It's hard to do fiction and nonfiction simultaneously.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
Fiction is harder for me than nonfiction - more gratifying, as a result, when it succeeds.
Fiction and nonfiction, for me, involve very different processes.
But I don't read a lot of fiction. I prefer the nonfiction stuff.
I tend to read more nonfiction, really, because when I'm writing I don't like to read other fiction.
With fiction, you can take something that bothers you, or that you don't have in clear focus, and you can put it under as much stress as you want. Really get underneath the skin. With nonfiction, you're restricted to what happened.
Nonfiction is both easier and harder to write than fiction. It's easier because the facts are already laid out before you, and there is already a narrative arc. What makes it harder is that you are not free to use your imagination and creativity to fill in any missing gaps within the story.
Writing fiction is for me a fraught business, an occasion of daily dread for at least the first half of the novel, and sometimes all the way through. The work process is totally different from writing nonfiction. You have to sit down every day and make it up.
Writing a nonfiction story is like cracking a safe. It seems impossible at the beginning, but once you're in, you're in.
Ah, well, I have no talent for nonfiction, that's my problem.
I read the same amount of nonfiction and fiction.