There are writers who focus primarily on fiction while other focus primarily on non fiction. How do you know which is right for you? I write both fiction and non fiction and although non fiction has dominated my past, I believe that fiction will dominate my future.
Being an academic, you tend to focus on non fiction. I have published around four dozen scholarly papers, a couple of hundred book reviews, and the non fiction books I have written since retiring. However, I am slowly transitioning from non fiction to fiction. Eventually, I would like to see myself, primarily, as a writer of fiction.
This is a quirk of mine which I should explain. I spent the first two decades of my career writing software. (Writing software and writing prose, fiction or non fiction, have a lot more in common that one might expect. In all three cases, you are writing to achieve an end of some kind.) I got bored with software and moving into academia provided a much needed change with equally as much needed new challenges. It was almost like a change of identity. When I told academic colleagues that I used to be a practitioner, they were often quite surprised, if not stunned. I liked my new identity and the changes that came with it.
Then, as I approached retirement from academia, I wanted a similar change. I wanted to tell people that I used to be an academic and enjoy their surprised looks attesting to my identity change. To those people who have done the same thing for their entire career or, even, their entire lives I say "Hats off to you!" But, I could never do that. I get bored too easily.
Non fiction requires research and an ability or organize your material in a coherent fashion. If you already know something, that will make it easier. For example, I had thought long and hard about the Meaning of Life before I decided to write a book about it. Similarly with Predicting the Future. The book I am currently working on - Writing Stories to Explore Possible Worlds - began as the germ of an idea when I was interested in Computer Ethics decades ago. It blossomed further when I decided to teach a class in Writing Stories to Explore the Ethics of Technology. I developed a lot of notes for that class and still there was a lot to be done. If you enjoy researching, organizing your thoughts, pondering elusive concepts and then explaining it all in reasonably simple terms, then non fiction may be for you.
I am on my fourth non fiction book, Writing Stories to Explore Possible Worlds, the foundation of which was developed when I taught the writing class which I just mentioned . I enjoy writing non fiction because like to learn new things. I like to organize my thoughts. And I like to explain things in (hopefully) simple terms. I have one more non fiction book in the current batch. However, this batch is based on ideas that I investigated while I was an academic. I have three or four more ideas on the shelf which will require a lot of research as I am starting them from scratch. We'll see how much I enjoy non fiction when I have to do a lot of research and then organize my thoughts facing a (self imposed) deadline.
I also like writing fiction. Back in the 1990's, when I was learning to write fiction, I wrote 3 1/2 detective stories. The first one (Identity) is available on Kindle and the second one (Spider) will be out soon (if all goes well). (Am I getting a little carried away with these parenthetical remarks? Probably. But I like making them.) Writing fiction is a very different experience, for me, than writing non fiction. You basically get to make everything up, although there are some boundaries on this. For example, your characters must be believable and your plot must make sense as a narrative argument revealing an important aspect of the human experience. Still, you have a lot of freedom.
For me, the experience of writing fiction is a sublime experience. Personally, I like writing better than I like reading. I also feel like I learned a lot more writing fiction. For example, you cannot make your characters do anything they don't want to do. They will argue with you. The novels I wrote but did not publish back in the 1990's were written using what people call the pantser approach. That is, I wrote them by the seat of my pants. I would even say it was an extreme pantser approach. For, at least, the first one or two, I wrote a short chapter each week and sent it out to an email list. It is a high wire act. But, Dickens did it, and the writers of the many streaming series we have on TV today do it as well. My pantsing was not a high wire act like these, but I understand, to some extent what these writers must have gone through.
Recently, I decided to up my writing game from pantser to plotter and maybe even to designer. How this impacts the writing experience is hard to tell. It makes it sound like a lot more work. But, I suspect that, once you get used to it, plotting, or even designing, will work out best in the long run. I should explain what I mean by designing, but that would be a huge digression. So, for now I will say that it is more teleological than plotting in that it defines goals for the story. The plot, characters and setting are then created to satisfy those goals. I will explain that in more detail in a future post.
So, after all that, I think I can say that I am equally as comfortable with fiction and non fiction although I need to improve my skills in writing fiction in order to be at the same level. But therein lies, what I believe to be, the major issue most writers face when going back and forth between fiction and non fiction. They are likely to be better at one or the other. This could be due to more talent in one area or just more practice.
First let me point out the similarities. Both fiction and nonfiction require that you know something in order write. Both require that you organize your thoughts to make them coherent. Both require better than adequate writing skills. Both require that your writing has a feel of verisimilitude. Both allow the reader to learn something they did not know or reinforce something that they did know.
Now, some differences. Non fiction is based on facts about the world. Fiction is based on the experience of being human. Non fiction must be more precise while (limited) ambiguity makes fiction richer.
Why do writers often feel that they are either a fiction writer or a non fiction writer? I think that one starts out, for what ever reason, writing one or the other. They get better at it with practice. When they consider switching, they already have knowledge and experience of the current style and hope to hop into the new style with the confidence, ease and knowledge they have already acquired from the first. Let's say they started out with fiction and decided to give non fiction a try. It may turn out that non fiction is really their strong suit. But, the edge experience gave them in fiction leads them to believe that they will never achieve that level of confidence and ease in non fiction. Any time you go from something you know to something you don't know there will be a learning curve. And the same problem occurs whether one is going from fiction to non fiction or vice versa.
But, the real problem with switching from fiction to non fiction or vice versa is that we think of fiction and non fiction as two independent (mutually exclusive for the most part) categories rather than poles on a continuum. Pure fiction would be something to which a reader could not relate as it would have no basis in the human experience. Pure non fiction would be dry as dust seemingly irrelevant to readers who are not, themselves, dry as dust and irrelevant. The question is not whether to write fiction or non fiction.The question is - where on the continuum is the writer most comfortable? And, if the writer wishes to try something a little different, the questions become - which direction on the continuum do you move and how far?
If you are not convinced of this continuum idea, hang on. In the next post we will deconstruct fiction and non fiction providing further evidence that this dichotomy like so many others, (hot and cold, light and dark), are just linguistic conveniences which can be employed when they are convenient and dispensed with when they are not.
No comments:
Post a Comment