PF Kluge, nonfiction

a novel is the first thing that occurs to me. But not—not always—the last. I’ve learned that the devices of fiction—the moods, the riffs, the scenes and the characters—can be put at the service of a story, richly peopled, well-located. And it has to involve a discovery, which the narrator—usually, the author—shares with the reader. And last, the author has to be willing to live and breathe the subject for years without losing his or her early enthusiasm for it.

In some ways, writing fiction and writing non-fiction are indistinguishable: author sits at typewriter, filling up page after page. From a distance, who can tell the difference? In other ways, fiction and non-fiction vary greatly. In fiction , all things are possible, anything goes, if you can make it work. Every page is blank. In non-fiction, it’s as if the pages are black: an impacted mass of real people and places, things that happened. The writing is about choice, selection, arrangement. You’re dealing with live ammunition: that makes it tricky, deciding what goes in the lines you write and what goes between them. As careful as you may be, you can be sure that someone will not like your book. Guaranteed. And someone will suggest that they could have done better. And your response should be to invite them to proceed, to promise to read their work—if published—and to show them at least as much generosity and class as they have shown you.