Pulitzer Prize-winner Richard Rhodes doesn't like the word non-fiction. The term is not helpful, he argues, because too many types of writing are lumped together as non-fiction. In addition, "non-fiction" defines a category of writing by the negation of another category, fiction.
Rhodes suggests that we replace the word "non-fiction" with the word "verity." As you might suspect, verity is related to the word veracity, meaning truthfulness or factual.
Rhodes goes on to say: "[c]onsidered as a craft, technically, the writing of fiction and writing of verity are identical processes but for one significant difference: we expect the information conveyed in verity to conform to verifiable external references, while the information conveyed in fiction need be only internally consistent."
More than one kind of truth? I think so.
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