Writing: Thoughts on Nonfiction

Hey. Here's another post about something that relates to me. Sometimes I wonder if this blog isn't accessible because I write about myself so much. The writer of a good blog writes about themself in a way that universalizes their experience for a wider angle of the human experience. I'm not really sure that I do that.

Although I want to fix it, and I hope that I fix it as I write more, I also am the only reader of this blog. In that sense, then, my writings are doing exactly what they're supposed to—serve as a resource for me.

The genre of the book that I'm writing is nonfiction. Zinsser's book On Writing Well claims that nonfiction is just as valid a mode of writing as any other genre. I hadn't necessarily doubted this, but it was nice to hear. Zinsser gave the history of this preference, which was interesting. Americans stopped preferring the novel after WWII and the increase in television, and "[o]vernight, America became a fact-minded nation" (97). Because of this, the genre most demanded by the American people is nonfiction.

That preference is convenient for me, because the genre I'm interested in writing is nonfiction. I didn't realize the extreme difference between fiction and nonfiction until my first assignment was due in my Creative Writing Fiction class. Even though the class was called Fiction Workshop, I hadn't realized that I had to cover the page with words for a story completely made up from nothing. It was remarkably hard. I ended up writing a story about how hard it was to be a writer, which is exactly not the point. Fiction is supposed to be about real people. That story, I suppose, was about me—a real person—but I was getting too close to nonfiction. So I discovered my preference for nonfiction through a fiction class.

So I liked this chapter in On Writing Well because it gave so much validity to nonfiction. Zinsser writes that "the great preponderance of what writers now write and sell, what book and magazine publishers publish and what readers demand is nonfiction" (97). So I'll finish out with two other quotations from the book about nonfiction:

"there's no area of life—present or past—that isn't made accessible to ordinary readers by men and women writing with high seriousness and grace. Add to this literature of fact all the disciplines that were once regarded as academic, like anthropology and economics and social history, that have become the domain of nonfiction writers and of broadly curious readers" (98).

"Ultimately every writer must follow the path that feels most comfortable. For most people learning to write, that path is nonfiction. It enables them to write about what they know or can observe or can find out . . . They will write far more willingly about subjects that touch their own lives or that they have an aptitude for. Motivation is at the heart of writing. If nonfiction is where you do your best writing, or your best teaching of writing, don't be buffaloed into the idea that it's an inferior species. The only important distinction is between good and bad writing. Good writing is good writing, whatever form it takes and whatever we call it" (99).