A Quote by Lisa Scottoline

The truth is that every writer, whether it's fiction or nonfiction, is trying to write something truly original and that's what I think I'm doing. — © Lisa Scottoline
The truth is that every writer, whether it's fiction or nonfiction, is trying to write something truly original and that's what I think I'm doing.
I remember reading an interview with a writer who said that in nonfiction if you have one lie it sort of messes it up. But in fiction the real details give you so much more credibility, because people do so much research just to write fiction. In fiction you're trying to recreate something lifelike.
I view myself as a fiction writer who just happens to write nonfiction. I think I look at the world through a fiction-writer's eyes.
I write fiction longhand. That's not so much about rejecting technology as being unable to write fiction on a computer for some reason. I don't think I would write it on a typewriter either. I write in a very blind gut instinctive way. It just doesn't feel right. There's a physical connection. And then in nonfiction that's not the case at all. I can't even imagine writing nonfiction by hand.
I find now I'm reading a lot more nonfiction, simply because every time I read fiction, I think I can write it better. But every time I read nonfiction, I learn things.
I think, about the distinction between fiction and nonfiction. Fiction is not really about anything: it is what it is. But nonfiction - and you see this particularly with something like the BBC Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction - nonfiction we define in relation to what it's about. So, Stalingrad by Antony Beevor. It's "about" Stalingrad. Or, here's a book by Claire Tomalin: it's "about" Charles Dickens.
Everyone else thinks I'm a nonfiction writer. I think it's because my nonfiction is easier to find. But I write both in equal measure. I love writing fiction because I can totally lose myself, and I get to make up the rules of the world that I'm writing.
My fiction-writing DNA shows in how I think about prose, how I think about the page, how I think nonfiction stories should work. And every piece of nonfiction I write, I want it to have fictional texture.
I'm bothered, as a reader, when I feel the writer is filling in too much. Again, whether it's nonfiction or fiction, I think writers are providing a kind of template or platform for thinking and imagining.
No one can teach writing, but classes may stimulate the urge to write. If you are born a writer, you will inevitably and helplessly write. A born writer has self-knowledge. Read, read, read. And if you are a fiction writer, don't confine yourself to reading fiction. Every writer is first a wide reader.
No one can teach writing, but classes may stimulate the urge to write. If you are born a writer, you will inevitably and helplessly write. A born writer has self-knowledge. Read, read, read. And if you are a fiction writer, dont confine yourself to reading fiction. Every writer is first a wide reader.
Prose gets divided up into fiction and nonfiction and short fiction and long fiction and autobiographical nonfiction and so on. Poetry can do any of those things except with the added definition of intensified formal pressure.
As every writer knows... there is something mysterious about the writer's ability, on any given day, to write. When the juices are flowing, or the writer is 'hot', an invisible wall seems to fall away, and the writer moves easily and surely from one kind of reality to another... Every writer has experienced at least moments of this strange, magical state. Reading student fiction one can spot at once where the power turns on and where it turns off, where the writer writes from 'inspiration' or deep, flowing vision, and where he had to struggle along on mere intellect.
I'm trying to speak--to write-the truth. I"m trying to be clear. I'm not interested in being fancy, or even original. Clarity and truth will be plenty, if I can only achieve them.
I don't believe a poet has a better hold on truth or morality than a fiction writer has. And I don't think a fiction writer has anything over a journalist. It's all about the good word, properly inserted.
I believe every time you film anybody, you create reality with that person - whether it's fiction or nonfiction.
It seemed to me that I could write commercial fiction. I wasn't sure whether I could, or whether I wanted to write serious fiction at that point. So I said, 'Let me try something else,' and I wrote a mystery - but I didn't know much about it.
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