Writing is like painting
And I hate painting. Well, actually it’s not so much the painting, it’s all the prep work. Scraping, sanding, spackling, repairing, ACK!
It’s the same with writing, at least non-fiction. With fiction, you don’t need to worry so much about facts, though internal consistency is important once you get the story going. You just more or less give birth to the characters and let them go. They will create their own facts.
But with non-fiction, there’s fact-gathering (which I always overdo), interviewing, more fact-gathering and checking, more interviewing, collating of notes, rough drafts, editing and yada yada yada.
Depending on the subject, you may even have to re-check facts you have already checked (sound like fun?). For instance, I did a piece on the fire ant a few years ago. The story took a long time to come together, and while I was working on it, new facts came out on the spread of the ant and about a fly that was being used to try to contain the growth of ant colonies. One never knows when the facts will change.
Still, fiction scares me. So much power, so much responsibility. Despite the work, I still think I prefer non-fiction. Too timid for fiction for now.
Fiction has no bounds as long as the writer can be consistent. In journalism, we are limited to real events and exact quotes. Original fiction characters also cannot sue you.