Novak claims within “Experiments in Life Writing”, that experimental nonfiction mediums are ” a defining mark of literary experiments in general…, (are) a “commitment to raising fundamental questions about the very nature and being of verbal art itself”—questions which mainstream literature “at all periods . . . is dedicated to repressing”(page 2, Novak). Essentially Novak believes although nonfiction mediums are traditionally very noncontingent on guidelines set to create an informative scene, experimental mediums allow a sense of freedom within nonfiction. This freedom, typically not seen within such a genre, enables readers to appreciate and question the deeper meaning of nonfiction and its relation to writing. When addressing nonfiction genres such as biographies, Novak claims such genres share a common trait that fiction also deploys. Novak says, ““historical” or “referential” genre is founded on the narrative strategies
espoused by writers of fiction in an earlier era.18… The model here is realism, not modernism or postmodernism, and the assumptions made about biography accord with those made by the readers and writers of realistic fiction” (page 5, Novak). When comparing fiction and nonfiction pieces however Novak also finds differences. Novak claims, “Cohn does concede that problems arise if reference is used as a criterion of distinguishing fact from fiction in absolute terms. That commitment to “verifiable documentation”28 may be suspended in fictional narratives does not mean that fiction “can not refer to the real world outside the text, but that it need not refer to it… Fictional narratives may contain external, real-world references, but these can be combined with non-factual elements; the selected facts can be imaginatively manipulated in fiction, as fiction is not bound to factual accuracy. In consequence, Cohn says, “external references do not remain truly external when they enter a fictional world,” but “are, as it were, contaminated,” that is, fictionalized, “from within” ( page 7, Novak). Novak finds that although fiction writing may deploy outside sources to create a sense of realism within the story, the ability of fiction writers to use creativity and selectively choose elements of nonfiction is vast. Essentially Novak finds that fiction has wider boundaries of creativity and limitless writing rules as compared to nonfiction. Sometimes the lines between fiction and non-fiction find themselves at odds as Novak shows within Virginia Woolf’s Flush: A Biography, which is still debated today as to whether it should be considered a Biography, Biographic Novel, etc. Novak claims that novels like such, have the ability to “marked departures from the standards of auto/biography bring the basic premises of auto/biography into view as much as they present alternative ways of writing a life” (page 15, Novak).