I contend that in the kind of nonfiction I write, and that other people also pursue, anything is permissible provided the reader knows what you're taking liberties with.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
Writing a nonfiction story is like cracking a safe. It seems impossible at the beginning, but once you're in, you're in.
People respect nonfiction but they read novels.
I read little nonfiction, but I have no boundaries about the fiction I relish. The only unfailing criterion is that I can hitch my heart to the imagined world and read on.
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.
Writing nonfiction of various kinds has been instructive and entertaining as well as paying the rent.
I can write with authority only about what I know well, which means that I end up using surface details of my own life in my fiction.
When you deal with nonfiction you deal with human characters.
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.
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.
For some reason, I seem to be bothered whenever I see acts of injustice and assaults on people's civil liberties. I imagine what I write in the future will follow in that vein. Whether it's fiction or non-fiction.