Why I’m writing a novel after 15 years of writing non-fiction (and what it’s teaching me about writing in the twenty-first century)

I’ve been writing and publishing non-fiction online for over fifteen years, across blogging, social content, courses, and emails.

I built a lot of skill and confidence in this world.

But for the last few months, I’ve been dedicating more time to writing fiction. And over the past few weeks I’ve been knee deep in writing a science fiction novel I’ve become obsessed with.

It’s also rearranging everything I thought I knew about the art of writing.

Here are 9 things the switch is teaching me.

1. The editing instinct transfers perfectly.

Years of cutting non-fiction to the bone gave me something most first-time novelists don’t have, which is the ability to kill a scene or a sentence I love because it doesn’t earn its place.

I’ve become good at murdering my poor darlings with a blunt spade.

Most people who attempt a novel can’t do this because they wrote it, so it stays, and you end up with a book that ate all the pies.

Fifteen years of trimming emails to 400 words trained me to cut with less flinching, and fiction rewards that instinct even more than non-fiction.

2. Audience psychology is audience psychology.

Writing emails that hold attention taught me pacing, tension, and when to NOT write stuff.

Fiction runs on the same engine. A chapter ending works like a subject line, and a scene builds tension the same way an email builds toward a click.

The formats are different, but the underlying psychology of keeping a reader’s attention is identical.

3. Structuring an argument is structuring a scene.

Every non-fiction piece I’ve written has a setup, a tension point, and a resolution.

Fiction scenes work the same way.

A character (in non-fiction, this is me, or a main character seen through the reader’s eyes) walks in wanting something, meets resistance, and leaves changed or defeated.

The shape was already in my hands from years of writing articles. I just didn’t know it until I started building scenes and realised I’d been doing a version of this for a decade.

4. Your voice has to disappear.

In non-fiction, I spent years making sure everything sounded like me. And that’s the whole point.

In fiction, the voice has to belong to the character, and the character isn’t me (unless I’m the actual narrator in a story, which is rare).

I’m writing several different people who think differently, talk differently, and notice different things about the world.

Every time I let my own voice leak through, the character flattened into a version of me giving a lecture.

Learning to disappear behind the character and let them think with their own background and personality is one of the hardest and most interesting adjustments I’ve had to make.

Having said that - and I’m not there yet - when i write more novels, I’m sure a writing style will emerge across my books that people will recognise as mine, and that’s good too.

5. You have to stop making the point.

This one took me a while to integrate.

In non-fiction, I show the reader solutions to problems with guidelines that create clarity.

In fiction, you lay the pieces out and let the reader assemble the meaning themselves.

The urge to resolve a problem more quickly in a scene is strong when you’ve spent a decade doing exactly that.

Learning to shut up and trust the scene is an art I’m still learning.

6. Fiction punishes me for knowing the ending.

In non-fiction, I always know where I’m going before I start writing, and the whole piece is built to get the reader there.

In fiction, the best scenes or stories happened when I let the characters surprise me.

I also don’t know the ending until I’m a good three-quarters of the way through writing the full book.

Non-fiction trained me to control the destination, and fiction is teaching me that the most interesting writing happens when I loosen my grip and follow the story instead of steering it.

7. You can’t write fiction from the teacher’s chair.

Non-fiction positions you as the person who knows the answers.

Fiction requires you to inhabit characters who don’t know, who are wrong, and who fumble through decisions. You have to step out of the authority role completely.

Every time a character started explaining what they’d learned instead of just acting on what they felt, I knew I was writing from my chair instead of from inside them.

8. AI is making fiction MUCH more accessible and enjoyable for me.

I use AI every day on this novel. Shock horror!

Don’t worry. My number one goal with any piece of fiction I work on is that it comes out high-quality, NOT slop, delivered in my voice, and executed according to my highly specific creative choices.

AI, however, helps me manage all chapters across several characters without losing track of who said what and when, and it catches continuity errors across tens of thousands of words.

AI doesn’t make creative decisions, write the final prose, or decide what happens in the story. It acts as a very useful assistant who I can bounce my ideas off, and who also checks the story and makes sure it reads smoothly and effectively.

In novel construction, I now view myself as having the role of a director, rather than a writer of fiction. It’s like my books are written movies I am directing. And AI is doing the harder graft that makes most authors lose their minds or quit.

This is exciting because it is making writing fiction more accessible to more people.

The AI I connect to my chapter files handles the structural and administrative work, so I can focus on rewriting and the decision-making that actually matters.

It’s the reason I believe more people have the opportunity to write a novel now, when they otherwise would never have shared that magic with the world. I plan to share more about this here.

9. Not everything gets resolved.

Non-fiction gives the reader an answer, and that’s the contract.

Fiction often works best when the question stays open: a character makes a choice, and you never tell the reader whether it was the right one. You leave it to the reader to reflect on.

I kept trying to tie things up neatly because that’s what over a decade of how-to writing trained me to do, and some of the best scenes in my novel are the ones where I resisted that instinct and let the tension be felt.

Years of non-fiction didn’t prepare me for the challenges of fiction-writing, but it gave me more than I expected.

I’m excited to share more about this fiction journey through Mastery Den in the coming months, so make sure you’re subscribed.