(Edit: this started as an email to a friend)
I’ve been musing about some things you’ve said, such as how you felt like you got more impression of me from my fiction than from “assigned” papers. It occurred to me that my view of fiction versus non-fiction is very disparate. In my mind, non-fiction is written to make others understand, and fiction is written to make others feel. Of course, fiction isn’t successful at drawing emotion from others unless the auther can find and illuminate a point of commonality – that is, I must write my own feelings in a way others can relate to.

Autobiographies, in my head, fall into the category of non-fiction. That is, expressing emotion in an autobiography seems counter to the definition.

This may be (probably is) something unique to me.

At any rate, I’m caught between two views: should I lean toward fiction because I’m familiar with that avenue of “getting in touch” with emotion? Or is it too much of an obstacle since there is potential to assign characters my emotions but deny them as being mine? Is recognition of that risk enough to mitigate it?

Reading some of the things I’ve written in the past, it’s really easy to see my characters acting out my pains, my angers, and my (in some cases, seriously messed up) views of the world. Whether that holds for the future remains to be seen.