Back in college, thanks to a system glitch, I won a nonfiction essay contest with a fictional short story. I came clean and returned the prize money, but the experience forever changed my relationship to storytelling. I had never before considered that the line between fiction and narrative nonfiction is, at least when it comes to writing style, nonexistent. Nonfiction is a story that happened; fiction is a story that hasn’t happened yet.
The rise of autofiction in the past few years has played jump rope with this invisible line; we’ve been inundated with novels that might or might not have actually happened as told, stories that are sort of, mostly, kind of true. I’m not usually a fan of autofiction (for reasons I won’t go into here), but there’s a lot to be learned from it, or at least from looking at fiction and nonfiction as two sides of the same story-telling coin.
The Exercise
Take a mundane, unexciting part of your week—going to the bank, getting coffee, sitting through a meeting, etc.—and write it as though it’s a piece of fiction. Use every tool in your fiction-writing toolbelt.
Think about setting: Which details create the correct mood? Which details create a strong and unique sense of place? Which are unnecessary because a reader would already be picturing them when you say “bank” or “coffeehouse”?
Think about character: What makes the people you interacted with unique or interesting? What parallels or contrasts bring out something unique in you, the protagonist or POV character?
Think about word choice: Do short, staccato words communicate the scene better or long, flowing poetic words? Is there a dialect or specific turns of phrase that would give life to the scene?
Think about narration: Is this first or third person, and how does that make the scene different? Is the narrator opinionated or simply observing? Is the narrator preoccupied with something in their own life or are they focused on the lives of the people around them? Does the story take place in the narrator’s head or physically in the scene?
There may not be a conflict in this exercise, and that’s okay. If you can add an appropriate conflict and shape the scene around that, even better. But remember you’re technically writing nonfiction, and you’re limited to what actually exists.
The Purpose
When you think about fiction as nonfiction that hasn’t happened yet, you’ll unlock a richer depth of detail and stronger sense of grounding that might not have existed when you were just thinking about fiction. It’s no longer a free-for-all of details you think are cool; it’s a responsibility to tell the story right, to be true to what actually happened, while still crafting a cool and interesting world and story.
By limiting yourself in this exercise to the real and mundane details of your bank or your local barista, you’re forced to find meaning and depth in real details rather than creating bespoke details that neatly and perfectly fit your story. Both are useful tools, but leaning too hard on custom, perfect details can start to give a story a boring, surface-level quality rather than creating a rich and lived-in world. The trick is finding the balance.
Limiting yourself to a sequence of mundane events that actually happened will similarly force you to find creative ways to weave plot into an everyday interaction you’d usually just gloss over and immediately forget about. Those everyday scenes happen in novels all the time; but in fiction they have to mean something, even if they seem quiet or normal. This is great practice for making that happen.
As always, writing exercises don’t exist to cramp your style; they exist to deepen your understanding of writing craft and provide you with tools to help you get a story to where you want it to be.
Happy writing!
