When it comes to memoir, we want to catch the author in a lie. When we read fiction, we want to catch the author telling the truth.
A blend of fact and fiction has been used in various forms since the dawn of creative writing, starting with sagas and epic poems.
I like to blur the line between fact and fiction, but not to condescend to the reader by enmeshing her/him into some sort of a postmodern coop.
File under "Hard Truths": the creative muse is fiction. If you sit around waiting for the right moment to create, you will die waiting.
I've written six novels and four pieces of nonfiction, so I don't really have a genre these days.
There can be nothing more humiliating for a writer of fiction to have to do than restate a case that has already been made.
If you think of a work of fiction as a kind of scale model of the world, then the positive valences - where things turn out better than you thought they would - ought to be in there somewhere, too.
Maybe the example of Southern fiction writing has been so powerful that Southern poets have sort of keyed themselves to that.
I have tread all three of his books and they held me spellbound interesting story. Its fiction based on fact...mmm I like!
Individuals who frequently read fiction seem to be better able to understand other people, empathize with them and see the world from their perspective.
Reading non-fiction without writing notes is like chewing without swallowing. You will get the taste of it but digest nothing
We fiction writers are a brazen lot, are we not? For we, in our passion, embrace just enough truth to consecrate our delicately contrived lies.
Don't believe everything you read or hear, remember a large part of our world is made up of fiction!!
Whenever I have had to write fiction, I've always had to invent a character who roughly has my background.
I think of myself as writing realist American fiction. 'Cynical but hopeful' wouldn't be the worst thing I've ever been called.
Short stories are fiction's R & D department, and failed or less-than-conclusive experiments are not just to be expected but to be hoped for.
The limited fictions used to sell the lives of public figures often form a cloudy chiaroscuro that covers their true humanity.
All of fiction is truthful. What you create is your own truth and no one can take that away or change it.
There is an element of autobiography in all fiction in that pain or distress, or pleasure, is based on the author's own. But in my case that is as far as it goes.
If you write genre fiction, you follow the rules, and you have to follow them because readers expect that.
Can't a rapper insist, like other artists, on a fictional reality, in which he is somehow still on the corner, despite occupying the penthouse suite?
