Very seldom in my fiction have I directly used the stories people have told me. I think ripping off people's lives in fiction is dangerous. It also lacks imagination.
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.
Whether you've done anything wrong or not people will write whatever they want, so it's just a matter of not reading it, not buying into it, and hopefully the people that do read it realise that it's just fictional stories for entertainment.
It is so common to write autobiographical fiction in which your own experience is thinly disguised.
I think once you write fiction, you put it out, and it can be interpreted in a variety of ways, some of which are going to be shocking to the writer.
Most fiction comes from your experience.
For me, there's a fine line between telling a story that's fictional with lots of details and then removing yourself too much from it, so it's bloodless, a little too fictional.
Writing fiction is the 'job' I try to keep at the center of things. The movie stuff has been a wonderful accident, though not entirely bizarre, either, as I have done some work in film before, and even directed a ridiculous, cable-access feature back in my 20s.
I don't generally read a lot of fiction.
When I see things in the world that leap out at me, I want to make use of them in fiction. Maybe every writer does that. It just depends on what you claim or appropriate as yours.
I think you can do a lot with fiction, and in some cases you can say even more in fiction than you can in straight-up documentary journalism.