Creativity, especially as it concerns the written text, is a process of symbiotic interaction between memory and imagination. If the text is fiction or poetry, memory shapes imagination. If the text is memoir or creative nonfiction, then the opposite is most often true. Imagination nudges memory. Memory perceives through the lens of imagination while specific images are formed from composite recollections. To assume an autobiographical piece of creative writing is accurately processed into facts on the page from what the writer remembers is to assume that he or she recalls where lunch was taken one year, two months, three weeks, and four days from the time of writing and in exact detail, including what kind of soup stain was on the tablecloth and what words were spoken to the waiter when leaving. How many people can really do that? Really? To assume a novel or a short story has been born from a purely unconscious imagining of characters, scene, dialogue, plot, and setting without drawing on past personal experience and observation is to make believe that a writer never saw a man with a moustache, or a woman with short hair, or a blue sky. Both concepts are ridiculous.

So, what differentiates fiction and imaginative poetry from creative nonfiction? To understand the major and simplest difference, you must first consider the necessary similarity in the reading process, the willing suspension of disbelief. For a writer to sustain a reader’s interest through the narrative, any narrative, the reader has to be able to enter the world of the story through the senses and at an emotional level and then interact with it. This requires both memory and imagination. Good science fiction works, not because people believe it’s factual, but rather because it’s so well written, so detailed, and the characters so specifically human that the reader is willing to say for a period of time, “I’m going to believe this while I have the book open.” The reality of the episode doesn’t matter. The story entertains and sometimes educates. The same phenomenon occurs when the event written about is real but from a slightly different angle. Readers accept the fact what they’re being told is a memory and actually happened, but are willing to accept also the small details impossible to remember as true, even though supplied by the imagination of the author. Why? For the very same reasons the reader engaged the science fiction as believable. He or she wants to believe it because the way it has been written stimulated that desire. He or she may leave the story with different conclusions and perspectives based on genre, but have become involved emotionally with the story due to the same suspension of disbelief.

Once you have accepted the similarities between all forms of writing, then the line between fiction and nonfiction seems to become blurred for many writers. This causes and ethical dilemma for some and creates economic opportunity for others. As we have seen in recent years, some writers motivated by the need for profit and fame rather than the need – to paraphrase Hemingway – to write one true sentence, have sold engagingly written stories as nonfiction. However, the events that form the core of the narrative never occurred. And, therein lies the simplest difference between fiction and nonfiction writing of any kind. One happened. The other, as specific history, never did. Contrary to the tricksters who call themselves nonfiction writers for the purpose of selling books and justify the philosophy of manipulating major events, or in some cases fabricating them, “for the sake of the story,” I believe that the boundary between something that happened and something that did not happen is solid and easily identifiable. It is the line that separates conscience from greed that more often gets blurred.