When Thomas Jefferson went about arranging his libraries in Monticello, Virginia, he used a taxonomic system based on one created by Francis Bacon. There were three headline categories:
- Memory Reason, and Imagination
Memory was history.
Reason was philosophy and emerging science.
Imagination was the world of Fine Arts, and also the slowly growing genre of novels.
We think a lot about defining the genre of books we are writing, and it strikes me that the old categories are more fruitful than ‘Memoir’, ‘Nonfiction’ and ‘Fiction’.
Memory, Reason or Imagination.
Does your book fit naturally into one of these categories, or is it something else entirely?