Office Hours

Yes, on a Sunday :)

Hi George, 

Story Club is such a joyful and inspiring thing, and I so appreciate you creating it and continually renewing its energy. My writing for a long while now (maybe since high school?) has been fairly consistently in some sort of essay or other non-fiction form, but I've been inspired by Story Club to try my hand at fiction. My question is: how do I move from non-fiction to fiction? I feel like maybe my brain is too encumbered by the habitual synaptic connections established by this point in my middle age to make this leap, but I'd like to try anyway. Can I just keep writing as I am and rename myself Allison or Frank? Do I need to microdose in the beginning to allow my brain a vacation from itself (please say yes and I will let my husband know he's on toddler duty)? How can a writer capture the granular details of reality needed to create something interesting and believable and, well, realistic, and then make those work in a fictional space? Or am I too limited by my inability to make those specifics up? How do I create a believable and interesting world that is not quite the same as, or maybe even hugely different from, the one I experience as reality?