Switching from Nonfiction to Fiction

“Writing nonfiction is different from writing fiction. There’s a lot of overlap of course, but it’s still different. So don’t be surprised if your process is different, too.”

I said that to a convention-acquaintance several decades back. She’d published a lot of articles, but had this fantasy novel she wanted to write, and she’d come to me for some basic advice.

A couple of years later, I ran into her again, and asked how the novel was coming. It wasn’t. So we went out for tea to figure out what the problem was. She explained in detail all the different things she’d been doing – writing bits and pieces of scenes as they came to her, making detailed character sketches, attempting to fly by the seat of her pants and failing. None of them sounded much like her.

Finally I asked, “When you write nonfiction articles, how do you work?”

She said that she started with what she wanted to talk about, and then figured out where to go for more information, and then who to interview, and then how to put it all together in an interesting way.

“None of these things you’ve been talking about doing for your fiction sounds anything like that,” I said. “Why haven’t you tried working that way?”

“But you told me it would be different!”

Well, yes, I had. But I hadn’t gone into detail about how it would be different (mainly because I couldn’t – it’s never the same). Also “Don’t be surprised if your process is different” does not mean “Don’t even bother to try working the way you always have, because you can’t write fiction the same way you write nonfiction.” At least, it doesn’t mean that to me. Evidently it did to her.

Nonfiction requires factual content: what the writer says about people, places, events, or information is supposed to be true to the best of the writer’s knowledge at the time. Fiction requires whatever the writer wants it to require; it can include verifiable facts, but mostly it is about people and events that aren’t real and never happened, places that don’t exist (or don’t exist in the way the writer describes), and information that the writer made up out of his/her head.

I’ve known a number of nonfiction writers who’ve switched to writing fiction, and from where I sit, this fundamental disconnect between fiction and nonfiction has affected each of them … but in a different way for each writer. The  former technical writer produces fiction in the sort of sumptuous, complex prose that one can’t indulge in when explaining how to access the features in a program. The former newspaper reporter whose topic, length, and content were almost always assigned by someone else does most of her fiction by the seat of her pants. (This has happened to more than one person.) The freelance article writer uses much the same process for her fiction as she used to use for her nonfiction, but she lets her backbrain pick the characters and topics instead of always starting with the question “What will sell?” (Yes, even though she still needs to make a living by selling her writing.)

In other words, writing fiction is not the same as writing nonfiction, but which pieces of fiction writing are going to be different vary, depending on the writer, the writer’s experiences with nonfiction and fiction, and the story the writer is writing. Some things will be the same, and other things will be different. If one religiously applies (or religiously avoids using) anything one has learned by writing nonfiction to write fiction (or vice versa), one is, at best, going to miss out on some techniques or processes that will make one’s life easier and one’s fiction (or nonfiction) more effective. At worst, one ends up stalled dead in the water like my convention-acquaintance.

This leads to the inevitable conclusion that judicious application of the things one needs/has learned for one sort of writing can benefit the other sort enormously. Sometimes, this is fairly easy to spot. Techniques such as invoking multiple senses to create a more vivid description work in both fiction and nonfiction. Sometimes, you have to stop and think a minute before you realize that you should figure out exactly how two different news articles spin the exact same fact into completely opposite conclusions, because you can use that same technique in your novel when your POV characters on either side react to some event.

Which leads further, to the notion that it might be valuable to study different types of writing to see how they get the effects they get, and whether their techniques can be usefully applied to whatever one is writing oneself. In my experience, there are two ways to go about this: either read a lot of stuff that isn’t what you are actually writing, or take a class.

The vast majority of fiction writers I know read a lot of nonfiction – from current news to science papers to research on wolf behavior or the history of the Byzantine Empire. Half of it is research, half of it is just part of everyday life, and half of it is because we’re all intellectual pack-rats, squirreling away information that might possibly be the seed for a future novel. (Yes, I know that’s three halves. I’m a fantasy writer. Deal with it.)

Nonfiction writers often seem to have a harder time. Much as they love fiction and want to write it, the only ones for whom it’s a regular part of their job are English professors and book reviewers. Those who don’t actually love fiction, who see it mainly as a writing occupation with higher status than “reporter” or “technical writer,” rarely manage to make the change.