Easy as Pie?

Which do you find easier to write: fiction, non-fiction, or poetry?

The answers are easy.

First, none of them are easy. Writing is hard work. It's not hard like pulling 20-foot rocks from Egypt to England in the hot sun without an engine is hard. It's not hard like a diaspora is hard. But it is brain surgery hard. And I think it's brain surgery important, too; without writers, brains have far less to learn and enjoy.

Second, fiction is easier because you make most of it up. And the stuff that's true, you can hide in someone else's character. But it also means that, third, fiction is harder because you have to be inventive and a good story teller in order to take advantage of all that freedom.

Of course, non-fiction is easier because you're limited to something that's already happened. Sometimes you can use research someone else has already done. But that's what makes non-fiction more challenging. You have to find the freshest way to tell it, and you're limited to telling it exactly the way it happened. (Unless you're James Frey or Augusten Burroughs.)

Poetry is easier because it's shorter. It's harder because it's emotionally draining. Each poem carries within it the weight of the world and all its people. That it's shorter makes it harder to get right.

The last answer is that it's sometimes easiest to do the thing that you do most often. If you practice non-fiction, you're probably better at it than you are at the others. Or not.

Most of the writers I know do it because they have to. They started as children, and, though they all have different goals (some don't want to publish; others want to make a best seller), they do it into adulthood because there doesn't seem to be any choice.

And sometimes we wish there were.

Because Sunday's secret has become Monday's mystery, and if I weren't writing now, I wouldn't be so tempted to say what I can't yet say. But it could be the talk of Tuesday.