Difference Between Fiction and Nonfiction
We go to a bookstore and find books classified as fiction and nonfiction. Every year we see the Nobel Prize to be awarded in both fiction and nonfiction categories. Sometimes it gets confusing, but if you attention, differentiating the literary works into fiction and nonfiction easily become crystal clear. Have you heard the word Sci-Fi? Did you watch the Avatar, the latest blockbuster James Cameron? If so, then you know what fiction is. Sci-Fi means science fiction. A book discussion of creatures or characters that are not real, but fictitious, invented by the imagination of the author is a work of fiction. On the other hand, a book that contains all the real events or real people talking about is a job that is known as non-fiction.
Ever got a chance to read Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll? Although this is a fiction book written almost 150 years ago, you felt that you read a real world and characters such as where the author speaks of the life of a look. That’s the beauty of fiction. The authors use their imagination to awaken the curiosity that is not possible in non-fiction, creating characters that seem real and it is immersed in a book of fiction. The surprising success of harassing Potter books is a testament to the ability of the author to make the fiction seem more real than reality.
It is easy to say that fiction is a creation of an active mind, however, if you look at all the fiction written in the last one hundred of years, we find that except for stories with strange characters, almost all are full of human emotions like the novel, hatred, revenge and the efforts that we end up seeing in real life. In fact, it sometimes becomes hard to decide whether the fiction is a reflection of what happens in our society where life is inspired by the fiction.
On the contrary, non-fiction, are works containing facts and figures of the real world. They also contain images of real people who live or once lived. All autobiographies, newspapers, history books, manuals, user manuals and so on are examples of non-fiction. It is clear then that non-fiction authors cannot just use their imagination and ability to present information in a way to make non-fiction, interesting enough for people to read them.
While one can use his imagination to come to any conclusion in the case of fiction, nonfiction does nothing to the imagination as it presents the facts and information which are already known to many.