Non-fiction (academic) vs. fiction writing

I've always accepted that there are differences between fiction and non-fiction writing (beyond topic) but it only recently occurred to me how important being aware of those distinctions is.

A few weeks ago, someone recommended the book, Getting the words right: 39 ways to improve your writing, by Theodore A. Rees Cheney. It's apparently been in print for decades, but I found a recent (2005) edition at the library.

It has three sections: Reduce, Rearrange, and Reword. I've been working my way through the first section, thinking about all the ways there are of using concision to make sentences more powerful.

But this, on reducing with metaphors and analogies, caught me:

One thing our education has taught us well -- perhaps too well -- is that, when writing nonfiction, we must qualify statements of fact. You must, in the name of truth (accuracy), make it clear that what you've written is not always true under all situations or for all time. You must qualify the statement, then and there, by telling the reader what all the limitations are. This makes for good research, because anyone who reads your work later will know precisely what you meant. The trouble with such qualification-laden writing is that it makes for slow reading -- it requires the long attention span of a highly motivated, dedicated reader. When the habit of qualifying is carried over into other kinds of writing, such as fiction, it doesn't work. (p. 17-18, 2005 ed.)

He then gives some examples such as writing 'the plane was like a bird of prey' rather than the stronger 'the plane was a bird of prey,' as well as listing some common words or phrases that frequently accompany over-qualification in fiction: seem to, apparently, looks as thought, looks like, it would appear that.

This is probably making me sound dreadfully thick that this was such a revelation. As I said at the beginning, it's not that I didn't know there were differences between the two styles of writing, but I don't think it would have occurred to me that over-qualifying was one of them, nor the degree to which I do it.

But I do. Even when I'm solidly in a character's head, I'm more likely to have her think, "It seemed as if the world was ending'' rather than, "the world was ending." I don't even think about it. Deep inside me is the Rigid Rule that 'all things must be crystal clear at all times.' Not for a moment should I risk the reader wondering whether the world is really ending, or if the character only thinks it is.

I remember being confused by a line in one of my favorite childhood novels, where the author used the phrase 'he was a blind and deaf man' to describe a character that was shocked, and I spent a lot of time trying to figure out when he'd gone blind and deaf and why none of the other characters seemed to care before I finally realized it was a figure of speech.

Another thing which plays into this is personality. I'm a very precise person, at least in my speech. When I'm describing something at work, I'm more likely to say, 'it appears that...' rather than just stating what's going on. It's always important to me that people know I'm stating my opinion rather than a general truth. But it should be my characters' voices on the page, not mine.

After reading some of Cheney's examples, though, it's easy to see how much better fiction flows without the over-qualifying. So now I'm on the hunt for all the 'it seems to' and 'it looked like' phrases in my writing, as well as any other ways a lifetime of academic writing is messing up my fiction.