From: Deborah Hopkinson <hopkinda>
Date: Tue, 02 Apr 2002 11:31:58 -0800

Julie asks: "Which brings me to the point, where does creative nonfiction cross the line and become creative fiction built out of real times, places, and events?"

As a writer, I assume that every time I myself make up words that come out of characters' mouths I am writing fiction, no matter how closely based in history it may be. So when someone refers to my books as biographies I wince, and I always start out talking to students with a definition of historical fiction (at least my definition).

An interesting offshoot of this discussion is memoir writing, Angela's Ashes comes to mind, or one of my favorite books, A Primate's Memoir. The authors do include dialogue, and one presumes that at the least some of it is embellished, or reworked.
 Perhaps in writing about our own lives we have leave to fictionalize???

Deborah Hopkinson Whitman College hopkinda at whitman.edu
Received on Tue 02 Apr 2002 01:31:58 PM CST