Reason 1 to write fiction: The truth

A few weeks ago on his late-night talk show, Joey Reynolds and I had a friendly discussion about why I write fiction. It went something like this:

Joey: Why write fiction? Fiction sucks.
Me: Except for mine.
Joey: Well yeah. But other fiction sucks.

Having written nonfiction, it would be kind of crazy to attack it. (And since I was on his show promoting Rangers at Dieppe, a nonfiction book, it would have been really stupid, even at like three in the morning.) A good nonfiction story or book is a good story or a book.

But you can do things in fiction that are either impossible or very hard in nonfiction. Nonfiction requires a strict adherence to the truth of specific, surface things. The story is limited by what is in front of you.

Fiction lets you tell the truth in a much deeper way. If it’s a well-written book, it’s the only way to tell that story.

To use one of my books as an example, Leopards Kill talked about what was going on in Afghanistan several years before it was possible, let alone fashionable, to do so. (I wrote it two years before it was published; it’s only in the last few months that what is going on there has started to come out.) That book is about a lot of other things besides Afghanistan, but if I’d done a nonfiction book on that topic – as I’d once been considering – I wouldn’t have been able to say what I did there. Unless I distorted the surface reality to the point where it was no longer nonfiction.

(to be continued)