Say you have an author who has a lot of random personal stories from their life, all interesting, but don't stand on their own to be an interesting, single story. The author decides, "why not combine them all into one story?" Well, that sort of becomes an autobiography, I guess, if you actually tell the story in a more chronological way that follows the timeline of their life.
What if the author decides not to do everything chronologically? Basically, taking these non-fictional stories, reordering them a little, and placing them all into a fictional character's life, somewhat shortening the timespan in the process? Basically, the story itself and the character would be fictional, but each separate story within the fictional story is non-fictional.
Does the fictional part of the story trump the non-fictional parts of the story and just classify the entire thing as fiction, or a novel? Or is there any special word or perhaps genre that would be used to better identify something like this? Ultimately, is there a word to identify a fictional story made up of non-fictional stories?
I've seen this similar question, but it talks about historical settings in a novel, mainly the non-fictional location a book is set in. I can't imagine that's really the same thing, as the situation I'm outlining is kind of the opposite. The stories themselves are non-fictional, but the setting, location, characters, etc are all fictional.
Best Answer
The adjective fictionalised is often used in this sense, as in the real-life basis was "made fictional". However, that word is sometimes also used of the purely fictional.
"A fictionalised account of..." can be clearer that it means fictionalised in that sense.
A subset of such novels would be romans à clef (sing. roman à clef, sometimes found hyphenated, and occasionally without the grave on the a). Such novels are disguised accounts where names and dates are changed and other degrees of artistic license are taken, but where there is a strong correspondence between them and reality (or at least, the authors side of the story).