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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.

It's hard to do fiction and nonfiction simultaneously.

Fiction and nonfiction, for me, involve very different processes.

Everyone else thinks I'm a nonfiction writer. I think it's because my nonfiction is easier to find. But I write both in equal measure. I love writing fiction because I can totally lose myself, and I get to make up the rules of the world that I'm writing.

I've written fiction... but the nonfiction has always received the most attention.

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.

I tend to read more nonfiction, really, because when I'm writing I don't like to read other fiction.

But I don't read a lot of fiction. I prefer the nonfiction stuff.

I find that nonfiction writers are the likeliest to turn out interesting novels.

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.