If anything, I've found nonfiction a little easier. You don't have to make anything up. Of course, that's the inherent difficulty as well: when you hit an information black hole, you don't get to make it up. That hasn't come up too often with this project though. I'm lucky to have tons of primary source material , reams of letters and diaries and memoirs.

I kept writing short stories and sending out my manuscript, and it kept coming back like a bad penny. It was rejected all over town, quite often in very complimentary terms, but rejected nonetheless. Agents would return it saying that they loved it but didn't think they could sell it, or they would ask if I could change the collection into linked stories.

If you have some other profession that allows you your evenings or weekends, terrific, stick with that. Having a profession other than writing also has the potential side benefit of providing you with material, something to write about.

That requires quite an imaginative leap because it's hard for me to imagine that my biography would be of much interest to anyone, and because I'm a fairly private person, the notion doesn't appeal to me.

When I left the theatre and turned to writing, one of the big pulls was that, unlike the theatre, I didn't have to wait to be hired before I could do my art. That was huge. But you still have to figure out how to support your habit; it's rare and lucky when art pays the bills.

I worked every waking minute, nights and weekends, in order to make enough money to buy those summers off, and even then we wouldn't have made it except that my mother helped out with a yearly check and my father bought me a car when my old one die

As a writer, the ideal job is the one that allows you time and mental space away from it. Teaching seemed to me like the obvious choice - those summers off, you know - but my experience may serve as a cautionary tale.