Write Club -- Nonfiction vs Fiction

Hey y'all.  So tonight's meeting was about stirring up the passion of a writer's soul.  There is a logical basis for everything a writer writes; a core of subjects that correlate to an inner principle or topic that a writer goes on.  This is true for both fiction and nonfiction.  The author uses the same core base for both.

What I mean by this is, the stuff you rant about is the stuff you'll write about.

For the first exercise, I wrote down several topics on note papers and allowed the members to choose one, whichever struck them as the most interesting or relevant to themselves.  They would then write a rant based on whatever topic they chose.

Topics:
- Government
- Big Business
- Divorce
- Dating
- Intellectuals
- Country vs City Life
- War

So yeah.  Whatever came to mind as they thought about the topic would be what they wrote.  The thing about it is, the members took each topic in a specific direction.  One member wrote about big business, and how the anonymity there is similar to the anonymity of the internet.  I never thought about it that way, and it was really interesting to read.

And then I took several items out.
- Turtle with bunny ears
- Fairy statue
- A Mega Man 2 cartridge
- A glass globe with color in it
- A glowy shimmering device that spins
- A Chinese fan

The members would take these items and relate them to their topic of choice, and then write up a fiction scene based on the item.  For example, the member who chose big business wrote a little scene involving the making of Mega Man 2.  I chose the fairy statue and wrote about how an intellectual would see a fairy statue in art versus her non-intellectual sister.

You see?  You can always draw a straight line between two points.  Any item can inspire a story from your base motivations -- base as in the foundation, not base as in low class.   The last thing I had the members do was write a short list of the things they could rant about for hours.  The list they compiled could usually be summed up by one or two words.

For example, one list was:
- Theology
- The middle east
- Troubles with democracy
- Moral dilemmas

The obvious tie between these is cultures, meaning that the writer would probably not write war novels or general fiction, but rather about cultures and how a person would live in such a culture when it contradicts their own morality.

So yeah, what are the things that you rant about?