Gordaen’s Blog

Yesterday I was killing time in the library, wandering down the aisles, eyes drifting among the books. Since I had no particular goal, I let curiosity guide me and I began to wonder if I could understand the organization of the nonfiction section simply by browsing.

I started to think that perhaps I was figuring out the layout. Keeping in mind the gender of the target audience, I passed quite a few books that were definitely focused more toward women, then family raising books, and then a little later came the art, which is fairly safe middle ground. After that I came upon sports books and then *WHAM!* books on pregnancy. Obviously, my hypothesis was flawed.

Just when I thought I was recovering from my confusion, I saw some of Tolkien’s books. I don’t remember the specific titles, but I didn’t immediately recognize them so I thought that maybe he did write nonfiction… and then I saw a Malory book. Thomas Malory is often credited with “creating” King Arthur and Camelot (though plenty of stories existed before him, mostly in French, and he combined and rewrote those). The book had one of the various “King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table” titles or whatever it was. I thought imaginary people were considered fiction, but I guess not.

I had wondered how you would draw the line on fiction compared to nonfiction. For instance, what about a book on ghosts? Is it nonfiction if you believe it or attack it with an analytical approach? If I write a book explaining about the Ghost of Terrible Webdesign and explain how he went from haunting Geocities in the 90’s to haunting Myspace today, would it be nonfiction? I’d like to think so.