor and on the publisher. They are the ones who can choose what is to be shown and what’s to be hidden.

For a blog, that’s the owner of the blog. For a book, these can each be a different person or group. And then I would say the same I say about any fiction. Is it a story worth telling? Consent is an issue, yes, some people might be uncomfortable having their roles made public, but that largely varies. I don’t think it’s possible to give one yes or no answer to all of the cases, which is why I say the judgment relies in the hands of the people involved in creating and publishing the content, it should be something each creator evaluates for himself whether that’s a story to be told or not.

Keep in mind that I’m not saying the reader is without any responsibility. There is one, but it’s the same as any consumer of any form of content: Support the good kind, pay no heed to the bad kind.

Anyone has the freedom to write and release whatever trash they deem fit, doubly so by means of the internet today. Pick what you read, share what’s worth perpetuating and give no audience to what isn’t. Which content falls at which side of that fence largely depends on the reader, of course. Taste is a very personal matter. But the idea doesn’t change, you should always encourage and support future development of what you enjoy and please, avoid joining hate groups. Publicity is publicity, spamming the world with how bad something is will only make people curious about it and in the end just give it more audience, which equates to encouragement to perpetuate that same content.

Though I feel like I’ve brushed into topics for several other posts, subjects that deserve their own in-depth look. So, enough of this prelude, let me address the question directly.

You were asked to write nonfiction for a class assignment, you are also uncomfortable with the nature of writing nonfiction. You ask for my opinion on the matter and what I think you should do. Well, I can’t reply to that, I can only tell you what I would do should I be in your place.

First let’s take the elephant to take a walk, you can always cheat. Who’s to know your best friend from preschool is someone you just invented for the sake of the assignment text? I’ll assume you don’t want to cheat, however, or there would be no need to give the matter this much thought.

With cheating out of the way,  I have personally found that honesty seems to work more often than subterfuge. Were I in your place, I would share with the professor the issues you brought up. Because, see, from what I understand the purpose of an evaluated assignment is to verify whether or not you acquired the abilities taught over the course of the discipline. If you’re able to write on your own experience and conflict regarding the subject itself, did you not just write suitable nonfiction?

Share with him your own writing on this matter, the same one you used to ask me about the subject. Add my own if you wish. This is public form by default, but I know you well enough to know that you would appreciate explicitly written consent, and that is here. Making this interaction into your assignment is a meta solution, but we writers are no strangers to meta, are we?

Failing that there are a number of compromises that could be reached. You can ask for permission to use the cheat with the professor’s consent. Creating a fictional interaction that could pass for nonfiction would not be cheating if the professor is aware and has allowed you to do it.

Another possibility would be agreeing to have the nonfictional text destroyed after grading. Assuming the reason it needs to exist is that the professor needs to see whether it correctly implements the techniques taught, hand it as a single print copy and agree to have it shredded or burned after grading. This doesn’t address your feelings regarding the nature of the assignment, but protects you from undesired consequences from accidental leakage of the content.

Should your professor be so inflexible that a compromise can’t be reached. Or should you be uncomfortable with any of the possible middle grounds, then you’re up to the question you actually asked: Hand it in or fail the course?

That I can’t answer. I have failed mandatory disciplines because I disagreed with my professors before, I have no doubt it’ll happen again. But each time I do, I delay my own graduation date because I’m forced to go through the same courses again. They’re mandatory, after all.

But my bottom line would be using these blog posts as your assignment. They are nonfictional and they constitute an interaction. That should be enough to satisfy the evaluation criteria, even if they’re not enough to warrant perfect grades. And this option addresses your concerns regarding the consent of the parts involved.

I don’t know what you’ll do, but this is what I think. I am, however, one hundred percent certain I would be a Ravenclaw were I to fall into the Harry Potter universe.

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