Wordstruck - Making the leap from non-fiction to fiction

The first question a journalist asked me last week was why I made the decision to write my new book as fiction. Why I made the leap.

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Although Last Seen in Lhasa is a travel memoir, I used fictional techniques — creating character, plenty of dialogue and a narrative arc – so in some ways it seemed an obvious (although scary) next step.

But it was more than that. Some stories demand a particular way of telling. My new novel, The Pagoda Tree, out tomorrow, started out as a non-fiction ide...