What novels do that biographies don't is get at truths by penetrating the facts, by going deeper to what's underneath fact, through invention.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
An autobiography can distort; facts can be realigned. But fiction never lies: it reveals the writer totally.
A good autobiography is like a document: a mirror of the age on which people can 'depend.' In a novel, by contrast, it's not the facts that matter, but precisely what you add to the facts.
People think that because a novel's invented, it isn't true. Exactly the reverse is the case. Biography and memoirs can never be wholly true, since they cannot include every conceivable circumstance of what happened. The novel can do that.
A typical biography relying upon individuals' notorious memories and the anecdotes they've invented contains a high degree of fiction, yet is considered 'nonfiction.'
I don't do nonfiction anymore. Eventually, you just feel constrained by the facts. You want to go where the words take you, and people's actual lives don't always conform. And you can't know them that well.
The novelist has a responsibility to adhere to the facts as closely as possible, and if they are inconvenient, that's where the art comes in. You must work with intractable facts and find the dramatic shape inside them.
But novels are never about what they are about; that is, there is always deeper, or more general, significance. The author may not be aware of this till she is pretty far along with it.
You can tell a more over-the-top incredible story if you use a nonfiction form.
But with nonfiction, the task is very straightforward: Do the research, tell the story.
I find that nonfiction writers are the likeliest to turn out interesting novels.
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