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CHAPTER 1
Defining Creative
Nonfiction
Defining something by what it's not is both unsatisfying and perilous. Hundreds of writers and scholars have made this point about the kinds of writing featured in this book. We'll agree that creative nonfiction is an inadequate term for fact-based writing with literary qualities, yet we use it anyway, for reasons we'll explain. We can say that creative nonfiction is supposed to be true (although what "true" means is not at all clear and "facts" can often not be verified). It is what fiction isn't, except very often it reads like a story. It isn't journalism, except when it is (and is then called "new journalism," or "the new new journalism," or "literary journalism"). The writer usually appears as "I," with a strong personal presence (al- though there are some pieces in which the writer is absent as a character). We can say that creative nonfiction is prose (except when it's mixed with
= '" un arguable characteristic
:- crea tive nonfiction is a strong or ial voice and style. "
graphics). Nearly every supposition about creative nonfiction can be countered with an example in which it is just not so. Complicating definitions fur- ther is the welter of subgenres crowding beneath the creative nonfiction umbrella, diverse in length, topic, approach, and purpose. One unarguable characteristic of creative nonfiction is a strong autho- rial voice and style. Even if the writer doesn't make a personal appearance, we can tell that a distinct individual has produced those word ~- and that he or she is yelling or whispering. Unlike types of writing that aspire to objectivity, concealing that a person produced them, works of creative non- fiction wear their making and makers on their sleeves. Still, we assume their writers are making every attempt to tell the truth. It is prose with a narrative
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trajectory of some kind, writing with a teller. It is prose in which how something is said is as compelling as what is said. Nobody much likes the term creative nonfiction. The challenges are many:
- Doesn't all nonfiction require the writer to be creative? Isn't everyone creative?
- What is creative as opposed to uncreative, anyway?
- Why don't they just call it a memoir (or essay or article or history or prose poem or new journalism or whatever it is)?
- Why don't they come up with a better term? What about literary nonfiction? Fictional nonfiction? Nonboring nonfiction?
Oh, people have tried to devise that alternative label. Most of the terms are just too specific; they don't encompass creative nonfiction's many sub- genres or take into account the pieces that cross several subgenres. The term literary nonfiction is sometim es used interchangeably with creative nonfiction, but it just hasn't stuck. This is mainly because universities with creative writing programs have adopted "creative nonfiction" as a course of study or major emphasis. The more people study creative nonfiction in college, the more standard becomes the use of the term. Literary nonfiction is actually a more accurate term, since it does connote all of the stylistic and aesthetic elements that make creative non- fiction what it is. The term creative nonfiction, on the other hand, implies
that thin line between fact and fiction. If newspaper journalism is too cre-
ative, for instance, we assume that it's taking liberties with the facts. "Creative" admits to a bit of open-endedness in the requirement that the writer hew to "just the facts ."
A Visit to the Bookstore
A slew of subgenres come together to make up that big hodgepodge that is creative nonfiction. Memoir, personal essay, narrative journalism, the poetic or lyric essay, travel and adventure essays, literary journals, nature and environment writing, profiles, the nonfiction novel, cultural critiques, and even some reviews all come under its heading. Yet much creative non- fiction falls under more than one of these subcategories. Go into your standard bookstore and you rarely find a section expressly for creative nonfiction. These books are scattered all over the store, by subject; they're found under sociology, architecture, travel, political science, and on and on- and often they don't quite belong there. A memoir about a child who travels widely across several continents might end up in travel, biography, African American studies, essay-who knows? Although a book may be less "about" New Zealand and more about the people the writer meets there, it may well be found among the travel guides. In most stores, and in
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abo ut being in tran sit, with pieces set in different countries, his books nearly always get filed under Travel. Yet Iyer's books will never tell you which hotel has the best rates or which highway has the least traffic, even though they are probably perched right beside the travel guides. How can you tell this without reading the who le book? Flip to nearly any page of The Global Soul and you'll be greeted by an "1." (And it is a kind of greeting, creating a sense that the writer trusts the reader enough to reveal himself.) Glancing through th e book, you'll see that along with its reflec- tions, there are plenty of facts: the airport in L.A. has its own $10-million office, Toronto is the most multicultural city in the world, and in 1930, Atlanta was the second-largest city in the wo rld in terms of office space. You won' t see facts like these in Stop-Time, yet both are works of creative nonfic- tion. While Iyer imparts all manner of random information, the book is not mainly about the facts, and people don't read it for the facts alone. They read it to enjoy good stories set in all kinds of places, or because they like the clev- erness of the book's structure, or because of the writer's background and sense of humor. But someone who wanted to find out the best museum in Atlanta wo uld probably not pick up Iyer's book- it would just be too opin- ionated, stylistic, scattered, and personal. Finally, you might be looking for a collection of essays by novelist Leslie Marmon Silko. (Her essay "Uncle Ton y's Goat" is found on page 666.) Her book Yellow Woman and a Beauty of the Spirit focuses upon various aspects of contemporary Native American life and mythology. It also includes a number of pieces about environmental catastrophe. Where in the bookstore might you find it? Logically, Yellow Woman would be fo un d in the essays section-but this is rather unlikely. It will probably turn up in the sociology, social issues, or Native American sections. It may even be shelved beside Silko's novels in Fiction. If you were a casual browser, Silko's book might easily be overlooked.
What Creative Nonfiction Is Probably Not
So now that we've acknowledged the lack of consensus about what creative nonfiction is and where it belongs, we can move on to what it isn't. It isn't traditional newspaper journalism, or logical argument, or academic exami- nation, or a business report. A creative nonfiction writer doesn't aim necessarily to persuade or inform the reader but to move her. The goal isn't to relay facts in an objective tone-precisely the op- posite. People read creative nonfiction not because they have to but because they want to. They read it not to exhume information or ideas (although they may well) but rather for the quality of the reading experience itself. Despite the use of poetic lyricism an d fictional scene, creative nonfiction is not a fabrication, a
"A creative no nfict io n writer doesn 't aim necessarily to persuade or inform the reader but to move her ."
What Creative Nonfiction Is Probably Not (^7)
fiction. It is supposed to be true to the author's best ability. The story and people in creative nonfiction are based upon actual events, people, and in- formation. The complications of relaying the truth and working through the black, white, and grey areas of "fact" haunt us (and taunt us). When a writer decides what " truth" is, he is going through a very personal pro- cess of intuition and evaluation. Since a written work is not reality itself, and since art requires imagination, how does a writer tell a true story in an artful, honest manner? There is no simple answer to this riddle. Creative nonfiction makes no pretense of objectivity; the writer admits that she is coming from her own point of view. Writers want to bring readers into their worlds. Even when we want to repulse readers, we still want them to pay attention. While the distance between reader and writer is narrowed in the moments of reading, this doesn't necessarily mean that the writer is revealing details of her own personal life. The nitty-gritty of the writer's life may not enter into the piece at all. The writer's persona is there, though-we are aware of this person, this voice. The voice and style are what make a piece personal-not the confession of intimate knowledge or experience. In creative nonfiction that voice is never neutral, as it is supposed to be in jour- nalistic or business writing. The language that projects the writer's voice is inventive and stylistic, sometimes lyrical, sometimes conversational, occa- sionally elegant. That voice can be engaging, abrasive, hesitant, cranky, philosophical- but it is not invisible. The voice reminds us that there is not only a human behind this work, but a specific (and, we hope, interesting) flawed human, at that. Creative nonfiction even allows for literary license: reconstructing scenes and dialogue, even reporting what a subject is - or might be- thinking. The ultimate question might be: Why does this form even exist? Why not just write fiction? Or journalism? It exists because it has to. Creative nonfiction is more than just "using the real names." It allows the writer to do things that can't be done in either fiction or journalism-it breaks through walls on all sides. The diarist and scholar of the essay Carl Klaus has observed th at the essay has a dual nature: it is a story of events that is also a story of the writer's mental journey. Creative nonfiction usually displays a kind of self-consciousness-a need to comment on the process of writing "r eality" and a need to examine the writer's own position in and upon the events. This compu lsive drive toward honesty is understood only by lhe individ- ual writer; he may simply need to tell the story in that way, finding fiction too masked and too defined by its own genre conventions. Creative nonfiction writers usually feel the need to explore an idea in a direct and complex way- in a manner that doesn't generally take place- in the always-show-never-tell environment of fiction ana that is usually too limited by the space and authorial restrictions of journalism. Virginia Woolf said that this "fierce attachment to an idea" is the essay's "back- bone." For many writers, chasing an idea is compelled by a need to right a wrong, to reform. "When I sit down to write a book, ': George Orwell said, "I do not say to myself, 'I am going to produce a work of art.' I
Works about Writing and Literature
Weschler, Lawrence. "In Lieu of a Preface: Why I Can't Write Fiction." In Vermeer in Bosnia: Selected Writings. New York: Vintage, 2005. Woolf, Virginia. "The Modern Essay." In The Common Reader, First Series. San Diego and; New York: Harvest Books, 1984. First published 1925 by Harcourt.
Works about Writing and Literature
Johnson, Samuel. A Dictionary of the English Language. London, 1755. Klaus, Carl, Chris Anderson, and Rebecca Blevins Faery. In Depth: Essayists for Our Time. Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1993. Orwell, George. "Why I Write." In Why I Write. New York: Penguin Books,
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