Fact - Fiction - The Difference?

 Someone reading "Road Tripping" asked me how much of it was autobiographical. That I wrote the mass while in prison, it is set in Indiana, and two ghosts figures prominently. It is not factually true. Imaginatively, it may be true and factual. 

And I think autofiction would be too hard a job and too much of what is in my head, which is neither as lurid or as monomaniacal as the federal government seems to think of my mind.

Yet, the subject of Elizabeth Graver and J.C. Hallman on the Blurred Boundaries between Fact and Fiction does interest me. I am interested in presenting what is factual as factual, but also along with all the imaginative trappings that go along with it.

I can live with this:

JCH: ​​Yes, I did—and I think I opted for calling it nonfiction for reasons that are similar to what you’re describing. Ultimately, I believe that the distinction between fiction and nonfiction is arbitrary, something that is more convenient for libraries and bookstores than it is for writers, who often (like us!) find themselves drawn to the interstices between genres. At the same time, it does matter when we say that a story is factual, or even based on facts. That changes how we take the work in as readers, and changes what we expect of it, as well.

In writing Say Anarcha, I thought about how the hard sciences handle this sort of question, particularly when they present their work to the public. For example, when you go into a natural history museum and look at the tyrannosaur skeleton in the lobby, you’re not actually looking at bones, or even at casts created from a complete skeleton that was found in that position. Rather, you’re looking at something upon which a significant creative process has been brought to bear, with everything from logical inference to outright guesswork coming into play. But is what you see in the lobby fiction or nonfiction? Is it a skeletal model or a sculpture?

I thought about how fact is decided in society writ large, particularly in regard to the legal system. Juries who hear criminal cases are called “finders of fact,” and what I did, in writing Anarcha’s story, was proceed very much like a prosecutor, creating a narrative that fit with all the evidence I’d found during years of painstaking research. If that’s good enough for “fact” in society, then shouldn’t it also be the case for books like ours?

On the other hand, I have used a couple of factual events in ways that did not quite happen in the way they did in reality, but close enough that I hope I do not get shot. That, I guess, shows my optimism about getting published. Until then, I am quite safe.

I will go back to thinking that realism - the realism of Dreiser, Hemingway, Faulkner, Algren - is great at reportage, but reality includes imagination and dreams and memory which cannot be brought within reportage. Those activities which are more often an escape from reality are what fiction, can tap into. How well, I do so remains to be seen.

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