Fiction or Nonfiction

[George Wilder Jr.]

For me, I really enjoy inventing every piece of the puzzle in a work of fiction. I love it. Every writer is different. No one writer thinks the same. What works for him may not work for her in terms of how to put a story together. Fiction for me is not work. It really is fun. Non-fiction is work, there is mountains of research that goes into every page. Inventing colorful characters are a breeze for me.

[I. J. Parker]

True enough. Though I get to do the research, too.

[Dawn M. Kravagna]

I agree. I wish a had a biz manager to do the "business/promotion end" so that I could focus on the fun part. I even enjoy editing my work. I have learned humility by the errors others have found in my work. One lesson: Don't edit when you're recovering from major surgery. The anesthetic really wreaks havoc with your brain! None of the doctors or nurses warned me--till I started mentioning the mental fog. And I am even enjoying the challenge of meeting a word limit. I am 700 words over in my current short story but know I'll somehow find those cuts, because I've done it before. Glad you enjoy the process. I've read some novels recently that make me wonder that the author was just trying to get a book out, but wasn't delighting in the actual process of creating the best story they could.
It's really about the characters, isn't it? And finding ones you enjoy working with.

[Eric Stone]

I find fiction a lot more challenging than non-fiction. That could be because of my background as a journalist. But with non-fiction, to me at least, it's all about the reporting. You do the research, enormous amounts of it, and eventually it achieves critical mass and the book sort of writes itself. You don't have to worry about whether or not it even makes sense, because sometimes truth really is stranger than fiction. If something in non-fiction seems completely absurd, the answer to that is: I did my research, that's the way it really happened no matter how strange it seems.

On the other hand, fiction has to make sense. It needs internal logic and order. Even the wildest fantasy requires something that makes sense of it. When I'm reading a novel, if I get to something that makes no sense to me at all, I have no patience for it. I just figure it's bad or lazy writing. In fiction you can't get away with falling back on "that's how it really happened."