A Quote by Darin Strauss
Not to be too 'Tale of Two Cities' about it, but I find writing a memoir easier than writing fiction, and more difficult.
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People really want to believe that there is no fiction. I think they find it much easier to imagine that novelists are writing memoirs, writing about their lives, because it's difficult to conceive that there's a great imaginary life in which you can participate.
I you're writing memoir, but it even comes up in fiction. People just assume that you're writing thinly veiled autobiography. And particularly, I think, for people of color, our work is always seen as kind of anthropological artifact regardless. So, there's always going to be that assumption, but even more so in a memoir because often the names aren't even changed. It is easier to verify.
I have to say that writing about my writing process is more daunting than writing non-fiction.
In a sense, journalism can be both helpful and detrimental to a writer of fiction because the kind of writing you need to do as a journalist is so different. It has to be clear, unambiguous, concise, and as a writer often you are trying to do things that are more ambiguous. I find that writing fiction is often an antidote to reading and writing too much journalism.
I think writing novels has taught me more about the value of patience and being organized. I've learned to use timelines and wikis to track decisions and make sure everything still fits together. It's both easier and harder than writing short fiction.
You write fiction, you're writing memoir, and when you're writing memoir, you're writing fiction.
I love the resource of the Internet. I use it all the time. Anything I'm writing - for example, if I'm writing a scene about Washington D.C. and I want to know where this monument is, I can find it right away, I can get a picture of the monument, it just makes your life so much easier, especially if you're writing fiction. You can check stuff so much quicker, and I think that's all great for writers.
It's an easier task to imagine someone's interior world when you feel quite distanced from them. In the same way that I find writing about Australia easier than writing about the UK because I don't have the reality of it in front of me to get me bogged down in trying to be exact.
My feeling is that writing Fantasy should be harder - not easier - than writing any other kind of fiction.
I find writing the darker side, writing tragedy, a lot easier than writing happiness. Happiness is just less psychologically compelling, isn't it?
Writing has taught me a lot - though far from everything - about writing, so as time has passed, it has become more pleasurable if not easier. I've done other things in life, but writing is by a factor of 10 the most difficult among them. And, of course, you never achieve what you set out to achieve, so you must keep on trying to do better.
While I love to read contemporary fiction, I'm not drawn to writing it. Perhaps it's because the former journalist in me is too inhibited by the press of reality; when I think about writing of my own time I always think about nonfiction narratives. Or perhaps it's just that I find the present too confounding.
Writing fiction is very different to writing non-fiction. I love writing novels, but on history books, like my biographies of Stalin or Catherine the Great or Jerusalem, I spend endless hours doing vast amounts of research. But it ends up being based on the same principle as all writing about people: and that is curiosity!
I guess it was easier for me to find my voice in poetry than it was in fiction. I'm working on fiction again, and I find it a lot more difficult. It's a struggle. At a certain point, you have your voice and you go to it every time, so it's not like reinventing the wheel. That's the way I see it at least.
Even though I always claimed that I didn't want to write about something - once I wasn't writing fiction, anyway; I think for me the change from fiction to poetry was that in fiction I was writing about something, in poetry I was writing something.
I enjoy writing, sometimes; I think that most writers will tell you about the agony of writing more than the joy of writing, but writing is what I was meant to do.
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