For a month now, I have mostly abandoned the pursuit of fiction writing. Yes, after a thirteen month period in which I sold seven novels, two novellas, one short story and one article, I gave it up. But don't worry, I'm still writing, it's just nonfiction.

At the library, I saw a book yesterday called Spook. I didn't have time to read the book, but I read the author's notes. She said that she guessed most people who wrote nonfiction were experts in their subject and she was probably the only nonfiction author who started a book knowing nothing about her subject. This made me smile.

I thought I was an expert on my nonfiction topic. I thought writing a short beginner's book on the topic would be easy. But in many ways, this process is as creative as writing fiction, though it goes so much slower. At every step of the way you are interpreting information from the point of view of your target reader. At every step you are fact-checking so you don't look like a moron. Frequently, you are looking for an example or a quote to wake up the material. The process isn't really so different from writing a pre-plotted fiction book. In fiction you write in your character's point-of-view, you do some kind of fact checking fairly often (yeah, Google!) and layer story within story to make it interesting.

With fiction, I always had this dream of simply sitting down to a blank screen and letting the words flow, but I do a much better job if I've plotted in advance. Nothing major, but at least I know my scenes and characters. So it is with nonfiction. I know my topic and most of my specifics, but there is a world between the topic and specifics that has to land on my page.

Now I know why some nonfiction is as good a read as a novel!