I don't do nonfiction anymore. Eventually, you just feel constrained by the facts. You want to go where the words take you, and people's actual lives don't always conform. And you can't know them that well.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
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.
Every time I get through the work on a book of nonfiction, I say I'll never do it again; it takes so much out of you.
Writing a nonfiction story is like cracking a safe. It seems impossible at the beginning, but once you're in, you're in.
The primary goal of the so-called nonfiction text is to relay the facts of an event - the facts about a person, the facts of history - which is not why I turned to this genre.
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.
Ah, well, I have no talent for nonfiction, that's my problem.
Fiction is harder for me than nonfiction - more gratifying, as a result, when it succeeds.
When you deal with nonfiction you deal with human characters.
People respect nonfiction but they read novels.
What I felt was, if you spend your life just writing fiction, you are going to falsify your material. And the fictional form was going to force you to do things with the material, to dramatize it in a certain way. I thought nonfiction gave one a chance to explore the world, the other world, the world that one didn't know fully.
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