Nonfiction brought me back to earth and sobered me up whenever it seemed like I'd become too drunk on the lives and loves of imaginary people, but that doesn't mean it was any less thrilling or transporting, although it was often more illuminating.
Maybe I have a one-track mind, but the best writers and thinkers are focusing on nonfiction these days; this is the genre where a writer can make a mark and change an aspect of the world - much more so than in fiction.
My theory for nonfiction is that nobody can be free of some kind of conceptions about whatever story they're writing. But if you can find a way to build those into the story, then the story becomes a process of deconstructing and heightening and sometimes changing those notions and that makes dramatic tension. The initial statement of your position, and then letting reality act on you to change it, is pretty good storytelling.
I'm not a poet, but I was in the poetry program. And I'm also not much of a nonfiction writer, at least not in the standard sense of nonfiction, nor especially in the way we were thinking about nonfiction back then, in the late 90s.
But I don't read a lot of fiction. I prefer the nonfiction stuff.
I could talk more directly in a nonfiction voice than I could in fiction.
In Bosnian, there's no distinction in literature between fiction and nonfiction; there's no word describing that.
The myth of objectivity made nonfiction increasingly unread. In feature articles, we could be playful in the opening and clever in the end but in the middle it was back to the boring basics.
When you deal with nonfiction you deal with human characters.
I enjoy doing the research of nonfiction; that gives me some pleasure, being a detective again.
I write funny nonfiction adventure books about crazy, serious worlds.
I really enjoy doing both, but I didn't write nonfiction until 1994.
Nonfiction, for the most part, is facts, and it's "how I was mistreated. I was mistreated. Were you mistreated? Weren't we all mistreated?"
I often read nonfiction, and some of my ideas begin there.
Nonfiction requires enormous discipline. You construct the terms of your story, and then you stick to them.
I still believe nonfiction is the most important literature to come out of the second half of the 20th century.
There's no division on my bookshelf between fiction and nonfiction. As far as I'm concerned, fiction is about the truth.
Movies feel like work, and reading fiction feels like work, whereas reading nonfiction feels like pleasure.
Fiction and nonfiction, for me, involve very different processes.
We like nonfiction, and we live in fictitious times.