My First Blog: On Writing Nonfiction and Fiction
After years of writing and editing books and writing screenplays and magazine articles, I’ve finally applied fingers to computer keyboard to write my first blog.
I like the idea of sharing my experiences and points of view with people interested in the same subjects I’m interested in—writing, psychology, mindfulness, family dynamics, health, politics, the arts and sciences, and contemporary culture—and if you’re reading this, I hope that includes you. I also like the idea of finding out what you think via your comments on my blogs and your answers to questions that I’ll ask from time to time.
Besides introducing myself in this blog, I’m going to share my thoughts about writing, which has been my vocation since childhood.
In college, I took creative writing classes, wrote short stories and plays, and was feature editor for the college newspaper while simultaneously working as a stringer (reporter-on-call) for the Chicago Daily News. It was 1968, a time of political upheaval in America, especially on college campuses, so having a stringer on politically active local campuses was a necessity for newspapers. My first assignment for the News was to report on the elation of students at my school, the University of Chicago, when Lyndon Johnson, who refused to end the Vietnam War, despite massive protests against it, decided not to run for reelection, opening the door for an antiwar candidate to take his place on the Democratic ticket.
Writing Nonfiction
I loved being a reporter, and to me, all nonfiction writing is a type of reporting because writing nonfiction requires accuracy and clarity, the hallmarks of good reporting.
When I reported on the students’ reaction to President Johnson’s decision, my story was based on observing firsthand a large student demonstration celebrating his announcement; I described in detail the jubilant mood, the students’ shouts of triumph, the words on the signs they carried as they memorialized the departure from office of the man they held responsible for a war they saw as illegitimate and needlessly costing so many lives.
Often, reporting requires research to find out facts about an event that has occurred or is about to occur and additional research to find out if what first appears to be a fact is actually a fact. Frequently, this involves interviewing experts and others whose experience is relevant to the subject and doing further research to evaluate the experts’ opinions and to substantiate the information you’ve gathered.
For example, when I was writing a magazine article about education, the head of the parents’ organization at a school in Southern California told me there had been a race riot in the school cafeteria. The information upset me, but I had no reason to disbelieve her. By talking to teachers and students who had been in the cafeteria that day, however, I discovered that the first person I’d interviewed hadn’t been in the cafeteria and that, in fact, there hadn’t been a race riot; there had been tension but no riot.
It amazes me how frequently doing further research reveals results that are very different from, and sometimes contradictory to, the initial research. Another example of this occurred when I was writing my book Stepfathering. The inspiration for the book arose from my own experiences as a stepfather and my interest in learning and writing about parenting, which was the focus of my work at Parents magazine. My original plan was to interview 25 stepfathers. When I had talked with all 25 men, Bob Bender, my editor at Simon & Schuster, wisely requested that I interview another 25.
The first 25 men I interviewed answered my questions about their roles as stepfathers, their relationships with their wives and stepchildren and, if they had them, ex-wives and biological children from their former and/or current marriage in a largely positive way; the second 25 men had encountered far greater problems as stepfathers than the first 25, which they brought up as they answered the very same questions. By going beyond my initial research and increasing my sample to 50 stepfathers, I was able to write about stepfathering in a far more complex and nuanced way than I would have if I’d ended my research with the first 25.
Working with Experts
When I write a nonfiction book, generally I read intensively about the subject and I interview experts. In the case of coauthoring with an expert in a particular field, that expert is the primary author and I learn about the subject from him or her because the book is presenting that person’s perspective. When I coauthor a memoir, the subject is the life of the primary author, and my job is to learn about that life and to examine and explore the experiences about which the primary author tells me with as much insight as I can bring to the process. Sometimes this means asking probing questions about the author’s interpretation of events when I sense the possibility of a deeper or different interpretation. Writing or coauthoring nonfiction always requires educating myself before I can share the information with others.
In writing and coauthoring a nonfiction book, my goal is for readers to find the book engaging and to benefit from reading it. The benefit can be better understanding ourselves, our relationships, or what is transpiring in the world; it can be learning about a new subject, or a life experience that is similar to our own or one that is very different from it; or it can be learning about how we may improve our outlook on life, our health, or our finances.
Writing Fiction
Although fiction is, by definition, made up, to me good fiction is about the truth of how people—all of us—think and feel and experience life. It is about what we have in common and the traits that make us different and that fiction illuminates and helps us understand; it is about how we relate to each other and respond to events that, foreseen and unforeseen, may arise in our lives.
For me, the process of writing fiction is being alone at my computer, with my imagination and my life experiences and observations, and entering a state in which all of these are acutely alive for me to draw from in creating characters and stories that seem as true and real to me as life itself and that I hope will seem equally true and real to whoever reads my work.
Why I Love Writing
Writing both nonfiction and fiction is an all-absorbing process; it is a process of finding not just any words or approximately the right words but the precise words that express the truth of what I am writing. Paradoxically, while writing is very much an internal process, the process of writing takes me out of myself and makes me a conduit for communicating something practical or illuminating or moving or inspiring or funny or all of the above. For me, it is a joy to write and an equal joy to help others realize their visions in words.
