I wish they'd apply the technique to fictional material.
What made you decide to use it as fictional material in this week's story, "Transatlantic"?
Swift explains that he has always bridled at the notion that writers are perpetually performing reconnaissance missions for fictional material.
Their first feature together, the sharply observed and satirically affectionate A Blonde in Love, aka The Loves of a Blonde (1965), gave fictional material documentary form.
Her main fictional material was her own early life, until in 2005 she published Quicksands, a memoir that illuminated but did not transcend her intense and dazzling fictionalisations.
In the absence of such a review, Mr. Gillespie asked the network to place a disclaimer on the screen every 10 minutes, advising viewers that the production contained fictional material.
A burden of personal, authorial pain can be felt in these pages, unsettling beyond the obvious awfulness of the fictional material; the reader would probably register this personal pressure even if he did not know of St. Aubyn's own childhood history — that, like Patrick Melrose, St. Aubyn was sexually abused by his father, and has also been a heroin addict.
Eimear McBride's first novel, "A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing" (Coffee House), tells a fall-and-fall story that, especially in a traditional Irish setting, can seem familiar fictional material: a departed father, a pious, abusive mother, an errant and blasphemous daughter, a predatory uncle, a death in the family, a God-soaked household busy with meddling priests and vain prayer.
Referring to the fictional material that is Superman's ultimate weakness, he said that Britain's exposure to troubled European economies and Mr. Osborne's political challenges ahead of the next general election in two years might prove to be Mr. Carney's Kryptonite.
In that novel, the eighties were not merely a discrete historical period — and so the book was not a historical novel — because the fictional material (love of money, excess of all kinds, fashionable drug abuse, political opportunism, the scythe of AIDS) so easily spilled beyond its temporal borders.
