A Quote by Roxane Gay

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.

Roxane Gay

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Roxane Gay
American - Writer

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.

Roxane Gay

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.

Jennifer Egan

I started writing nonfiction because nonfiction is well-suited to subjects that, if you wrote them as fiction, people would say, "I don't believe this. This is a little outlandish".

Debra Monroe

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.

Tom Bissell

I started off doing fiction in 1993. It didn't occur to me to do nonfiction because it wasn't a thing yet. So I was bumbling around, writing short stories, and then I took a nonfiction workshop, and I realized that this was what I was supposed to do.

Meghan Daum

I suppose writing nonfiction did prepare me for writing fiction. Whenever you write anything, you're honing your skills for writing anything else.

Elizabeth Berg

I love nonfiction the most. It's hard to find a good nonfiction story, and that's why I'm not as prolific, I guess, as a lot of people. They're hard to find. I love the nonfiction writer Ben Macintyre. I think he's terrific at the form of telling a story in a cinematic way.

Robert Kurson

Writing fiction is for me a fraught business, an occasion of daily dread for at least the first half of the novel, and sometimes all the way through. The work process is totally different from writing nonfiction. You have to sit down every day and make it up.

Joan Didion

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.

Geraldine Brooks

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.

Tom Bissell

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.

Chris Claremont

Because the kind of nonfiction I write has a plot, the events and transactions that make up a life, nonfiction offers me a break from plotting.

Kathryn Harrison

My job, in general, is nonfiction, so writing fiction was liberating. If you can't find the answer to something, you just make it up!

Jake Tapper

When I'm writing fiction I'm thinking, God, this is so hard - I have to make all this stuff up! I wish I were writing a nonfiction book where all the facts are laid out and I don't have to be so much at sea.

Douglas Preston

When you're researching things that have happened, the clear narrative arc is not there already. This is the problem of writing nonfiction for me - writing nonfiction which is about serious subjects and has serious political and social points to make, yet which is meant to be popular to a degree - what happens when the facts don't fit a convenient narrative arc? I guess that for a lot of nonfiction writers that is a central challenge.

Misha Glenny

I love playing with language and the rhythm of language - for some reason, this seems so much easier for me to do when I get to make things up than when writing nonfiction.

Uzodinma Iweala

A Quote by Roxane Gay

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