Fiction v Non-fiction

In this essay by Kevin Smokler about editing Bookmark Now, a non-fiction anthology by younger authors about writing in the 21st century, there’s a lot of words spent on writing fiction vs writing non-fiction. I think it all comes down to this:

I noticed something else while editing. Most of the contributors with a background in journalism turned their pieces around quickly, sending me a first draft in a week or less, and then worked with me to hammer the essay into shape. The novelists took weeks, even months. I had to email several times to remind them of deadlines. But what they handed in was pretty damn near done. The fiction writers saw their process as: hunker down and write until it’s exactly where you want it. The nonfiction writers, more accustomed to working closely with an editor, had a more suggestive style. Do you like it this way? Okay, how about this way. Together, we’ll get it there.

I think this pretty well sums it up. If you read Ben Yagoda’s book about style, The Sound on the Page, you’ll see that he talks about what he calls the "middle" style. This is what you get in most newspapers and magazines and it’s meant to be as invisible as the air you inhale. The words are nothing more than a delivery system for facts, just like air is a delivery system for oxygen.

(Now, of course, there’s all kinds of creative non-fiction that is highly stylized, and some of the best essayists have styles every bit as nuanced as that of fiction writers. But still, they’re the exception. You average feature article isn’t going to be a place where high style flourishes.)

In contrast to the middle style are authors like Gertrude Stein, DFW, Faulkner, Pynchon–people whose writing is very singular and, often, difficult at first to read. These are extreme examples, but most good fiction writers have some kind of personal style they’re trying to stay consistent to. They’re paying far omre attention to the language of what they write. Of course, plot and facts are important to them as well, but not nearly so much as with the journalists.

I think Smokler’s remarks get at this key difference. From what he says, the non-fiction writers who wrote pieces for his anthology were more concerned with getting the facts right. Together, he and them could massage the words around into whatever it needed to be. The fiction writers seemed to be much more concered with getting the language to sound exactly as they wanted it to. I’m sure they were open to Smokler’s edits, but probably not nearly as open as the non-fiction writers. They turned in pieces that reflected this attitude.

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