Let me start with an important confession: I’m not one for writing nonfiction. I love to write, but that love is reserved for things I make up. To stories. To prose whose veracity no one can legitimately find issue with. If I write a tale of a giant pink elephant who’s a nuclear physicist by day and a caped crusader combating organized crime at night—organized crime made even more dastardly than usual by the participation of sentient anarchist furniture—well, it’s my story. You’re free to not like it. Advisably, you really shouldn’t like that story. But you can’t complain that it’s not true. Because, of course, it’s not true. It’s fiction.
Start with Fiction
Type “fiction” into Google’s search window, and at least in the United States on an evening in the spring of 2024, you’ll find two definitions. The first: literature in the form of prose that describes imaginary events and people. And the second: something that is invented or untrue. See a pattern? Not true. Made up. Nothing you can hold me to. You’re getting a story, and that’s all. Far-fetched and poorly conceived, but that elephant is all I promised. Even if my story is a screenplay for one of the best sci-fi movies you’ll ever see, it’s still all just made up.
(Google, by the way, gets these definitions from a place called Oxford Languages, a place I hear is a leading publisher of dictionaries.)
Nonfiction, on the other hand, is more tricky. It can involve facts. Claims of facthood invite scrutiny. Competing alleged facts are bandied around. People disagree. Lawyers get involved. Potential disaster waiting to happen. So I usually avoid nonfiction. But there’s this blog phenomenon. Blogs are nonfiction as far as I can discern. And it turns out some people—bless their kind souls and errant taste in fiction—like my stories. Like them enough that they want to know about my writing. People have convinced me, against my better judgment, to start a blog and share my thoughts and ideas on what I’ve written, what I’m writing, and on writing in general. So here it is. A blog called…
Notes from my Writing Desk
These blog posts will appear roughly fortnightly. I will write about writing and the process of writing—my own writing and that of others. I will likely often employ a less serious tone, but I promise what I say will be serious, at least to me. I will mostly assume you get the joke, or the obscure reference, or the too clever allusion, even if it’s too clever by half. When you go to school to learn how to be a famous writer, they tell you to always trust the reader to figure it out. My apologies if this was bad advice. Feel free to get in touch if I say anything you’d like clarification on. I’ll be happy to try to clarify.
I hope you find something to interest and amuse you in these notes to justify your time. I’m delighted you have an interest in reading them. You have my abiding appreciation, but if you have to choose, please read my fiction.
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