Creative Nonfiction Read online

  matter how clear-cut or simple the events we're trying to relate, the

  minute we open our mouth or take up our pen we are delivering

  fiction. We embellish. We misremember. We inadvertently change

  what somebody actually said because we didn't happen to have our

  tape recorder handy. Or worse, we paraphrase their words, giving

  them a different emphasis, a sharper tone. We conveniently leave out

  details that make ourselves look bad and leave out other information

  because it seems irrelevant and leave out still more details because

  we just plain didn't see or hear them.

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  WhatIs Creative Nonfiction Anyhow?

  And what's left out can change the story of what happened-a lot.

  We're limited by our point of view-from where we stand, we can

  see only so much of the action. Our vision is blocked, or crucial things

  happen in several places at once and we can be in only one place at a

  time. Or we assume a God-like objective omniscience that equally

  distorts pure fact. We make judgments about which character (we've

  already turned real people into characters) is important, which event

  deserves emphasis, which detail best conveys the feeling of the

  moment.

  And we tell it all out of order-we want to establish suspense, after

  all. Give it a dramatic punch. But telling events out of order can be a

  kind of lying, of fictionalizing. Or it can be a better way of being

  truthful. It's a tricky business, but it's made less so if we remember

  always that our first obligation is to tell the truth. Every strategy, every

  dramatic convention, every selective choice must be employed in the

  service of making the story more not less truthful.

  So when we label a piece of writing nonfiction, we are announcing

  our determination to rein in our impulse to lie. To test our memory

  more carefully, do a little research to fill in the holes in what we witnessed, draw clear lines around what we are offering as objective fact (as if such a thing exists-more on that later) and what we are offering

  as opinion, meditation, analysis, judgment, fancy, interpretation.

  In the past few years, the lines between all the genres have blurred:

  Poetry and stories merge into the prose-poem, fact and fiction into

  "faction," the so-called nonfiction novels of Truman Capote or Norman

  Mailer. But there is a meaningful distinction between fiction and nonfiction, Powers says: "It's interesting to me that people who otherwise would say that it's all fiction, that there's no such thing as nonfiction,

  because truth is infinitely elusive-I happen to agree with that last

  part-they're the same people who would get very exercised when

  George Bush says that the wetlands aren't wetlands after all. They

  don't say, What a marvelous act of deconstruction or reexamination

  of the 'text.' They say, Let's impeach that so-and-so."

  Expletive, of course, deleted.

  YOU CAN'T MAKE IT UP

  The hardest part of writing creative nonfiction is that you're stuck

  with what really happened-you can't make it up. You can be as artful

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  as you want in the presentation, draw profound meanings out of your

  subject matter, but you are still stuck with real people and real events.

  You're stuck with stories that don't always tum out the way you wish

  they had turned out.

  I once sent a piece to a producer at National Public Radio's All

  Things Considered who had used a couple of my radio essays in the

  past. The piece was a reflection on our American obsession with things

  from the point of view of a long-haul moving man, which I was for a

  summer. Most of what we trucked back and forth across the interstates of America was pure junk.

  But one woman's belongings were all antiques, beautiful and probably priceless: lovely furniture, original paintings, heirloom crystal.

  We picked up the load at a warehouse in Florida, where we knew

  the crates had been damaged but had no idea how badly. When we

  unpacked them in Las Vegas, everything was destroyed. Completely,

  utterly smashed.

  It wasn't our fault. A careless forklift operator back at the warehouse

  had probably dropped the container full of her crated belongings onto

  a concrete floor.

  As we unpacked piece after broken piece, the woman cried, and I

  didn't blame her. We spent several hours taking inventory of the

  damage, filling out forms for the insurance company, and I sat with

  the woman while--the driver made all the necessary phone calls. Mer

  awhile, somewhat embarrassed, the woman regained her composure,

  stopped crying, and told me, "It's not right to cry over things." As a

  parting gift, she gave me a paperback novel to read on our way west

  to Beverly Hills, our next stop.

  The book was William Styron's Sophie's Choice.

  The NPR producer liked the piece a lot, but she thought Sophie's

  Choice-a novel about a woman caught up in the Holocaust-was a

  pretty heavy book to drop into a piece about losing everything.

  Couldn't it be a different book?

  Well, no, I told her. It happened to be that book. The woman was

  real, and when she was done crying she was a little embarrassed and

  oddly grateful to us, and she gave me a real book, and that book was

  Sophie's Choice. Not only that, but I read it on the way to Beverly

  Hills, and, reading it, I understood her remark about not crying over

  things: Styron's novel is about a woman who loses everything-and

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  What Is Creative Nonfiction Anyhow?

  everyone-to the Nazi Final Solution. Reading it in the context of what

  I had just witnessed moved me beyond words. By the time I had

  finished reading it, I had developed a profound respect for that woman

  in Las Vegas and a deep curiosity about what-whom-she'd really

  been crying about as we uncrated the broken souvenirs of her life.

  Too bad, the producer said. They didn't use the piece.

  I really wanted them to use the piece. It had every natural irony

  real life ever offers-including Las Vegas and Beverly Hills in a piece

  about materialism. The problem was, the truth seemed as if I had

  contrived it. The ironies were too neat to be believed in real life. I

  could not fault the producer-she wanted the story to sound true as

  well as be true, and it may be that, in her experience, other writers

  took greater liberties with the form. Radio commentaries frequently

  tend toward memoir, which the reader or listener recognizes as inherently looser and less objectively reliable than other kinds of nonfiction.

  But to me, such a change would have broken my contract with the

  listener. It was nonfiction. That's the first good reason for the term

  nonfiction: to announce that, while every story tends toward fiction,

  this one at least owes an allegiance to the truth of events.

  The second reason is simpler: Nobody has yet come up with a

  better term. Lee Gutkind, a writer and long-time faculty member at the

  University of Pittsburgh who founded and edits the journal Creative

  Nonfiction, explains why he avoided other terms, such as "literary

  journalism," in coining the name: "Because I thought the word 'journalism' would frighten away those
in the creative writing program and the word 'literary' would frighten away those in the journalism

  department."

  FIVE HALLMARKS

  But what in the world makes nonfiction creative?

  Five characteristics: First, it has an apparent subject and a deeper

  subject. The apparent subject may be spectacular or mundane. Unlike

  in a feature article, it is only part of what we are interested in.

  John Steinbeck's The Log From the Sea of Cortez, for instance, is

  the chronicle of a voyage of exploration in the Gulf of California. But

  it is also a meditation on the creative process, especially for the writer

  using the facts of the world meticulously observed and recorded: "The

  design of a book is the pattern of a reality controlled and shaped by

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  the mind of the writer," he confides to us in his introduction. "This

  is completely understood about poetry or fiction, but it is too seldom

  realized about books of fact." Again and again he returns to this

  implicit comparison between a voyage of discovery and a book of

  nonfiction.

  But the apparent subject must itself be made fascinating-as

  Steinbeck makes fascinating the tidal pools and ports-of-call and beerdrunk companions of his maritime expedition. Gutkind says that the best nonfiction always teaches the reader something: "One important

  distinguishing factor is this teaching element-a reader reads on to

  learn something. It's not just personal experience."

  Second, and partly because of the duality of subject, such nonfiction

  is released from the usual journalistic requirement of timeliness: Long

  after the apparent subject ceases to be topical, the deeper subject and

  the art that expresses it remain vital. That doesn't mean it isn't triggered by today's headlines-in fact, every great piece of creative nonfiction I've ever read seems driven by the writer's felt urgency to tackle that subject right now, not tomorrow.

  But what captures the writer's attention is not just what everybody

  else sees-the current crisis. In today's headlines, the writer recognizes larger trends, deeper truths about the way human beings behave. The particular event offers an epiphany, a way of getting at the deeper subject. This ironic tension between the urgency of the event

  and the timelessness of its meaning keeps the writer firmly planted in

  particulars, in the concrete detail that will make the larger abstract

  truth come to life on the page.

  Writers are passionate about different subjects at different times in

  their lives. They are attentive to the world and alert to the hinges of

  history-those great and terrible moments of promise, crisis, impending salvation or doom-and they are drawn to write about them in an effort to affect the outcome. Thus Bob Reiss writes about famine

  relief in the Sudan ostensibly because it is an urgent practical and

  political problem right now. We-our country, the world, private citizens-have some hard choices to make, and it's the nonfiction writer's job to make us face our choices.

  And, to be practical, that's the moment when editors and readers

  are most likely to care about the subject. To assign the piece and

  publish it. To read it with at least a shadow of the writer's urgency.

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  What Is Creative Nonfiction Anyhow?

  The writer must not only write about what he or she cares about but

  must do so at the time he or she is most passionate about it. That

  sense of passion, of personal urgency, cannot be faked. And it endures.

  All art seems grounded in paradox, and nonfiction is no exception.

  Triggered by the timely meeting of writer and subject, a piece may

  stand outside of time. Beyond the particulars of present-day politics,

  Reiss' story about famine relief is almost biblical in its archetype: Do

  you give the starving man fish, or do you teach him to fish? And what

  does he eat while he's learning to fish?

  Third, creative nonfiction is narrative, it always tells a good story.

  "So often, it ends thirty minutes after it begins-something is happening in time," Gutkind says. It takes advantage of such fictional devices as character, plot and dialogue. "It moves," Gutkind explains.

  "It is action-oriented. Most good creative nonfiction is constructed in

  scenes." And, he says, just as in a good short story or novel, "There

  is always a magic moment. Your readers are waiting for that magic

  moment to occur, waiting for a change to occur, a lightbulb to flash,

  something to happen."

  In Ted Conover's journal of riding the rails, Rolling Nowhere, the

  entire journey-and thus the whole story-moves toward that moment when Conover, a clean-cut college boy, will at last be initiated as a true hobo. And like the best magic moments, when it happens

  it brings surprising and dramatic consequences-once he has truly

  entered the world of the railroad tramp, he is terrified that he will

  never find his way back to the world he knew, the person he was.

  The moment comes in the hobo jungle in Everett, Washington, as

  Conover watches his bickering alcoholic companions binge on cheap

  wine and sees one possible future for himself reflected in their violence, their incoherent babble, their broken teeth and ruined bodies.

  He searches out a gas station washroom, where he scrubs his teeth

  and washes his long hair, and then calls long distance to a college

  roommate. "In a complete turnabout from my earlier concerns, I

  wanted a guarantee that, while I could get close to tramps I could

  never really become one, and they would never permanently 'rub off'

  on me," he tells the reader. But of course there is no such guarantee.

  The roommate ironically congratulates him on having proved himself

  a true hobo-for Conover, at this stage in his travels, a truly frightening insight.

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  Creative Nonfiction

  We anticipate that magic moment, we expect it, but some part of it

  is always unexpected.

  Fourth, creative nonfiction contains a sense of reflection on the part

  of the author. The underlying subject has been percolating through

  the writer's imagination for some time, waiting for the right outlet. It

  is finished thought.

  The purported subject of the piece, though it may seem like a target

  of opportunity, is actually one that has preoccupied the writer for some

  time. He has written about it before, in other ways and in exploring

  apparently unrelated topics. He has brooded about it, asked questions

  all his life about it, trying to make up his mind. He is building on what

  he has already learned, what he has already written, coming to ever

  more sophisticated insights with each pass.

  Terry Tempest Williams, author of Refuge: An Unnatural History of

  Family and Place, says that it takes time for an experience to sink in,

  that the writer must meditate on what she has done and observed to

  discover what it means, how to write about it. "There's such a pressure

  to write fast, to get it done," she says. "But one of the most important

  things in writing nonfiction is to have patience."

  In such a reflective piece, you'll see the writer making connections

  between the subject at hand and books he has read, between history

  and philosophy and a remark his fifth-grade teacher once made. So

  Conover invokes Jack London. In Arctic Dr
eams: Imagination and

  Desire in a Northern Landscape, Barry Lopez talks about early Arctic

  explorers. Steinbeck ruminates on a political stance he has been cultivating for years. Even in the context of a boat trip on the Sea of Cortez, he finds insight about the relationship between government and

  people in a democracy, one of his chief preoccupations as a writer in

  both his fiction and his nonfiction.

  In other words, the piece reflects not only whatever immediate

  research was necessary to get the facts straight on the page, but also

  the more profound "research" of a lifetime.

  "I tend to write about subjects I was born to," observes Anne

  Matthews, whose book about the landscape inhabited by eight generations of her family, Where the Buffalo Roam: The Storm Over the Restoration of America's Great Plains, was a finalist for the 1993

  Pulitzer Prize in nonfiction. "It takes a lifetime to know a subject."

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  What Is Creative Nonfiction Anyhow?

  When 1 set out for Paris to track down the haunts of Ernest

  Hemingway for a piece on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the publication of A Moveable Feast, the memoir of his formative years in Paris as a young writer learning his craft, my journey was steeped in fifteen

  years of reading Hemingway's books and wondering about his marvelous, troubled life. We had shared an editor at Scribner's.

  Hemingway's Nick Adams stories had given me my first inspiration

  to try writing stories of my own. 1 wanted to go to Paris to find out

  what had been so special about that city to him-did the Paris he

  knew still exist, and could it still inspire a young writer to greatness?

  So that journey back to the city of his first inspiration was one 1 had

  been preparing to make for a very long time.

  Fifth, such nonfiction shows serious attention to the craft of writing.

  It goes far beyond the journalistic "inverted pyramid" style-with interesting turns of phrase, fresh metaphors, lively and often scenic presentation, a shunning of cliches and obvious endings, a sense of control over nuance, accurate use of words, and a governing aesthetic sensibility.

  Finding the writing is as important as finding the subject. Good

  writing is elegant-cleanly arresting rather than gaudy or merely decorative. It carries itself gracefully and falls rhythmically on the ear. It is artistic, and often informed by other art. "There's a certain voice,