Deciding to dedicate myself to writing creative nonfiction and delaying a dream of writing fiction was a conscious and carefully considered decision.

At the time I was in my middle 20s, and I realized that I didn't know enough about the world to write anything with the insight and experience necessary to make my novels and short stories culturally and morally significant.

To be a better writer, you have to be a better and more well-rounded person. I realized the importance of learning to relate to others and understanding the struggles and challenges of people from different walks of life.

If characters I created in my fiction were to be compelling and true then, I concluded, I had to learn about other lifestyles, other professions, and the patchwork of prejudices and kindness that make some people different from others.

I did not want to become a writer who wrote about the same family, the same high school, the same moral dilemma, nor a writer who wrote about other writers or for that matter, other departments of English and universities.

So, I decided to write creative nonfiction and in that way become more mature by broadening my scope of experiences. At some point I would gradually return to my literary roots, fiction, and make my impact on the world. At least I assumed that.

And, perhaps, I was being naive. But I really thought that writers with something to say could affect the world, and I still do. And the fact is, I'm still trying.

At that time, in the early 1970s, daring nonfiction writers were rare. By daring, I mean people who would venture into and experience other lifestyles and then write about it in a literary way. And by literary I mean by using scenes, dialogue, description, first person points of view, all the tools available to the fiction writers while consistently attempting to be truthful and factual.

Most people regarded nonfiction as academic, as in formal essays about literature, politics, law, or journalistic, as in news and feature stories, op ed briefs. But a minority of writers calling themselves the New Journalists were making an impact and causing controversy by writing nonfiction in this very dramatic and literary way.

Some of these writers are still active today like Norman Mailer, whose coverage of the 1968 and 1972 political conventions in his books Armies of the Night and Miami and the Siege of Chicago were powerful statements of personal journalism and political and moral activism. Tom Wolfe's anthology published in 1973, The New Journalism, features Mailer, Rex Reed, Terry Southern, Hunter S. Thompson, as well as a 55 page manifesto boldly defining the roots of this daring New Journalism. Lillian Ross, who continues to write for the New Yorker, had paved the way for this experimentation in voice and style in remarkable profiles, in-depth profiles in which she skillfully recreated vivid and dramatic scenes that capture the charismatic and eccentric personalities of such figures as the film director and actor John Huston and the novelist Ernest Hemingway.

The descriptions of Hemingway in his hotel room in the Sherry Netherland in Manhattan, drinking champagne with his wife and entertaining visitors in his bathrobe and subsequently on a shopping outing at Abercrombie and Fitch, illustrated the way in which a writer might discover and reveal character and personality through observation and involvement.

Now this work inspired me, and it helped me to recognize the great potential of creative nonfiction. I realized I could exercise almost every option available to fiction writers while experiencing life in an active and involved way, rather than avoiding it or observing it only at the fringes. Some of the best of these daring nonfiction writers were also fiction writers and poets. John Updike's essays about growing up in Eastern Pennsylvania and his incredible portrait of Boston Red Socks superstar Ted Williams at his last game at Fenway Park in 1962 illustrated the importance of writers taking risks, not only by experiencing things they did not know, but also by crossing genres and reaching beyond the boundaries of their literary comfort zone.

And I have yet to mention Gay Talese who is generally credited for inspiring these literary explorations into nonfiction. In a series of profiles of famous people written in the 1960s for various magazines and collected under the title Fame and Obscurity, Talese demonstrated how extensively a writer could stretch the traditional boundaries of the form by capturing people in scenes and situations that were not only compelling in content and dramatic effect, but at the same time reflected who they were--a magic moment of action or a nugget of personality, captured the essence of their personal or professional life.

Talese referred to this essence as the larger truth, which is what the creative nonfiction writer is doing. It is what the creative nonfiction writer is always seeking, both the literal journalistic fact-oriented truth and the three dimensional truth or the meaning of what it is they have observed and experienced. The meaning is what we are working for and the meaning is the way we are able to render the objectives, the reason we have become writers. We have become writers to help make a change in the world and by capturing the meaning of what it is we see and hear, what it is we observe, we can help change a very little bit of how a reader perceives an idea, a human being or a situation.

Before I decided to be a writer, I thought a lot about what I wanted to accomplish in my life. I admit that I didn't know exactly what that was, but I knew two things: First I wanted to be understood. That is, I wanted people to be interested in my ideas and feelings generally and what I knew specifically.

/>Secondly, I wanted my ideas and experiences to make an impact on other people, to change or influence a small part of the world in one way or another.

In order to achieve these goals, I had to more thoroughly understand myself and I had to learn a great deal about how other people lived. Of course, I had a passion for writing, and I had been significantly affected by the writers I had been reading. I thought I would give myself a year to see if this was the lifestyle and the profession that would help me achieve those objectives.

At the time, I was a motorcyclist, and I was traveling extensively around the country on my two-wheeled machine. This was the subject of my first book. Since then, I have traveled through a half dozen different worlds in order to write books about baseball umpires, organ transplantation, veterinary hospitals, psychiatric institutions and children's hospitals with the same ideas and intentions in mind.

I'm not exactly certain if I have even achieved an iota of the goals I have described, but I covet the memories and the experiences of the journeys I have been taking. And although I dreamed of being a novelist I have never looked back or stopped to rethink my decision or direction. I continue my total involvement in the creative nonfiction experience, an odyssey that has consumed me and that has monumentally enriched my life.