In the reading “Experiments in Life Writing” by Julia Novak, we are presented with the idea of mixing fictional and non fictional writing. Although they are complete opposites, the combination of the two is a technique being used by writers that can help strengthen either the fiction or non-fictional side of the story. Novak says that doing so establishes a ‘pact’ between the author and the reader by establishing a specific perception of the text. For example, writers may incorporate some fictional events in the writing that are about events that actually happened in real life in order to make the writing more interesting to the reader. Incorporating fiction in non fictional writing doesn’t make the entire piece fictional, all it does is just enhance some areas to deliver a clear message and establish that ‘pact’ Novak mentioned earlier. The reason we have started to experiment with mixing these two in the same piece of writing is simply to make our work more entertaining. In the modern era we live in, lots of books being written happen to have their own movies as well. There is no possible way we could make a movie about a non fictional event that happened two hundred years ago because nobody knows what actually happened. However, we could always incorporate some fictional scenes in these movies to keep the audience engaged. It’s just like dramatic acting, it puts more emphasis on what the creator wants the audience to know.

Fiction has informed life writing in many ways such as the media. As society still goes through its technological advancements, humans are now open to many ways of entertaining themselves other than reading books. This may have been a more popular choice in the older days, but now we have super high definition TV’s that visually display the special effects and skills of actors/actresses. Now, everybody has a TV just like everybody used to have books which means the demand for this type of entertainment is high! Writers/directors, etc are required to be more creative in order to keep up with the high demand for entertainment. This means that we have to set our limits beyond strictly non-fiction because we can only re tell the same story so many times. The additional of fictional events doesn’t mean the entire story is a lie, it just means the author is trying to establish a clear standpoint and lean more towards either the fiction or non fiction side.