Some important distinguishing marks between the fictional and non- fictional narrative involve the fiction writer’s mantra of showing instead of telling. In the narrative do you show the reader the nature of the characters through his actions, or do you identify and explain through narrative what the character is like? Do you give a reader word descriptions of time and place so that he actually feels the setting, or do you explain with geographical and physical characteristics so that he intellectually realizes the location? Is the narrator a character in the story so that the author is transparent, or is the narrator the author? Is dialogue important to develop character, time and place, and move the story forward, or is it used to relay merely the change in the story’s rhythm?

In each of these instances, if it is the first then it is generally fiction; if the latter, generally non-fiction. Some of the stories we have read in Visions of America, and Imagining America illustrate these points. The best examples that can be cited are those in which a fiction story and a different non-fiction story are written by the same person.

Paule Marshall

The fiction is "To Da-Duh, in Memoriam." The non-fiction is The Making of a Writer. In the fiction piece, Da-Duh is a very round character, full of action and life. The reader can really get involved with her. In the non-fiction piece, the characters are flat, more like cardboard cutouts. Their language is their story.

In the fiction story Barbados is depicted with sights, sounds, and smells. Much of the story is about place. In the non-fiction, the kitchen and the library are the place of the story, but these places are only important for the language they bring forward. The reader is only intellectually at these places.

In Da-Duh the narrator is one of the two characters in the story. Although we might suspect that Marshall’s story is somewhat biographical, if you took the author’s name off the story, it would not change its worth. In Poets the narrator is the author without much question.

In these two stories the dialogue easily identifies which is fiction. There is no dialogue per se in Poets. We hear quotes from characters, but no conversations. In Da-Duh, the dialogue between the child and Da-Duh carries the story.

Bharati Mukherjee

The fiction is "A Wife’s Story." The non-fiction is "Love Me or Leave Me." The characters in "A Wife’s Story" are alive and vital. The actors in the play, the person sitting next to her, Imre, Charity Chin, her husband, several people on the tour, are all almost too marvelous and wonderfully interesting to be real. In "Love Me or Leave Me," we have Doris Day as the only person in whom any real descriptive work is done. Even her father is not described in any interesting way.

In "A Wife’s Story" when the scene is the theater, the streets of New York, or the sites visited on tour, the narrator makes considerable use of the senses in describing them. We see little descriptive adjectives for both New York and India is the non-fiction piece.

We don’t see the writer in the fiction piece where she is the character in the non-fiction one, and the non-fiction is almost bereft of dialogue, with the fiction pull of strong a line like, "You’re exploiting my space." As a putdown of the man next to her in the theater.

Two of the stories assigned blur these lines slightly. Garcia Girls might just as well be called a memoir, and Angela’s Ashes might be call fiction for the first several chapters.

In summary the story seems to be the essence of non-fiction, whereas characters and style share an equal importance with story in fiction.

Other differences that could be explored, time allowing, would be general conditions required of fiction like conflict and resolution, and tension and release.