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editor at Glamour who learned her trade at Esquire. "Which is one
thing with a lot of heavy stylists-you get caught up in the language,
rather than having the language forward the story." Editors have a
phrase for wonderful writing, she explains: They say it sings. "Good
writing has a lyricism and a rhythm to it," she says. "It's very hard to
put into words."
Look closely at this brief passage from Lopez' Arctic Dreams:
"Winter darkness shuts off the far view. The cold drives you deep
into your clothing, muscles you back into your home. Even the mind
retreats into itself."
Listen to it. Hear the writing sing?
Or this sentence from White Town Drowsing, Powers' book about
Hannibal, Missouri, a hometown he shared with Mark Twain: "I grew.
up in a town that seemed less a town to me than a kingdom."
The simple, unadorned writing opens an elegant metaphor.
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THE ART LIES IN THE CRAFT
A good way to approach writing creative nonfiction, paradoxically, is
to forget about the creative-the literary-part and concentrate on the
nonfiction part. Pay enough attention to the craft of learning the story
and telling it clearly, accurately and economically, and the art will
happen when you're not looking.
Writing nonfiction is simple: You find out some facts, you figure
out how to arrange them in light of a larger idea, then you do something artful with the arrangement. Simple, but hard. Like climbing a mountain-all you have to do is keep going up. The most important
step is always the next one. That's the craft of it-paying attention to
what's under your feet, what your hands are grabbing hold of, working
against the gravity of all your bad habits.
"I consider myself a storyteller," says Reiss, author of seven novels
and two books of nonfiction and a correspondent for Outside magazine. "And I distinguish between stories I make up and stories I find out." Creative nonfiction is the stories you find out, captured with a
clear eye and an alert imagination, filtered through a mind passionate
to know and tell, told accurately and with compelling grace.
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CHAPTER TWO
FINDING AN
ORIGINAL SUBJECT
Tthreats a woman can know: breast cancer. Two biopsies, a
erry Tempest
small tumor Williams
between
was
the
facing
ribs,
one of
borderline the most chilling
malignancy. Would
she inherit the legacy of her female relatives? Her mother had fought
the same disease and won, but only for a while. Both grandmothers
and six aunts, like her mother, had all undergone mastectomies. The
future looked dangerous.
Because she is a writer, and writing is how writers make sense of
the world-especially the scary parts-she chose to write about it: "A
person who is told she has cancer faces a hideous recognition that
something monstrous is happening within her own body," she writes
in Refuge.
The subject captured her attention, preoccupied her, focused her.
"Perhaps I am telling this story in an attempt to heal myself," she
writes in the prologue, "to confront what I do not know, to create a
path for myself with the idea that 'memory is the only way home.' "
But had she written only about her personal struggle, or even her
mother's struggle, while it might have been compelling in the way
that TV-movie scenarios are compelling but ultimately forgettable, she
would have written a one-note symphony-just a sad story we already
knew by heart.
But she did something most writers would never think to do, something profound. She looked beyond her own predicament and found a larger parallel in the impending ruin of a migratory bird refuge
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Creative Nonfiction
threatened by the rising waters of Great Salt Lake. She set her own
struggle-and that of her mother-in the context of a larger world of
community, nesting birds, Mormon tradition, the desert West, theology and humane values. She chose beauty and meaning over personal melodrama.
Refuge takes the reader beyond easy sympathy to understandingof a much larger chain of events, including nuclear testing, environmental caretaking, family duty, religious faith and personal responsibility. She gives the reader choices and so makes the reader participate in her choices. Her book is painfully accurate, poignantly
sorrowful, yet also full of warmth, gentleness and hope. It is the work
of a clear mind and a large imagination-not of self-pity or victimization or blame.
It is also a book of facts and figures-it even contains an appendix
listing the birds who find refuge in the Bear River preserve. And
Williams does the human arithmetic precisely, in a voice we can
trust-the statistical balance of breeding species, the ratio of habitat
to survival, the equation between nuclear testing in the 1950s and
cancer rates in the 1980s.
Since we're talking about literary nonfiction and not plain journalism, it might seem that subject matter is irrelevant. The literary writer is, we agree, a stylist-a maker of literary art. So there's no
need to do research, to pay attention to the mundane details of real
life, to take notes, visit archives, go on field trips, interview interesting
people. It all comes from the Muse, right? You reach inside where
your art lives, and you tell the truth, right? You are inspired, and, being
inspired, you write beautifully, the lovely words tripping off your pen?
Well, not exactly.
William Matthews' poem "A Night at the Opera" shows us two
aging performers struggling mightily to pull off their operatic roles.
Using makeup to hide their flaws, faking what their talent isn't quite
fine enough to do naturally, enduring shopworn and gamy costumes,
they manage, barely, to float their romantic illusion before the audience. It's a kind of magic show, really-a triumph of appearance over reality, of what seems over what is. During the poem, we pity themwe want brilliance, virtuosity, genius, not these journeymen actors.
We even resent them for pretending so hard, for resorting to stagy
tricks, for being such stubborn, veteran troupers.
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Finding an Original Subject
Until the devastating last line: "Beauty's for amateurs." We realize,
all at once, that they've been making art the only way art can be
fashioned, through labor and craft, out of the imperfect things of this
world.
WANTED: AN ACCURATE SENSE OF THE WORLD
There's no denying that some reflective writers write mostly about
themselves, tracking their thoughts, exploring the whimsical workings of their own imaginations: Vladimir Nabokov. Nancy Mairs. Peter Matthiessen. Gore Vidal.
But notice also how their best work always depends on an absolutely accurate sense of the real world-not in some vague, generic way, but in all its astonishing particulars. They know the names of
plants and animals-in Williams' book, each chapter is named for a
migrating bird: western tanager, long-billed curlew, Wilson's phalarope. She presents each of them with a naturalist's living detail.
Such writers pay attention to wha
t goes on around them and are
curious about nearly everything. They have read not just American
history but also Russian history. They can find Trinidad-Tobago on
a globe. They're intrigued by Caribbean weather, suburban traffic
patterns, how farm machinery works. Reiss speaks for all such writers
when he says, "One of the great things about being human, one of the
joys of being alive, is the understanding of things that are complex."
They listen to how new lovers talk, watch how they move their
hands during an argument across the room. They touch the coarse
fabric of an old army uniform jacket-and the broken knees of an old
friend who once played football. They roll down their windows and
stop the car so they can smell the night breeze outside of Deming,
New Mexico. And even at that moment, when they are completely
captivated by the moment, they are also outside themselves, inventing
the words they would use to describe the aroma of dust, hot asphalt
and sage. They can't help it. They are in the habit of noticing things
through words.
When they go on vacation, they go off the tour. It isn't that they
are not astonished by cathedrals, but they are more fascinated by the
old women in black shawls drinking aperitifs at the tobacco shop next
door at nine o'clock in the morning-in the looming shadow of a
sacred Gothic architecture of light.
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Creative Nonfiction
They find local monuments to suffering that aren't in the guidebooks-in this forest clearing in Brittany, three local partisans were executed by a Nazi firing squad. At an Anasazi cliffhouse ruin, they
are overwhelmed by the ghosts, real as tourists, going about their
business across the centuries. At parties, they always wind up in the
kitchen among people they've just met, very late, sitting on the counter
drinking too much wine, not talking but listening.
When they go for a walk in a new city, their eyes gaze up past the
first story to the signature architecture above street level, where the
gargoyles live. They deliberately do things they've never done, go
places they haven't been, even-especially-to places in their own
backyards. They climb up into their neighbor's attic and watch their
own house from a completely new perspective-briefly, irrationally
thrilled, expecting some stranger to emerge from their own front door.
They make it a point to be where interesting things are liable to
happen. And because they prowl the world with their eyes wide open
and their ears pricked for sound, wherever they go interesting things
are liable to happen.
REFINING THE SUBJECT
For example, in the closing chapter of Annie Dillard's autobiographical gem, The Writing Li/e, Dillard describes the life and death of aerobatic pilot Dave Rahm. It's a thoroughly researched and precisely
reported section. And, like all good literature, it's also about something else: making art. Dillard spins a lyrical analogy between the airborne line of the stunt pilot through an imaginary box of blue skycurving, dipping, rolling, falling and recovering-and the transcendent exhilaration that is the reason for art. And the dangerous life of the artist.
Then in a stroke, she closes the analogic distance and makes them
one and the same: "When Rahm flew, he sat down in the middle of
art and strapped himself in."
So creative nonfiction seems to need a subject at least as much as
a newspaper story-more-because the subject has to carry itself and
also be an elegant vehicle for larger meanings.
But Dillard reminds us that she didn't start with a fully realized
idea for an essay that connected aerobatic flying with making art. She
started out by going to an airshow in Bellingham, Washington, where
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Finding an Original Subject
she had recently moved, with, as she writes, "the newcomer's willingness to try anything once." In other words, having arrived at a new home, she was casting about her for interesting ways to pass the time.
She was not herself a pilot or even an airplane buff. She did not go to
the airshow for the specific purpose of writing about it, then or ever.
The airshow just seemed more interesting than an afternoon at home.
Who knows-something might tum up.
What turned up-who turned up-was a living wonder. A pilot of
amazing skill and daring named Dave Rahm. Like the others in the
crowd that afternoon, Dillard oohed and ahhed in amazement. But
then she did the next thing: She pondered what she had just witnessed
and decided it was important enough to learn more about. She worked
on it with her mind and imagination. She read articles, asked questions, even went flying with him, so she could feel his art happening in her stomach, in the pull of g-forces against her viscera, experience
the vertigo, the liberating terror of tumbling through space under
control, just barely. She began to understand what Dave Rahm was
all about. The larger implications became clear.
This is important: Good subjects aren't just lying around waiting to
be scooped up. The writer has to take raw data and somehow refine
it toward meaning. Sometimes the interest is obvious, in a general
way; other times it is not obvious to anyone, even the writer.
In this case, hundreds, thousands of people had witnessed Rahm's
performance over the years without ever turning it into literature.
Finding in aerobatics a worthy subject-beyond the pedestrian interest of the feature story, an ooh-and-ahh in print-took imaginative effort. Time and hard work. Reflection and phone calls. A willingness
to invest herself, to take chances, to be scared. In this case, Dillard
literally risked her life to discover her subject. Such aerobatic flying
is very risky, as Rahm was the first to admit. Pilots routinely crashed.
Every stunt pilot eventually crashed, including Dave Rahm-those
were the odds.
Dave Rahm wasn't a subject until Dillard dared to tum him into a
subject.
FIND THE HUMAN STORY
And there's a corollary lesson: One way or another, the focus of
every really good story is a person. In a magazine, the human story
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Creative Nonfiction
often takes the form of a profile. The writer is intrigued by a particular
individual-usually a celebrity, some newsworthy figure, or else some
unsung hero of science, politics or art. The profile is a kind of portrait.
It depends on intimate detail of a living personality-and, if the writer
is not scrupulous, it can quickly devolve into sentimental hero worship
or a gossipy ambush. It's easy to hold up a paragon of genius, virtue
or worldly success, just as it is easy to bash anybody who has a high
profile. Much harder is to present a portrait of a life in action that
communicates the complexity, the contradictions, of a particular
human personality.
Gore Vidal is one of the few masters of such portraits-he has
given us such diverse figures as John F. Kennedy, Anthony Burgess,
Eleanor Roosevelt, Ronald and Nancy Reagan, and Orson Welles. His
profiles usually come in between the lines of his purported subjecta review of a new book, an analysis of a political campaign, an essay on popular culture. His portraits have provocative, unexpected titles:
> "Theodore Roosevelt: An American Sissy."
Vidal deftly blends objective detail with his own interpretive
powers, and admits his biases both implicitly and explicitly. In "Barry
Goldwater: a Chat," he first tells us that Goldwater's office is in the
old Senate Office Building. "The corridors are marble with high ceilings and enormous doors which tend to dwarf not only visitors but Senators," he writes. So far, so objective. Then: "There is an air of
quiet megalomania which is beguiling in its nakedness." And we
haven't even met Goldwater yet.
When we walk into Goldwater's office with Vidal, we see that "The
large desk was catercornered so that the light from the windows was
in the visitor's face." We know at once who is in charge. By the time
we are told that Goldwater keeps a small bookcase beside his desk,
we already have guessed what it contains: a leather-bound set of the
speeches of Barry Goldwater.
The biographer takes the human subject even further, trying to
re-create a whole life and the mystery behind the accomplishment of
that life, the reason the individual is worthy of a biography in the first
place. As David Nasaw, biographer of William Randolph Hearst, puts
it, "What the biographer does is try to figure out the riddle of creativity: how did it get there? Why did it get there? What the biographer tries to do is unravel the alchemist's mystery, to find out how, 18
Finding an Original Subject
out of these mundane lives, great things are created-out of nothing,
something appears."
FIND YOUR PASSION
Any story is a very complex transaction between writer and reader. It's
useful for the writer to answer three questions about this transaction:
1. Who is writing this?
2. Why am I telling this story?
3. Who will be reading this?
The answer to the first question seems obvious to the writer: I am
writing this. But it's a trick question, a two-parter. One part is, Who
am I? in life. The second part is, Who am I to be telling this particular
story?
Bob Reiss recounts the story of his first meeting with Walter
Anderson, editor of Parade magazine. He managed to get an appointment with Anderson, even though he was just starting out as a freelancer, having left the Chicago Tribune. He had a list of eight ideasstory proposals-that he thought were original and interesting. As he ticked off his eight brilliant ideas, Anderson dismissed each one in