Tag Archives: Author Interview

What are the unique challenges of writing nonfiction compared with writing fiction? Interview by “With Five Questions”

Posted by diggercartwright on

With fiction you can do just about anything. You can suspend reality, and the bigger the lie is, the more believable it is to some extent. With fiction, the writer is bound only by the bounds of his own imagination. It’s like an artist with a blank canvas. You start with nothing and slowly but deliberately fill the canvas and bring the picture to life.

Nonfiction is a little more restrictive. Nonfiction is sort of like paint-by-number. You’ve got a pre-established set of lines and you just have to paint inside the lines. You might get away with changing up the colors a little bit, but you’ve got to stay in the lines. Nonfiction is reality. You’re just re-telling what has already happened. Now, as an author you can take certain liberties and change up the scenery. Maybe you make it raining in a scene where it was a sunny day. Maybe the people involved don’t remember where a certain conversation that is being recounted took place, so you have to create a scene where there was not one. With a work of fiction, you get to create the people and everything about them. With nonfiction, you have to get to know the people you’re writing about and try to convey a factual representation of them as best you can.

With Conversations on the Bench, I was able to obtain the crux of the lessons and the conversations through interviews with one of the characters in the book. There may not have been a record of exactly when the conversation took place or who else may have been there or in what circumstance the conversation came up or exactly what was said in the conversation. So, as the author, going back to the artist example, I had a paint-by-number that had some missing lines. I had to create those missing lines, then fill in inside the lines with the right color and the right amount of that color. It was certainly a challenge for me going from fiction to a factually-based storyline. You’ve got to know the people you’re writing about pretty well. It took me time and a lot of telephone conversations to get the story from Robbie and get to the point where I felt comfortable that I knew him and Sebastian.

http://withfivequestions.blogspot.com/2013/05/meet-digger-cartwright-author.html

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How have you balanced your career in business with your interests in writing and publishing? Interview by “With Five Questions”

Posted by diggercartwright on

It’s been difficult to balance the two. When I started writing, I did it as a hobby primarily. I did it because I just enjoyed it and wanted to tell some stories. It wasn’t really a priority for me. When I could find time, I sat down and wrote a little bit. But the more I wrote, the more I wanted to write even more. I wasn’t satisfied with having a book sitting incomplete, so I started to schedule more of my time for writing. I had to keep in mind that business was what made money. In the early days, writing only cost me money in terms of time, and writing at that point didn’t have much financial return. As I wrote more, I started to dedicate a little more time each day to writing until I finished a particular project. That’s really how I still do it. I don’t write full time. I still have business to tend to, but I really try to manage my time well. There’s always going to be sleepless nights when I’m working on a project or missed meetings or cancelled lunches, but I’ve come to accept that.

In the past few years, however, I’ve really started to focus more and more on writing as a business unto itself. I’ve chosen to go the independent, self-published route for a number of reasons that are neither here nor there, and that has really gotten me to examine and get deeply involved in the business aspect of being an independent, self-published author. I’ve really integrated the entire process from writing to marketing into my overall business structure and found some synergies there. I’ve adopted the perspective that as a writer I’m creating a product and it’s my company’s job to sell copies of my book. It’s been a very entrepreneurial endeavor in writing a book and bringing it to market. That’s one of the primary reasons that I’m working on setting up the National Federation of Self-Published Author Entrepreneurs as an outlet and resource for other self-published authors who are serious enough about writing to undertake it as an entrepreneurial business venture. If you’re a writer who is serious about your work, you can turn your writing endeavors into a business. Just like any entrepreneurial venture, it’s not necessarily easy, and it takes a lot of dedication and hard work. But if you dedicate yourself to it and have a passion for it, you can make self-publishing a successful enterprise.

http://withfivequestions.blogspot.com/2013/05/meet-digger-cartwright-author.html

http://www.diggercartwright.com/Blog/Latest

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