Pulling 180

Nonfiction writers imagine.  Fiction writers invent.  These are fundamentally different acts, performed to different ends. 

Unlike a fiction reader whose only task is to imagine, a nonfiction reader is asked to behave more deeply: to imagine, and also to believe.  Fiction doesn't require its readers to believe; in fact, it offers its readers the great freedom of experience without belief - something real life can't do.  Fiction gives us a rhetorical question: "What if this happened?"  (The best) nonfiction gives us a statement, something more complex: "This may have happened."