Blog #7

I personally think the book must be 100% true because if an author thinks their life or part of their life is interesting enough to share with the world or move a specific audience then they shouldn’t need to exaggerate facts or even put in things that aren’t necessarily true.  Especially if the author is telling a story about challenges they faced then in that case the story could relate to many people going through similar things and it isn’t fair to them if the author later on admits that the story was a lie. If the author wants to base their story off of their life then in that case it’s still not a completely true story it is partially made up so they should label their book as “based off a true story”.  If the author has a story in their life that is interesting or they feel the need to be told then they shouldn’t need to change things to allow more people to like it.  Changing the facts could not only affect the readers but also the people in that story if they were changed in the book into something they’re not. I think if a story is said to be non-fiction then it should tell the whole truth because just like how we read books in the past maybe people in the future will want to read books about how our life was and if these “true” books were a lie then what’s the point?

            I think we do need lines between genres because some things are very important and can’t be forgotten.  For example stories about the Holocaust or World War 2, if they were blended in with fiction maybe a couple hundred years from now people wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between what actually happened during that time and what was made up.  It’s important that things are remembered as they are and not as what people they should be. 

Blog #6

I don’t think anyone gets to decide what good writing is because everyone is going to have a favorite genre or style of writing which will immediately cause a bias opinion towards a genre they don’t enjoy.   I believe that many people decide on what books to read by what everyone says about that book.  For example many teenagers feel the need to read Hunger Games or Harry Potter because of how popular it is for our age group and only good things are said about those books.  Many teenagers will think that literary work is much less exciting than genre fiction for many reasons being many people our age, if they enjoy reading they will chose to read genre fiction which is such a different type of writing than literary work.  Coming into school and being forced to read literary fiction will immediately cause a bias opinion towards that work.  I think students see Literary Fiction less exiting to read during school than genre fiction because many times I find the style of writing confusing to understand and when teachers are cramming in tests and quizzes on a specific scene or chapter I end up studying the facts from the story rather than the overall theme or story the author is trying to get across.  When studying facts rather than the theme or importance of the story the facts make it almost like memorizing the “important” parts of the book leading me to easily forget what happened in the story.  When literary fiction is assigned you are told to read a specific amount of chapters and not to go ahead of the class but when I read genre fiction sometimes I can’t stop at a specific spot because of how exciting the book is.   I believe both genres are important but I think different audiences will enjoy different genres.