Recently our own Big Al wrote a post about non-fiction and how it is largely missing in the annals of IU. True enough, most of our emphasis here is on fiction. Some of us, however, have waded into the cool waters of non-fiction, and I for one found the experience totally different than crafting a novel.
One thing I’ve learned is that fiction and non-fiction have very different roles. Broadly speaking, fiction’s purpose is to provide entertainment while non-fiction’s purpose is to provide information. These two things are not mutually exclusive, of course. If you read the novel Congo, you no doubt learned quite a bit about extracting data from digital video. By the same token, a non-fiction book like American Sniper is certainly entertaining in a dramatic, thought-provoking way.
Non-fiction, like fiction, can be broken down into several sub-genres. Continue reading “When a Novelist Writes Non-Fiction”
I recently wrote a post instructing 
“There’s two ways of disliking poetry; one way is to dislike it, the other is to read Pope,” said Oscar Wilde.