The Fiction Versus Non-Fiction Debate: Is One Better Than the Other?

I recently spent time with a group of friends I see roughly four or five times a year and one of them asked me how my writing was going, knowing that I was doing it full-time. Well, I told her. Did I have a daily routine? she asked. Just to sit down and start, I replied. And when would my next book be out? In a few months. Non-fiction, I clarified. My next novel would be published in about a year’s time. Oh, she said with a hint of disappointment and then moved onto conversation with someone else.

That “Oh” gave me pause. Everyone else I’ve ever discussed my writing with (which isn’t too many people as I find it a little self-indulgent and difficult to do justice to when I’m the one talking) has had the exact same response, which is admiration – admiration at the fact that I’ve written and published books. After all, so many people talk about it and never get around to doing it but continue talking about it until anyone hearing them talk about it wants to beat them over the head with their non-existent book.

I also found it a little strange because I’ve always thought of non-fiction as a slightly higher, slightly more respectable calling than fiction (not my non-fiction, though, just the non-fiction of others) because it requires knowing what you are writing about (or it should) whereas in fiction you can just make up any old thing. Still, they both require effort and commitment over a reasonably lengthy period of time. Why would one let alone the lesser other (whichever you happen to think it is) elicit an “Oh”?

In preparing to write this blog post, I did a bit of research about the differences in the perception of fiction writing versus non-fiction writing and discovered something that I didn’t know. There is a lot of debate about this. Unsurprisingly, those who write fiction defend it vociferously and those who write non-fiction point to bigger sales and grateful marketing departments at publishing houses who always know how to promote non-fiction but struggle with fiction, particularly literature.

I happily read (and write) both fiction and non-fiction, although I read (and write) more fiction because I like to escape from the horrific realities of the world and even when there are horrific realities in fiction, there tends to be poetic justice or loose ends tied up nicely or something at the end that allows me a sense of closure. Non-fiction can often raise more questions than it answers and I always want to know what happened after the end of the book. I never wonder that about fictional characters because their stories have to be complete (even if sequels are being planned).

I started wondering if because fiction and non-fiction are both forms of writing that they make us think they have more in common than they actually do. We don’t compare fiction with scientific writing so why do we compare it with biographies and histories? Perhaps it has something to do with the rise of creative non-fiction. Helen Garner’s Joe Cinque’s Consolation is a great example of it and will be her most lucrative, if not successful, book as it has now been made into a movie. But eventually I realised this was me just trying to get away with not having to answer the question.

Which, of course, is that no, neither one is better than the other. Perhaps that’s because as EL Doctorow put it, “There is no longer any such thing as fiction or non-fiction; there’s only narrative.” And perhaps it’s also because they so often lead into each other. I didn’t intend to write long-form non-fiction and it was very much a surprise when I realised that was what I had been doing. And I certainly never thought I’d write two non-fiction books. But the truth is that I never would have if it weren’t for the fact that I was already writing fiction. And I’m certainly not the only one. Would Tara Moss have written the terrific books The Fictional Woman and Speaking Out if she hadn’t been funded by the phenomenal success of her nine previous fiction books? Could she have? John Birmingham’s Leviathan: An Unauthorised Biography of Sydney is an accomplishment and he wrote it in order to be taken more seriously as a writer but it’s his Axis of Time and Disappearance series that gave him his worldwide fame. (They had US agents falling “on it like a bit of raw meat, and the next thing I knew I had Americans backing truckloads of greenbacks up to the front door”. This quote is from a terrific interview with John Birmingham in the book Literati: Australian Contemporary Literary Figures Discuss Fear, Frustrations and Fame by James Phelan.)

In the end, I suspect this is another one of those ridiculous debates that people in the writing profession spend way too much time on. Nobody else cares and in the end it really doesn’t make any difference to the quality of whatever writing it is you prefer to indulge in. So in honour of that ridiculousness, I’d like to end with a quote from a movie about baseball but which I seem to be able to endlessly repurpose to make it about writing.

Dottie Hinson: Thanks for the ride, kid.

Dollbody Kid: What’s your rush, dollbody? Whaddya say we slip in the back seat and you make a man out of me?

Dottie Hinson: What do you say I smack you around for a while?

Dollbody Kid: Can’t we do both?

A League of Their Own