Fictional License

Fiction writers require real-life events and people to trigger their imaginations to create plots and characters. If they are imaginative enough, as Hemingway once said, “any writer worth his salt can create better people than God can.” So writers project all kinds of conflicts for their characters to endure and all kinds of means for them to handle or mishandle them. Generally, writers agree that it takes five real people to create one good fictional character. A one-to-one relationship between real person and events and character and his or her situation is called nonfiction. However, there is a type of novel called a roman a cléf in which the author reduces the distinction between real person and literary character and is generally used for satiric purposes. Philip Roth’s Our Gang, about the pre-Watergate Nixon administration, is a case in point. Even then Roth had to rename the president, Trick E. Dixon, and have him wind up in a conflict with the Boy Scouts of America. Roth is a novelist who does not have to abide by known facts. Bob Woodward, on the other hand, is a nonfiction writer, indeed historian, who cannot, indeed must not, tamper with facts. He can speculate on what he does not know for sure, but he must label them as such. Fiction is creative; nonfiction is factual.