The Confabulator Cafe

Tag: nonfiction

  • Wherever I Go, There I Am.

    I know what kind of non-fiction I wouldn’t write.

    Academic or scholarly writing. Memoir or biography. Mainstream journalism. Gossip or tell-all. Anything that involves an interview.

    This week’s topic was my idea. I’m really interested in how my fellow Confabulators will answer. But I’m nearly stumped.

    I already write non-fiction for my job, and I like the kind of non-fiction I’m doing now. I like reading through diverse stacks of primary source material and synthesizing it for various audiences. I like learning the obscure history of common everyday things. Who was this guy? What did he do? How did he get involved in this situation? What is his relationship to the problem we’re trying to address now, sixty years after he died?

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  • Boring But Necessary: My Nonfiction Life

    I’ve already got a whole lot of nonfiction in my life, but none of it’s the fun kind.

    I am a freelance technical writer by trade, and depending on whether I’m in the feast or famine portion of my employment cycle, I spend large portions of my days working on behalf of companies that build cell phone towers. It involves a lot of research and letter writing and watching the calendar to see if anyone has gone beyond their FCC-mandated response times.

    Roughly 90 days after I’ve been assigned a project, I get to cobble together a report that either says “Go for it. No one cares if you build it there” or “Run, don’t walk, from this location. Do it! Do it now!”

    Whoever coined the phrase “thrill a minute” obviously had this very specific profession in mind.

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