I still believe nonfiction is the most important literature to come out of the second half of the 20th century.
It's the technique, I think, of writing a novel that is difficult for a nonfiction writer.
Writing nonfiction is more like sculpture, a matter of shaping the research into the finished thing.
You can tell a more over-the-top incredible story if you use a nonfiction form.
In fiction, when you paint yourself into a corner, you can write a pair of suction cups onto the bottoms of your shoes and walk up the wall and out the skylight and see the sun breaking through the clouds. In nonfiction, you don't have that luxury.
the challenge of nonfiction is to marry art and truth.
In nonfiction, you have that limitation, that constraint, of telling the truth.
People respect nonfiction but they read novels.
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.
In this time of the Internet and nonfiction, to be on an actual bookshelf in an actual bookstore is exciting in itself.
My platform has been to reach reluctant readers. And one of the best ways I found to motivate them is to connect them with reading that interests them, to expand the definition of reading to include humor, science fiction/fantasy, nonfiction, graphic novels, wordless books, audio books and comic books.
Nonfiction speaks to the head. Fiction speaks to the heart. Poetry speaks to the soul. It's the essence of beauty. The essence of pain. It pleases the eye and the ear.
I come from a little island with the Caribbean Sea on one side and the Atlantic Ocean on the other. I come from, really, nowhere, and for me, the fiction and the nonfiction, creative or otherwise, all come from the same place.
I think the goal with any writing, but especially narrative nonfiction, is to put the blockade of putting your thoughts in this unnatural medium of print and then trying to reach through that and actually convey what's going on, what you think, and make people laugh and recognize themselves while doing it. Definitely the laughing thing.
I am consumed, or I have been consumed, with these issues of motherhood and the way we act out societal expectations and roles. So both my nonfiction and my fiction have been pretty much exclusively about that.
There is always a certain leap of faith that editors have made with their nonfiction writers. If the trust is broken, things can get very embarrassing for the writers and the publisher.
One of underestimated tasks in nonfiction writing is to impose narrative shape on an unwieldy mass of material.
There is no longer any such thing as fiction or nonfiction; there's only narrative.
I like nonfiction books about people with wretched lives.
I have written two nonfiction books, I'm embarrassed to say.
My favourite all-time work of fiction: Lord of the Rings. My favourite all-time nonfiction book: Guns, Germs, and Steel. Ask me again next week, you'll get a different answer.
I enjoy doing the research of nonfiction; that gives me some pleasure, being a detective again.
Writing fiction is for me a fraught business, an occasion of daily dread for at least the first half of the novel, and sometimes all the way through. The work process is totally different from writing nonfiction. You have to sit down every day and make it up.
I tend to read more nonfiction, really, because when I'm writing I don't like to read other fiction.
I like to get paid for doing basic research, so it's pleasant to write some nonfiction about it.
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