What Is Fiction?
Quick answer: What is fiction? Narrative writing about invented people and events, from flash fiction to novels. What the term covers, and why invented is not false.
Fiction is narrative writing about invented people, events and worlds. The word covers everything from a six-word story to a thousand-page novel: if the characters and events are products of imagination rather than reportage, the work is fiction, however much real history, real geography or lived experience stands behind it. Its counterpart, nonfiction, makes a factual claim about the world; fiction makes no such claim and is read under different rules.
That definition sounds simple until the edges appear, novels starring real emperors, stories lifted from the writer's own divorce, memoirs with invented dialogue, and the edges are where most people's questions live. The core holds firm, though: fiction is defined by the contract it offers the reader, not by how much truth it happens to contain.
The longer answer: a contract, not an ingredient list
The cleanest way to define fiction is by the agreement between writer and reader. Nonfiction says: these things happened, and I am accountable for their accuracy. Fiction says: come with me as if these things happened, and I am accountable only for making the journey worth taking. Philosophers call the reader's side of this deal the willing suspension of disbelief, a phrase coined by Coleridge in 1817, and the deal is what lets invented events produce real feeling without anyone being deceived.
This is why the amount of truth inside a work does not decide its category. 'War and Peace' contains Napoleon, real battles and real dates; it is fiction, because Tolstoy invents thoughts, conversations and characters and claims no reportorial accuracy. A memoir that fabricates its central events has broken its contract, and readers respond with a sense of betrayal no novelist ever triggers, which tells you the contract is real.
Fiction's territory is also wider than realism. Fables with talking animals, ghost stories, satire, myth retold: all fiction. The invented need not be possible, only coherent enough to hold the reader inside the agreement.
Fiction's family tree, briefly
By length, fiction runs from microfiction and flash through short stories, novelettes and novellas to novels and series. By mode, it spans realism, which imitates the observable world; genre traditions like crime, romance, fantasy and science fiction, each with its own reader contracts stacked on the basic one; and experimental work that plays with the contract itself.
The tradition is older than the word. Ancient epics, parables and myths were fiction in function long before anyone catalogued them; Aesop's talking animals never fooled a single listener. The modern prose forms consolidated with the novel's rise, from 'Don Quixote' (1605) through the eighteenth-century English novelists, and the short story crystallised in the nineteenth century with Poe, Gogol, Chekhov and Maupassant.
For a working writer, the family tree matters mainly at submission time: venues, prizes and readerships organise themselves by fiction's lengths and genres, so knowing where your piece sits saves it from the wrong doors. A 1,800-word invented narrative is a short story, whatever else it is, and there are magazines and monthly contests built precisely for it.
Using the definition in your own writing
Claim fiction's full licence. New writers often smuggle their real life into stories and then feel bound by what actually happened, refusing improvements because that is not how it was. Once you call the work fiction, accuracy to your memory is not a virtue; serving the story is. Change the ending, merge the aunts, move the city.
At the same time, honour the ballast truth provides. Fiction convinces through specific, lived texture, the smell of a hospital corridor, the exact phrasing of a family insult, and your experience is a warehouse of such texture. The craft is transplanting true details into invented structures, which is roughly what every novelist means by write what you know.
Mind the legal and ethical edge cases: recognisable real people presented damagingly can raise defamation issues even inside a novel, which is why fiction based on living people gets its own careful treatment. And label your work honestly when you send it out; a personal essay submitted as fiction, or the reverse, wastes everyone's time including yours.
What fiction is not: common confusions
Fiction is not a synonym for lies. A lie intends to deceive; fiction announces its inventedness on the cover, so no deception occurs. This confusion powers the internet habit of calling false claims 'fiction', understandable shorthand, but it obscures what makes the art form honest: it never claims to be fact.
Fiction is also not the opposite of truth. Invented stories routinely carry psychological, social and moral truths that survey data cannot; readers of 'Animal Farm' learn true things about power from events that never occurred. Nor is fiction only novels: short stories, flash, drama and narrative games all qualify. Finally, fiction is not defined by emotional intent, by being entertainment while nonfiction informs. Plenty of nonfiction entertains and plenty of fiction instructs; only the contract about factual claims separates them.
What poets can take from this
- Decide your contract before drafting: factual claim or invented world, never a blur.
- Treat real memories as material, not obligations; fiction licenses improvement.
- Transplant true sensory details into invented structures for instant credibility.
- Disguise real people beyond recognition or expect consequences.
- Label work accurately at submission; category errors read as amateurism.
- Remember the reader feels invented events as really as reported ones; spend that power carefully.
Try it yourself
Take a true incident from your week, something small, an argument overheard, a queue, a missed call, and fictionalise it three ways: change the outcome, change the point-of-view character, and change the setting by fifty years. Notice which invention made the incident more true, and finish that version at 1,000 words.
Questions
What are the main types of fiction?
By length: flash fiction, short stories, novelettes, novellas and novels. By mode: literary and genre fiction, including crime, romance, fantasy, science fiction, horror and historical. Most works carry one length label and one or more genre labels.
Is historical fiction real or fake?
It is invented narrative set among real events. The history supplies the stage and constraints; the characters' inner lives, conversations and often the characters themselves are imagined. Good historical fiction is accurate about the period and honest about being fiction.
Why do humans read fiction at all?
Because invented narratives exercise real capacities: empathy, prediction, moral reasoning, the rehearsal of lives we will never live. Psychologists studying readers keep finding that fiction functions as a simulator for social experience, which may explain why every known culture tells stories.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
Enter a Writory poetry contest
Enter the August contest and have your own poem read and scored.