Day: July 12, 2011

I’m still working heads-down on the biology book. I wasn’t happy with the original structure, so I’m reorganizing it and moving stuff around, rewriting some stuff, and writing new stuff.

It’s times like this that I really envy fiction writers. They don’t have to work within the constraints that we non-fiction writers do. They can just make stuff up, and as long as it’s believable that’s all that matters. If a book runs too long, they can just cut stuff out; if it runs too short, they can just add some scenes. We non-fiction writers have to get everything right, and we have to fit everything in that belongs there.

I remember years ago at a mystery conference sitting down with Peter Robinson. When I told him that I wrote non-fiction, he said he could never do that because it would be too hard to get everything right. I told him that I’d never written fiction, but I thought it would be more difficult than writing fiction. Nowadays, I’m coming around to his point of view.