Fiction is finer

Books and Movies 2006: Author Angela Hunt on why she prefers writing novels to nonfiction, and how writers always send messages of some sort | Marvin Olasky

Combining creativity and discipline, Angela Hunt has astoundingly written over twice as many books as she has years (48). A Florida resident, she briefly taught high school, then wrote everything from catalog copy to children's books. Her recent novels for adults include Unspoken, about a sign-language-using gorilla, and The Novelist, which features a mother's attempts to understand her self-sabotaging teenager by inventing a fictional character who is also heading toward destruction.

WORLD: You've written both fiction and nonfiction books. What are you able to do through novels that you can't do through your other writing?

HUNT: Create worlds. A novel is a unique art form, a microcosm that says, "this is how the world is" or "this is how the world works." That's why the author's worldview is always revealed through the story—because ultimately, we are revealing our deepest beliefs about man's purpose and reasons for living. Best of all, novelists can do all of the aforementioned things so subtly that the reader is unaware of the "engine" beneath the entertainment.