There appears to be a common view among writers and readers that it is more difficult to write fiction than it is to write nonfiction . I would suggest that this has come about because of the appallingly poor standards that seem to pervade nonfiction as compared to fiction though there is a lot of mediocre fiction out there.
Learners are often ill served by textbooks which often display a high level of opacity, designed to show off the author’s erudition and can be less than ideal as a learning resource often requiring a study guide for the learner to use as a map to gleen the gems of wisdom.
Fiction, on the other hand, is there to entertain and captivate the reader and transport them to other worlds. The reader is there usually through choice and will quickly abandon any writer who does not deliver on a cohesive fictive vision.
We need to show those experts that they are not the only source of information and that they’d do well to look at the model of storytelling as a paradigm for communication. We need to put all writing on the same footing and judge them by the same standards.
Some of the world’s most effective nonfiction have embraced the form of story. The holy books. The books of satire. The books of social comment. The books of philosophy, of mind, of spirit…