Creative Nonfiction and the Ethics of First Person

I teach a course called Creative Nonfiction.

Most of the time, I have to explain to people, even the students in the class, what it's about. I think this happens because we live on a mental fault line. On one side, we enjoy the fruits of myth and story, but we're seen as purveyors of pleasant falsehoods. The other, inhabited by scientific discourse since the nineteenth century, joined by journalism in the twentieth, seems the more credible side.

Certainly, scientific discourse shows no sign of exhausting itself. Scientists seem secure in their position as explainers of reality. But journalism, with the rise of the Internet and partisan coverage, has been in crisis. As for journalistic objectivity, I like to remember that most American newspapers began as partisan publications in the nineteenth century; most towns had a Democratic paper and a Republican one. If talk radio, the Internet, and even most of those newspapers that remain today  are either tacitly or openly biased, this seems a return to journalism's roots, not a decay.

That doesn’t matter, though, because to most people, the fault line exists and is important. It influences our reading of most genres, even straightening out how we read the Bible. The usual terms—fiction (novels, short stories, romance and mystery) and nonfiction (science and history writing, news, instructional videos)—seem endangered as I begin to describe what goes on in my class.

Creative nonfiction, or as it is sometimes designated, narrative nonfiction, draws on fiction techniques—what we normally reserve for poetic writing—to recreate experiences drawn from memory. In using character development, dialogue, scene construction, symbol, and narrative summary to recreate our experience, we want our reader to experience what we have gone through. We also have an interest in “art,” in creating something new that hasn’t been before.  

Exploring a New Genre

I was first drawn to this genre in the nineteen-eighties as a new Christian because I realized that if I wrote a novel about the spiritual events that had occurred to me, no one would believe me. We all experience coincidences in life, but put them in a novel and they look unbelieveable. But when I adopt the first person persona of myself, whoever that might turn out to be, and stay true to what I'd written in journals and what other people remebmered, I might relate a piece of reality that startled me.

Even so, to the purists, this blending of “reality” with fiction techniques sounds as though we want to embellish on our lives, make them bigger, more important than they are. To this accusation, the narrative nonfiction writer will argue that she/he wants to gain insight into what happened.

Admitedly, there are problems with this kind of writing, not the least having to do with memory. As Mira Bartok notes in her award-winning memoir The Memory Palace, writing changes what we remember. In her work about her mother’s debilitating mental illness, Bartok employs the statement “I do not remember…” often. However, it is this admission that gives what she does remember, what she checks with others about, a certain credibility.

If the aim for us is to set down in concrete a record of what happened, then this hybrid genre will seem too soft. But if, like writers from Augustine to Montaigne to Patricia Hempl and David Eggers, our desire is to speculate, to explore, and discover, the attempt is worth a lifetime spent on reflection, writing, understanding.