The Dark Side of Longform Journalism | Literary Hub: "Lately, for better or worse, I’ve been writing more fiction than journalism. One advantage to writing fiction is that it does not oblige you to engage in tacit contracts with real subjects, and so there’s no pressing onus to define its purpose and value, or to weigh that purpose and value against whatever ethical awkwardness it might entail. I don’t mean to suggest that the stakes of fiction are somehow lower than the stakes of journalism—I don’t believe that; I tend to think the opposite might actually be true. All I mean is that you don’t have to watch an ignominious killing in order to describe one. You don’t have to give false hope to desperate people. You can emerge from it relatively unsullied because you can do it from start to finish while sitting alone in an empty room.
That’s a place I’ve sometimes found appealing."
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