Fiction

Mystery writer Lawrence Block created the perfect description of fiction with the title of his book, Telling Lies for Fun and Profit. Yes, we do make things up when we write, even if our story "Ripped from the Headlines". We still change things, embelish events, change character names (if for no other reason than to avoid law suits), and sometimes we have to insert wholesale fabrications to cover all the juicy details that the facts leave out.

Since most of my writing is currently non-fiction, I enjoy those times when I can get away and just give my imagination free rein. Even when I am writing a police procedural about my favorite homicide detective, Kate Roark, I am still fabricating all of the plot and personalities; only the police procedure is as authentic as I can make it in a work of fiction.

My fiction writing is mostly in the area known as genre fiction or popular fiction. That is, Mystery, Science fiction/Fantasy and Horror/Paranormal. I avoid the other two main brances of genre fiction, Romance and Westerns like the plague.

I also make the occassional foray into what is known as Literary fiction. I have never read a really good definition of what comprises literary fiction other than to say that it is not genre fiction.