I am opposed to autobiographies, mainly because most autobiographies lie.
I'd never written nonfiction about the war on drugs, but I know a tremendous amount about it: I taught a class on it for seven years. I was putting into words the stuff I was teaching, and I was writing it up and thought, "Dude, you're writing a book."
When I wrote nonfiction, my best work was the really personal stuff.
I got this idea of doing a really serious big work-it would be precisely like a novel, with a single difference: Every word of it would be true from beginning to end.
I don't like to read nonfiction. To me, fact is something I can look up.
And there are two types of stories. One type is one's own story. The other type is telling the stories of others. Thanks to this genre, writers of nonfiction can now use the tools of the reporter, the points of view and ear for dialog of a novelist, and the passion and wordplay of the poet.
Whether it's fiction or nonfiction, writing takes me to another world.
Prose gets divided up into fiction and nonfiction and short fiction and long fiction and autobiographical nonfiction and so on. Poetry can do any of those things except with the added definition of intensified formal pressure.
You do nonfiction, you get to meet people you would not normally meet.
With nonfiction, I go in trying to be really honest about what my preconceptions are.
I don't actually have a one wellspring of inspiration. Though I'm most often inspired while reading - both fiction and nonfiction.
Christopher Hitchens's autobiography, 'Hitch 22', is a poignant read and very interesting because I have a very poor knowledge of recent political history - or, for that matter, distant political history.
But I don't read a lot of fiction. I prefer the nonfiction stuff.
I wanted to be a writer, but I kind of wanted to be a fiction writer someday, like 20 - 25 years down the line. I never thought I'd write a nonfiction memoir about Iraq.
I often read nonfiction, and some of my ideas begin there.
Nonfiction is more personal for me. It's more personal in that it's more direct, and actually it's always been more direct, even when I first started doing pieces.
It's rare for me to read any fiction. I almost only read nonfiction. I don't believe in guilty pleasures, I only believe in pleasures. People who call reading detective fiction or eating dessert a guilty pleasure make me want to puke.
We approach nonfiction at a much different level than we approach fiction or poetry or drama: that there's almost no room for metaphor. We expect the "I" in any nonfiction text to be an autobiographical "I" when there is a history in the essay of the "I" being a persona.
Late summer is perfect for classic mysteries - think of Raymond Chandler's hot Santa Anas and Agatha Christie's Mediterranean resorts - while big ambitious works of nonfiction are best approached in September and early October, when we still feel energetic and the grass no longer needs to be cut.
I have my ideas of what a good documentary is, but drama is a different animal because you're arranging everything.
I like documentaries because there's nothing to nitpick or criticize about scenes if they aren't just right. It's about honesty and real-life circumstances coming out. Granted it can be swayed by how people tell that story, but overall, I like it because it is true.
Medicine, you see, is my first love; whether I write fiction or nonfiction, and even when it has nothing to do with medicine, it's still about medicine. After all, what is medicine but life plus? So I write about life.
I am now reading Cooper's Naval History which I find very interesting.
I like fiction and the kind of history that gives the grace and flavor of fiction to the past. No bloviation on current events, please. I can write that junk myself.
The American war-writing tradition is a proud one and booming in this era of the Global War on Terror - at least in the nonfiction realm. Hundreds of memoirs and press accounts from Iraq and Afghanistan have been published since 9/11.
