Fiction v. Nonfiction

Up until this point, I had read only fiction independent reading books. My last book was Guests of the Ayatollah, by Mark Bowden. This book is a potrayal of the Iranian Hostage Crisis of 1979, where the US Embassy in Iran was stormed by an Iranian militia and held hostage to further their political agenda. The 53 hostages were held in the embassy for 444 days, a miserable 15-month span. Between Guests of the Ayatollah and The Collector (A similar fiction book I read last time), there were some very noticable differences between the nonfiction and fiction titles. The nonfiction authors have less creative freedom than the fiction authors. Given that the nonfiction books don’t reflect the event 100%, the author still has a timeline that he can’t veer from too much. This has two effects, one of which is that it makes the nonfiction books more realistic. Since the nonfiction books are based on an actual event, the plot events will seem less far-fetched than some of the fiction books (Come on Suzanne Collins, no one wins the Hunger Games twice). However, it makes nonfiction books less suspensful. For the same reason, because the events are totally realistic, the book will have believable and sometimes predictable outcomes.