Success Quote by Jerry B. Jenkins

The joke lands because it’s true enough to sting: Jenkins flips the labels on fiction and nonfiction to expose what the attention economy has done to readers’ trust. “Ironically” isn’t just a wink; it’s a diagnosis. In a marketplace where algorithms reward surprise, nonfiction often succeeds by sounding like a dare - the grifter’s miracle, the CEO’s impossible hustle, the scandal with receipts. The bar isn’t accuracy so much as audacity. “Unbelievable” becomes a sales feature, not a credibility problem.

Then he turns the knife. Fiction, supposedly the home of invention, has to feel plausible to get through the door. Contemporary audiences will tolerate dragons, time loops, or dystopias, but they won’t tolerate a character who behaves “out of character,” dialogue that feels staged, or emotional stakes that ring false. Believability here isn’t about factuality; it’s about psychological coherence. Jenkins is defending craft: you can make anything up, but you can’t fake how people are.

The subtext is a lament about collapsing categories. We live in a culture where “true story” is a genre promise and “novel” is a quality test. Nonfiction borrows fiction’s cliffhangers and plot twists; fiction borrows nonfiction’s documentary texture. Jenkins, a working novelist with a foot in mass-market storytelling, is pointing at the cynical equilibrium: reality is marketed like spectacle, while imagination is forced to behave like evidence.