With the marketing pressures driving the book world today, it's much easier to get the author of a memoir on a television show than a serious novelist.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
A good TV writer needs all the same tricks a good novelist has.
My book sales make 'real writers' possible.
It's never really easy to be successful as a writer when you're trying to write literary fiction. You've already limited your readership limited by that choice.
I find that nonfiction writers are the likeliest to turn out interesting novels.
I mean, first, almost all writers these days teach because they don't make enough money publishing to live on, to support themselves - people like Tobias Wolff, Anne Beattie, Amy Hempel, Stuart Dybek; a lot of short story writers, for one thing.
I certainly grew up seeing more movies and television than I read books, but when it came time to do the thing itself you don't have to hire a lot of people to sit down and write a book, so that was the story-telling medium that was available to me.
I had been writing for the 'Late Show' for about four years when I started writing short stories. I had a blast writing the stories because I was writing in a voice more my own, as opposed to a man's. HBO ended up buying four of them. I think that had a direct impact on my decision to write a book.
If you create a good story that has a lot of story value... I think audiences like that. It's why they stick with the same TV show over and over.
Writing a novel is easier than writing a memoir; you are not constrained by the truth.
Writing a memoir is such a private, personal experience that it's intimidating to think of adapting it for television.