Yes, there’s a big deal of difference between writing fiction and non-fiction and it might not be apparent from the surface. Having done both, I can tell you, that I regard non-fiction, that is biography and autobiographies as a cinch, up to a point.
If you’re going to do a novel, think what you have to do. You have to create a plot and tweak characters, maybe six or eight or ten characters. You have to create scenes, you have to write dialogue. And when you write a biography, all of that’s given to you, so that’s much easier, you don’t have to do that.
But there are other problems in writing
biographies that you don’t have in fiction. For example, in writing biography, you can’t get out on a roll. When you write a novel, say you’re writing a scene, you can get on a roll and, my gosh, the scene develops and it really goes.
This is just like mosaic work, it’s so slow because you have to stop and look that up and stop and look that up and get that spelling right and get that quote exactly right, where the quotes go and where the commas go. It is slow, slow, slow work. So it’s quite a difference in the writer’s approach to it.
I enjoy doing them both. The one is a refresher from the other.