I think that if you are writing fantasy or magic realism the book definitely doesn't need any truth behind it. Realistic fiction should be something people could imagine but didn't necessarily have to happen. Historical fiction should keep the main ideas but if you add/change little details to add impact or make things seem more important I think that’s totally okay. Going off of that, I think if you’re going to categorize something as non-fiction it should be real, not something you make up. Especially memoirs. I just read the book Black Like Me and I’d be pretty mad to find out that some of it was made up like Frey’s was. A memoir is a story about what really happened in your life and you shouldn’t make it up otherwise it would be categorized as realistic fiction.
I personally think that Shields is wrong about not needing lines to separate non-fiction from other types of fiction. If you’re doing research for a class or something your first move would probably be to go to the library and check books out about the topic. You’d probably choose non-fiction books because they’re the most reliable, but what if they just had all types of fiction in one area? You wouldn’t be able to tell at a glance what books were non-fiction, realistic fiction, or fantasy. It’d be a confusing mess of books. I honestly don’t like non-fiction books so I think it’s nice to categorize things as non-fiction or fiction. This way there would be no confusion about if something really happened or not. We don't need younger generation thinking things like Hunger Games happened, or that the Holocaust was just a story someone made up.
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