The Creative Writing Challenge: On Starting Out Where You are

One challenge confronts some college students new to the genre of Creative Nonfiction. On their own, away from the influences of family for the first time, busy reinventing themselves on some college campus, they may not want to be honest or vulnerable about where they've come from. But that is exactly what is needed.

It was this, and not the lack of experience, that made me write fiction and kept me from nonfiction when I was younger. About my own background, had someone given me a truth serum, I would have said this: When you come from around here, you start out wishing you were from somewhere else. This is very easy to do with a number of things. Your parents become invisible. The kitchen where your meals were cooked vanishes. You imagine a whole new neighborhood where you could have grown up, and even if it does begin to sound like a stereotype, at least it is not the tree lined suburb where your affairs were looked after in reasonable terms, where you sledded winters and rode your bike during summer months that threatened with rain or gave away the sun in an afternoon apocalypse that sent you out looking for glory and light.

Nothing There?

Nothing big or important happened to you there, you think. And you notice that people from elsewhere think they have it better than you. You don’t notice that they may be homesick or feeling strange and are compensating. You just hear what they say about their own places. And though people from the East coast visit and tell you that the landscape you’ve seen since early childhood is beautiful and you shouldn’t take it for granted, you find you want to be from where they are.

That’s what I did. The first story I tried to write was set in New York, a city I’d never been to.

When your parents aren’t from the area either, it’s easy to do this, and to claim to be a citizen of the world, where celebrities emerge.

Celebrity Class

That’s what I began to assume in college, even though I looked out at streets where students who were going to go back and do middle management for their relatives’ businesses would be busy building snow men or cross country skiing to class without worry, and where the snow billowed over the trees, cars going by, and windows of buildings, and the steam came up through the manhole covers and made spots where the dark pavement came through the snow.

It was easy to think you really belonged somewhere else and not too hard to start thinking about being from somewhere else.

And that is perhaps the first challenge facing the writer. You can go to a coast and re-invent yourself. Or you can start with what you know and become willing to go back and mine those early conflicts for real conflict, sorrow, and joy, conflicts you are busy right now rather strongly denying.

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.