I recently had to answer this question: "You write both fiction and nonfiction. Do you see these disciplines as complementary, or conflicting?"

My answer: "So many of the writers I admire--Anthony Burgess, V.S. Naipaul, Peter Matthiessen--have worked diligently in both disciplines, so I've always thought of them as interlocking. I think each informs the other. For me, at least, working in both fiction and nonfiction seems to minimize the temptation to blur the two. You have an outlet for your flights of imagination, so you're less compelled to speculate, invent dialogue, or add other "novelistic" touches to your factual work.

At the same time, the spirit of narrative nonfiction is to take up the same challenge as the novel, which is to tell a cohesive story about convicingly drawn characters. So you're constantly honing the necessary techniques."