Is writing fiction harder than journalism?

Added: 2026-05-17

[00:00:00]In terms of the immediacy of book writing, like it is [ __ ] agony. Like wait like the process because I literally like [snorts] yesterday for example, 9:00 a.m. speak to my editor, pitch my column, by 4:00 p.m. it's written, it's done.

[00:00:16]>> wow. Oh my goodness. Wait, what? Yeah, and it's gone. Like what I didn't know, okay, nonfiction makes me laugh.

[00:00:22]You write it and you send it in and the editor your editor is like maybe a few little tweaks here and there, but essentially it's your story. Do you know what I mean? So they're not going to be like we I don't like how it ends. You're like, well, it's kind of what happened, so I [laughter] can't really change that.

[00:00:38]Fiction, you send off this like 80,000 word, 90,000 word thing and then they come back and they're like, yeah, this is this is good, but you know, we could do and you're like you end up like discarding quite a lot of it. An author friend of mine said, oh yeah, the first draft it's like it's like a throat clear. You have to get it all out of the way and then you can really start. And I was like, what the [ __ ]