I finish two books a week, mostly nonfiction.
I like to get paid for doing basic research, so it’s pleasant to write some nonfiction about it.
Even if your novel occurs in an unfamiliar setting in which all the customs and surroundings will seem strange to your reader, it’s still better to start with action. The reason for this is simple. If the reader wanted an explanation of milieu, he would read nonfiction. He doesn’t want information. He wants a story.
I did not set out to write another novel. One day I sat down with the thought of trying my hand at a piece of nonfiction, a personal memoir of youth, but over the next several weeks, without intending it, the work began evolving into what has become ‘Tomcat in Love.’
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.
You do nonfiction, you get to meet people you would not normally meet.
Nonfiction that uses novelistic devices and strategies to shape the work. That’s material that I really like.
Tina Fey, a performer and head writer for ‘Saturday Night Live,’ has deftly adapted Rosalind Wiseman’s nonfiction dissection of teenage girl societal interaction, ‘Queen Bees and Wannabes: Helping Your Daughter Survive Cliques, Gossip, Boyfriends and Other Realities of Adolescence.’
I never really understood the idea that nonfiction ought to be this dispensary of data that we have at the moment.
I read nonfiction almost exclusively – both for research and also for pleasure. When I read fiction, it’s almost always in the thriller genre, and it needs to rivet me in the opening few chapters.
When I’m writing fiction I’m thinking, God, this is so hard – I have to make all this stuff up! I wish I were writing a nonfiction book where all the facts are laid out and I don’t have to be so much at sea.
I don’t read for amusement, I read for enlightenment. I do a lot of reviewing, so I have a steady assignment of reading. I’m also a judge for the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards, which gives awards to literature and nonfiction.
I believe every time you film anybody, you create reality with that person – whether it’s fiction or nonfiction.
What I don’t like is constructing a book that fits in with any kind of generic template, whether it’s fiction or nonfiction.
The truth is that every writer, whether it’s fiction or nonfiction, is trying to write something truly original and that’s what I think I’m doing.
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 always considered myself a nonfiction artist.
Writing nonfiction, you’re responsible to posterity, to history, to other people because the events happened, and you feel responsible to record them as they happened.
In terms of going back and forth between fiction and nonfiction – in which I’ll include memoir, biography, and true crime – is that one relieves the other.
I used to distinguish between my fiction and nonfiction in terms of superiority or inferiority.
In Bosnian, there’s no distinction in literature between fiction and nonfiction; there’s no word describing that.
Generally, I read nonfiction. There’s very little fiction that I enjoy enough to spend my time reading. I am generally a nonfiction guy.
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.
It was David McCullough’s ‘The Johnstown Flood’ that lit my imagination as to how I might one day go about writing book-length nonfiction, though my favorite of his books is ‘Mornings on Horseback,’ about the young Teddy Roosevelt.
I have this long-running idea that the distinction between fiction and nonfiction is not just, ‘Did it happen or didn’t it happen?’ It’s one of form.
I completely identify with finding freedom in boundaries. That’s why I tend to have more freedom when I write nonfiction over fiction: because I’m running up against actuality and beholden to the truth in a different way.
I often read nonfiction with a pencil in hand. I love the feel, the smell, the design, the weight of a book, but I also enjoy the convenience of my Kindle – for travel and for procuring a book in seconds.
My work was entirely nonfiction.
People respect nonfiction but they read novels.
I read almost exclusively nonfiction when I read, because even though it’s harder to find a great true story, when you find one, the idea that it actually happened is immensely powerful.That’s what moves me the most.
From an early age, my favorite thing to read was novels. For years, when I was writing only nonfiction, still I was reading almost exclusively novels. It’s weird to be producing something that you don’t consume. It feels really alienating.
I tend to read more nonfiction, really, because when I’m writing I don’t like to read other fiction.
I realized I couldn’t have one foot in the fiction world and one foot in the nonfiction world, which is why ‘Here I Go Again’ is so not me. I didn’t graduate from high school in the ’90s, I never listened to metal music, and I don’t time travel.
When I’m writing fiction, I read nonfiction or biographies. Now I’m watching very old movies or old foreign films. I don’t immerse myself in whatever’s going on in whatever area I’m working in.
The expectations for a nonfiction writer are awful high.
I read all of the nonfiction that I could find on Chechnya, and all the while, I was searching for a novel that was set there. I couldn’t find a single novel written in English that was set in the period of the two most recent Chechen wars.
I knew that a zombie book would not particularly appeal to some of my previous readers, but it was artistically compelling, and being able to do a short nonfiction book about poker was really fun and great.
I think Henry Miller has had huge influence not because he wrote about sex, but because the memoir or the nonfiction novel has become such a monumental force in American publishing, if not in literature.
Everyone else thinks I’m a nonfiction writer. I think it’s because my nonfiction is easier to find. But I write both in equal measure. I love writing fiction because I can totally lose myself, and I get to make up the rules of the world that I’m writing.
On ‘Catfish,’ I’m a co-host and onscreen cameraman, maybe the second onscreen cameraman after Wes Bentley’s turn in ‘American Beauty,’ which is funny and ironic. But before that, I’d been doing a lot of creative nonfiction.
I often say flippantly that the short story is… shorter; you can be done with it more easily. It’s much less of a commitment of time and energy than a big project like a novel or long nonfiction book.
I first moved to New York, like many twenty-somethings before me, to be a grown up. I was attending an MFA program in the city, starting work at a nonfiction imprint at a reputable publishing house, and excited about being on track to becoming the writer I had always wanted to be.
I’ve written many nonfiction books, but that’s a special gift.
I’m really interested in the new nonfiction. I think the hyper-digital culture has changed our brains in ways we cannot begin to fathom.
Endnotes, often confused with footnotes that live at the bottom of a page, is that lump of text at the end of the book, sometimes even relegated to a tiny font size. They’re often forgotten but, in nonfiction, particularly history books, can offer a fascinating footprint into the author’s research, a joyful, geeky abyss.
Beast Books will be longer than conventional long-form magazine articles but shorter than conventional nonfiction books. They will be published digitally and distributed on multiple platforms, and will soon thereafter be available as handy paperbacks.
I have three libraries. As a gift, a friend alphabetized and organized my main library of novels, history books, and nonfiction. Then I have a photo-book collection. Then there’s this nearly whole room of my childhood books. I’ve also got cookbooks and a big collection of horse-related books.
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