Nonfiction writers are the packhorses of literature. We're meant to carry the story. If we can make it up and down the mountain by a reliable if not scenic route, we have delivered. Technique is optional.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
Writing nonfiction is more like sculpture, a matter of shaping the research into the finished thing. Novels are like paintings, specifically watercolors. Every stroke you put down you have to go with. Of course you can rewrite, but the original strokes are still there in the texture of the thing.
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 nonfiction of various kinds has been instructive and entertaining as well as paying the rent.
Nonfiction means that our stories are as true and accurate as possible. Readers expect - demand - diligence.
I find that nonfiction writers are the likeliest to turn out interesting novels.
Nonfiction that uses novelistic devices and strategies to shape the work. That's material that I really like.
The challenge for a nonfiction writer is to achieve a poetic precision using the documents of truth but somehow to make people and places spring to life as if the reader was in their presence.
I've written fiction... but the nonfiction has always received the most attention.
Both types of books - fiction and nonfiction - are a search for story. As a writer and a reader, there's nothing I crave more than a good story!
Writing a nonfiction story is like cracking a safe. It seems impossible at the beginning, but once you're in, you're in.