Fiction vs. Non-fiction Writing, by Kari Sperring:

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I write both fiction and non-fiction. As a result from time to time, I'm asked what the difference is, when writing them. I always say: it's a question of where you start. With non-fiction, you start at the end. Or close to it, at least.  Which sounds, now I think about it, both facile and slightly ridiculous. But for me, anyway, it's true.

It's a matter of process. I write historical non-fiction aimed at both the popular and the academic markets. A book or an article is the final stage in the project. To get myself to that point, I've already spent a considerable amount of time on preparatory work. For the sort of history I specialise in - mediaeval British and particularly Celtic - this usually begins with a collection of source materials composed in the period which I'm intending to study, often written in Old Welsh or Old English or Latin and available in rather elderly editions or even in single manuscripts. The bulk of the work is in reading and studying these sources, working out their relationships to each other and their biases and problems, in seeing what it is they say, hint at and convey. There is also a long period analysing and absorbing secondary materials - books and articles by other scholars, texts from other cultures and such things. By the time I come to the writing stage, the bulk of the work is behind me and I am drawing conclusions. Non-fiction is a culmination, a summation of what has gone before, a tip of an often rather inky iceberg. I tend to write non-fiction fairly fast: I know what needs to go where and how I need to relate it to the rest of what surrounds it. It's a question of ordering and explaining and laying out. The end, or at least the beginning of the end, of that project. Indeed, the last section I tend to write with non-fiction is usually the introduction.

Fiction is different. Fiction for me starts at the beginning or very close to it. Some of that is down to the genre in which I work: as a fantasy author I do not necessarily have to have a research phase before I begin to assemble my words. Living with Ghosts started with a feel and an image: a city shrouded in mist and a confrontation on a quayside with a desperate ghost. The details spread out around that image and as I wrote more and more words, the project spread outwards off the pages of my notebook and into libraries and archives. As I shaped what I wrote, I discovered what it was I needed to know in order to go on writing, and I took time off to hunt for it. There were some things that were already in place, already in my head - the details of the clan system practised by the Lunedithin, for instance, came from kinship concepts that had intrigued me when I studied anthropology as an undergraduate. Others I had to go and track down - the language of fencing, the protocol for the reception of an ambassador at a seventeenth-century European-style royal court. I wrote and I researched all at once, going from book to page and page to book as I needed to. When I began Living with Ghosts, I had a handful of characters and an atmosphere and a sense that this book would be about a river, but that was all. I had only the vaguest sense of where it would end and how. When, at the end of chapter one, a character named Quenfrida walked in and announced she was the villain, I was as surprised as my protagonist. More, perhaps, as he seemed already to know her. Where my non-fiction has always been planned, Living with Ghosts grew, and, as it grew, it pulled things in from all around it with which to make itself and it proceeded at its own pace, whatever I might think of that. There were fast days and slow days and days on which I threw up my hands and went and cleaned the windows instead.

So, for me, the two types of writing are almost opposed. They can feed each other - one of the side effects of Living with Ghosts was that I co-wrote a book on the real people behind The Three Musketeers.  But the two types of writing don't co-exist well and I can't work on both a fiction and a non-fiction project simultaneously. I know novelists who plan and research and lay down the whole of their novel before they begin, and it works well for them. But that just isn't me.

Kari Sperring, Living With Ghosts, fantasy, DAW Books, Penguin Books