Writing-wise, fiction is scarier, but nonfiction is harder — because nonfiction’s based in reality, and today’s felt reality is overwhelmingly, circuit-blowingly huge and complex. Whereas fiction comes out of nothing. Actually, so wait: the truth is that both genres are scary; both feel like they’re executed on tightropes, over abysses — it’s the abysses that are different. Fiction’s abyss is silence, nada. Whereas nonfiction’s abyss is Total Noise, the seething static of every particular thing and experience, and one’s total freedom of infinite choice about what to choose to attend to and represent and connect, and how, and why, etc.

(more dfw from the best american essays intro).

This is something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. Or it occurs to me and I push it away because I’m not sure it’s something that is worth thinking too much about. Well, why not just BLOG ABOUT IT, instead, I say.

I can’t decide which is scarier. In my HO (I’m just giving that one to you guys, free, okay), fiction can be scary because you are sort of afraid this world you create will reveal horrible truths about you and the way you think about the actual world. Not unlike how, left with the overwhelming responsibility of shaping a human being, parents raise children who in many ways reveal their own prejudices, inadequacies, neuroses, etc (oh yeah, and good stuff, too!), shaping a story cannot help but show your hand.

Nonfiction is terrifying in its truth, sure, but okay— I think I’m with him, now (him=dfdubs)— you can sort of pare it down, idealize it, narrative-ize it, to create something you and, you must figure, others, will find acceptable (and, if you are feeling particularly grandiose [ which you must, always]: brilliant, transcendant, profound, hilarious, adorable [I’m KIDDING, you don’t have to be adorable. but in my experience, it helps]).

Nonfiction grants you the barriers of reality with which to work. Which is appealing not just for matters of well, laziness (no sitting around trying to think of what to write), but for bigger, sleep-better-at-night reasons. You aren’t inventing horrors which otherwise wouldn’t have existed in the world, you aren’t bubbling up paradigms which shouldn’t be bubbled (though I suppose you could, it’s just less self-conscious), you aren’t, as I often got criticized for doing, writing pathetic female characters who put up with too much shit over and over and make the reader wish they’d never been born. In short, you will always have empirical reality to fall back on. “Well it’s a true story! I’m just telling you what happened. It’s not my fault.” (I feel like I’m really getting back into italics lately, I hope that’s okay).

And I suppose that is less scary. My own life and the truth of it doesn’t really worry me to share anymore. You reach a certain point and you realize not much is new, or shocking, or terrible. It is just said in newer, better, more terrifying ways.

To the abyss!