Good Morning Everyone, As the title reads, I am a professional non-fiction writer and am at the point in my career where I want to branch out into more endearing projects. I've always had a fondness for sci-fi and fantasy, and am now working on a series of sci-fi novels geared towards the YA audience. I'm looking forward to giving and receiving feedback.
Welcome! Your prose seems to be on point, as I would expect from a nonfiction writer. The tough part is often to break away from the things that work so well in non-fiction, like tell 'em what you're gonna tell 'em, tell them, and then tell 'em what you told 'em, or too much emphasis on clarity at the expense of mystery and good storytelling technique. But we're here to help get you through it!
Thank you @Xoic, I appreciate your message. Agreed, there is a barrier I need to work through here; the non-fiction and fiction spaces are very different in both style and intent. At a ground level, non-fiction is about presenting and interpreting the facts, while fiction is about creating them (and recreating them!). I've come to realize that there is a certain vulnerability with sharing creative work that isn't present in the non-fiction world, and I think my first big step here is getting used to sharing content that isn't yet finalized.
The definition of non-fiction needs to be able to encompass counterfactual propaganda and pseudoscience (which are art-forms). Perhaps another way of differentiating between non-fiction and fiction is that:- - in non-fiction the external/phenomenological world is real, and character and personality usually has to be sidelined for objectivity - in fiction only the internal/psychological world is real, and the external events and objects have to be sidelined (because nobody cares what happened in Elfland) This might relate to the vulnerability the OP senses - fiction is about revealing characters we have formed inside us. Every nasty, grasping idea that occurs to our villains in some way belongs to us - a bad side of us. And even worse is that we own the protagonist's initial stage, before they discover the story's truth: we must reveal unformed, incomplete versions of ourselves. But if anyone can reveal examples for others, it's writers. Great writers' fictions are realer than most people's facts.
Yes I totally agree with this! With non-fiction you simply need to tell the reader what happened (well, not simply, but there is a reality that you can prove with facts) whilst in fiction, you have to convince your audience not only that x y z happened, but also that your world makes sense, that your ideas are good, that the words are beautiful. Hopefully that made sense.
