Topic 2. Truth and baloney in creative nonfiction
by Jacqueline Windh
I like the phrase that Alex Heard tweeted the other day – enough that I am stealing it for the title of this discussion!
Heard is editorial director at Outside mag. He also wrote an article in 2007 for The New Republic called This American Lie, which challenged the veracity of some of the incidents recounted in David Sedaris’s so-called “memoirs.” Heard concluded: “I do think Sedaris exaggerates too much for a writer using the nonfiction label.”
But this brings up a question that most writers of creative nonfiction have had to deal with at some point:
We write in a genre that is defined by what it is not. Creative nonfiction is “not” fiction… therefore we can’t make things up. Or can we?
After all, that word “creative” is in there, right?
The general genre of “creative nonfiction,” and in particular its sub-genre “memoir,” have had a rough go these last few years, as more than a few memoirs have been exposed to be more fiction than truth.
The first that I became aware of this issue was back in the early 90s, when my sister sent me a copy of Marlo Morgan’s Mutant Messages Down Under. I was actually living and working in the Australian outback at the time, and it was clear to me, from what I knew of the place firsthand, that there was no way that much of that story could be true. The subsequent controversy eventually led the publisher to relabel the book as a work of fiction.
Probably the most publicized example has been James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces – a memoir about the author’s drug addiction and recovery, the truth of which Oprah publicly tore to shreds. And, in a similar vein, Margaret Seltzer’s memoir (writing as Margaret B. Jones) Love and Consequences, about growing up in LA in a world of gangs – again, turned out to be entirely fabricated. And of course there was this year’s example – Jon Krakauer’s exposé of numerous fabrications in Greg Mortensen’s memoir Three Cups of Tea.
As we all know, there are numerous other examples of so-called “memoirs” that were later exposed as lies… Wikipedia even has a page devoted to Fake Memoirs!
- So, what do you think? Does the label “nonfiction” mean that we writers must stick to the facts?
- Just what does that adjective “creative” apply to? Does it mean that the writing itself is “creative” – or does it mean that we can be creative with the “non” part of nonfiction… that we can invent a bit?
- Is it OK to omit or combine characters, or change the order of events (or even omit events… or even create events) in order to streamline our narrative? Or, if we choose to write under that label of “nonfiction,” does that constrain us to stick to the facts – even if they don’t really serve our narrative well?
- And of course, we all know that we never have all the facts, all the information – especially when we are writing memoir. Memory is fallable. Sometimes no one really knows what happened in that room. Sometimes other people who were also there have a different recollection of what actually happened than you do. How do you get around that, the unreliability of memory?
- What is a writer’s “contract with the reader”?
I think this is going to be a great discussion – I’m looking forward to your answers… and your questions!
And, I just want to mention – this discussion is inspired by a great blog post by Lorne Daniel, and the comments/conversation that followed. I urge you to check it out. And remember to look at our ABOUT page if you want to know what this site is, umm, about…
Writers discuss... 
Hi Jacqueline. This is a good idea, and it will be fun.
At the outset, I think I should say that this discussion would not be necessary were it not for the fact – there’s that word; it will pop up a few times – that this genre has become a bit of an academic romper room, at the same time that it actually exists and flourishes outside of academic circles. For serious practitioners in the trade, most of these questions do not come up, and it is for that very reason that discussions like this are useful. So good on you for hosting it.
I’ll just wander through your questions now and answer them as best I can.
1. Yes. Non-fiction writers must “stick to the facts.” Doing so will not preclude a writer from employing the elements of fiction, poetry, or any other genre. It’s harder work. But that’s what it’s for. As for what facts are – facts are the substance of objective reality. Do we not all apprehend facts subjectively? Yes. That is what it is to be human.
2. Can we “invent a bit”? If by that you mean: Can we present as fact something that is not? No. Before certain “creative writing” departments got a hold of the concept, it is what used to be called “lying.”
3.It Is not OK to “combine characters.” That is what fiction is for. Real human beings are not “characters” in a pantomime, so no. To “change” the order of events is also to misrepresent their order, which is a euphemism for lying. it is totally up to the writer to determine the sequence in which events are presented in the narrative structure of a work. it is also completely up to the writer to decide where the story begins, where its middle is, and where it ends. There is a universe of creative possibility and opportunity for “streamlining” a narrative arc and so on in that one simple liberty. But to intimate that one thing happened before another thing when the opposite happened is to engage in something other than non-fiction. You know what you do with sequences and facts that “don’t really serve our narrative well”? You don’t bother with either. But if the “narrative” you’ve chosen isn’t served by the facts your working with or by a key sequence of events, then the problem is your narrative, not the other way around.
4. It is quite true that “we never have all the facts, all the information.” Can we not stop for a moment and give thanks for that? You work with what you have. You accumulate as many facts and perspectives as you can in the same way a wooden boat builder will acquire a variety and abundance of types of wood. But it a wooden boat we are building, not a fibreglass boat. This goes to the heart of what non-fiction writing is. If one sets out to create a work of art from the found materials of the known world (my personal “definition” for the thing creative non-fiction actually creates), then one is not in any way encumbered in one’s art by the fallibility of memory, or the multitude of recollections of and perspectives on “what happened in that room.” Rather than being a restraint, it presents even more galaxies of creative opportunity in telling a true story that is also a work of art. You want to try to “get around that”? Don’t. Embrace it. Deal with it. Rejoice. if the “unreliability of memory” is meant to mean something that portends to afflict a writer, I highly recommend the spiral-bound Hilroy 160-page 10×20 cm notebook. Fits in your pocket. Always have a second pen handy too.
5. What is a writer’s contract with the reader? Very good question. Perhaps the only one you really need to keep your eye on, especially since the genre of creative non-fiction – or long-form narrative non-fiction, or literary journalism, and what have you – has been so “problematized” of late.
To get the problem of memoir out of the way: 1. There has always been a kind of unspoken agreement between the memoirist and the reader, or rather a boilerplate codicil, that memory is what it is, especially when it the narrative resorts to a vivid and detailed depiction of a scene or an event from, say, the memoirist’s childhood. No problem. 2. It is the current fashion in the publishing industry to appease low taste by marketing what are in effect novels closely derived from personal experience as “memoirs.” As we have seen, this has caused a great deal of harm to the stature of creative non-fiction, to put it as charitably as I can.
Back to he contract. It’s this: You can’t lie to the reader. You will be found out eventually, and quite apart from the deserved rubbishing of your own reputation if you engage in this sort of thing, making shit up violates another contract (to persist with the metaphor), one with real writers of real non-fiction who must inescapably suffer from the pall of distrust that such scandals cause to hang over the entire genre.
To now thoroughly confound the whole conversation, I will conclude by submitting that you can make stuff up, out of whole cloth. But what you have to do, eventually, or somehow, is let the reader in on it. Just one example is the latest title in my wee Transmontanus series / imprint, written by Grant Buday: Stranger on a Strange Island. Smack dab in the middle of it is an entirely fictional digression, a chapter on Captain Richard Mayne, after whom the island of Grant’s title is named. You’re halfway through the chapter before you realize that it’s just so astonishing it can’t be true, and before you reach the end of the chapter it’s plainly obvious that Grant’s been having us on.
Anyway, that’s my two bits.
Salaam,
TG
Thanks for such a great start to this discussion, Terry!
And yes, I am quite with you on the definitions of “non”-fiction. But I know that there are a lot of writers who don’t see the line between fiction and non-fiction to be so sharply defined, and I do hope that we will hear from them too.
I think part of this disagreement comes from the naming of our genre:
creative non-fiction
Most people agree that it’s a pretty dumb name – but it doesn’t seem that anyone has come up with a better alternative. Thinking about it, as I prepared for this discussion, I concluded that some of the confusion about the rules comes from that phrase – which I take as:
creative non-fiction writing
as in, the adjective “creative” modifies the inferred noun “writing”. (i.e., we non-fiction writers can use many of the creative writing techniques that are commonly applied to fiction writing). But I think some people take that “creative” to be modifying “non-fiction” – and so therefore they feel that they can be creative with the facts.
I like to think of this range between the genres like a sliding scale – with white on one end for pure “non-fiction” and black on the other for pure “fiction.”
But the only thing that really is “pure” on that sliding scale is the non-fiction end. Pretty much all fiction still has some parts of it that are “true” – real places as their settings, real historical time periods, human characters or at least humanoid characters. So whereas sci-fi and fantasy might sit in the dark grey end of the spectrum, a novel like Lawrence Hill’s “The Book of Negroes” would sit over in the pale grey end – still a novel, with fictional main characters, but with very real and well researched historical time periods, political contexts, settings…
And the only thing that is white is non-fiction, where nothing is invented. As soon as you slide at all into the shades of grey, as soon as you start to invent anything, you have moved into the realm of fiction.
That’s how I see it, anyway.
Jackie pursed her lips, thought a bit, and decided to start with encouragement. “Thanks for such a great start to this discussion, Terry!” she typed into the comment box. “And yes, I am quite with you on the definitions of ‘non’-fiction.”
Biting a chunk from the slab of cold, uber-rare beef she always kept by her writing table, she chewed thoughtfully. I want to encourage participation,‘ she thought, but I already know what the answers to these questions are. After another moment’s thought, she continued typing: “I think part of this disagreement comes from the naming of our genre: creative non-fiction”. In later years, some commentators would conclude that she left out the period deliberately to be provocative; others saw in it the beginnings of her slow decline.
At any rate, she brushed her hair away from her eyes and pulled up the right sleeve of the green-and-gold plaid blouse she may or may not have been wearing (though a doctoral researchers doing research on “The Ill Windh” unearthed photographic evidence of Jackie having once owned, or at least worn, such a blouse, no reliable proof of her actually wearing it at this moment ever turned up; we, your humble authors, just want to be thorough, this being a creative nonfictional account of the writing of Jackie’s most celebrated (to date) self-comment on her own blog post).
She chewed the beef slowly, typing a letter each time her jaw moved: “Most people agree that it’s a pretty dumb name” — she hesitated a trifle before punching in the double-hyphen that passes for an em-dash in the (she felt) rather slapdash world of knee-jerk, on-line commentary. Then she swallowed, set her jaw, spat on the floor, and leapt into it wholeheartedly.
Umm, thanks for the, umm, participation, Greg – I think!
Sorry this reply will be very brief – I have to get up in 6 hrs for an all-day trail run! So I won’t be able to read or post anything here until Saturday morning – but I hope there will be others with something to say in the meantime.
The one thing I want to say right now, though, is that I dispute your imagined account of me saying “but I already know what the answers to these questions are.” I already know what my answers to these questions are. But I know there are people who feel differently about the limits of CNF – and I hope that we will hear from them!
I get you, Greg B.
I guess I’m one of those whom Jackie identifies as being somewhat less dogmatic about where the limits of creative nonfiction are than Terry. I agree with Terry about “lying.” It’s wrong in life, and it’s wrong in writing. But “lying” has a deliberate aspect to it: we know when we’re telling an out-and-out lie because somewhere in our brains we know what the truth is. If we know the truth is “a” and we write “b,” then we are lying.
Almost everything we write, whether fiction or nonfiction, is memory. If I write “tree,” I am not imagining a tree, I am remembering one. Physiologically, when I look at a tree, my brain is recording only about half of what my eye is actually seeing; the rest of the tree is being filled in by my memory.
So what is the “fact” of the tree?
And memory is fallible. Spotty. And fully charged with imagination. Memory makes stuff up. Memory puts a light blue bathing suit on my father when he took me to the beach when I was five. The beach was at Point Pelee, on Lake Erie. I am going to write those “facts” from my memory. It will not be fiction, even though I subsequently find out that my father never owned a light-blue bathing suit, that the beach was on Georgian Bay, and that I was eight.
I do not believe that writing what exists in my memory makes me a liar (unless we agree that all writing is lying). If I changed my father’s bathing suit from light blue to orange, and the beach to Georgian Bay, and my age to eight, then I would be writing about something that I do not remember. Wouldn’t that be fiction?
My definition focuses on intent and motive:
Memoirists write the truth of their memory and observation, and they are obligated to fact-check, reality-check, b.s.-check that truth wherever possible. Intelligent readers understand and accept the limits of memory, but they trust the writer to not knowingly alter material just to make the story more enticing (that’s what fiction writers do, and they do it well.) There are truths you will find by adhering closely to this path; truths you will not find if you give yourself license to shortcut and fudge.
Dinty W. Moore
I agree with this entirely. I call it “personal truth” and use it as a guide for my personal nonfiction. I try and extract others’ personal truths and fact check as much as possible when writing about others. The contract we have with readers is that they trust us to be as truthful as possible and we trust them to understand our limits.
Whatever happened to never let the facts get in the way of a good story?
Grant: That works well in fiction and taverns.
To state it baldly, i am mystified by painstaking discussion over the world of “fact”, and the slavish but unidimensional attention we pay to it (when we’re conscious of it; most of the time we are not, and we function just fine). What is a “fact” but an intellectual conceit, or a social convention? Even science, that unassailable bastion of fact, is backing away from its position of certainty as it tackles ever more complex areas. So often, today’s “fact” is debunked by tomorrow’s new discovery.
So, that light blue bathing suit that Wayne mentioned — was it really light blue? Or was it closer to cyan, maybe shading into violet? What colour was the light at the time? Was the eight-year-old wearing sunglasses? Would everybody have agreed it was light blue? That it was a bathing suit, and not shorts? Would an insect have seen it as blue? What about the 80% of humanity that wouldn’t know a bathing suit from a cualacino* (something many Italian people know, but for which there is no word in English)? How “true” can such a tenuous, assumption-loaded “fact” possibly be?
In my ontology, a fact is an artificial extraction from a contiguous whole (known informally as the cosmos) in which every “fact” is connected to and dependent upon every other “fact”. The extraction itself is such a gross distortion of ultimate reality (a.k.a. ultimate truth) that any argument as to whether the fact is “true” or not pales in absurdity.
I do concede that facts can be useful, and in a discipline like nonfiction writing — which is largely composed of extracted “facts” — they are indispensible. But let’s not treat them as something absolute and inviolable. We might be able to get a firm handle on the colour of a bathing suit; whether its wearer is happy or sad, less so; whether he is right or wrong … well, we’ve left the realm of fact entirely.
* The mark left on a table by a cold glass.
In my ontology purple is a hairy bus.
But my child, what can you possibly mean when you say ‘I burned my hand.’ You what? You reached into the fire to retrieve a marshallow that fell off a stick? You silly child. “Fire” is merely an intellectual conceit, a social convention, a tenuous, assumption-loaded artificial extraction from a contiguous whole (known informally as the cosmos) that is connected to and dependent upon everything else. It is a gross distortion of ultimate reality (a.k.a. ultimate truth) to assert that you burned your hand in what you call a”fire.” What you say is absurd!
Wayne:
“Memory puts a light blue bathing suit on my father when he took me to the beach when I was five. The beach was at Point Pelee, on Lake Erie. I am going to write those “facts” from my memory.”
If you’re writing non-fiction, you will write that you remember that it was a light blue bathing suit that your dad was wearing back in the day. If that is indeed your memory, then to write it thus is to stick to the facts with unimpeachable loyalty.
I do not propose that a writer should insert some subordinate clause along the lines of “If I recall correctly” or “If I’m not mistaken” or “As I remember it” into every dang sentence. I merely notice that you and any other decent writer should be able to write the whole dang thing with the reader in on that fact (tada!), the fact that it is as all as you recall it from memory.
in this way I fail to see how it is “dogmatic” of me to notice no puzzling ontological dilemma that we are obliged to confront here and to carry on in the knowledge that we have no pressing need to wrestle with the abstractions Greg raises. That’s somebody else’s job, and certainly not the job of a writer who merely wants to convey something rather more interesting anyway, about when he was five, about his dad, and Point Pelee.
T
I agree, Terry. Part of the “contract” is that the reader understands that the writer is being as accurate as memory allows without hiring a raft of fact-checkers, and even at that I would hire a raft of fact-checkers if the fact in question was more important than the colour of a bathing suit. In other words, the contract works both ways: it obliges the writer, but it also obliges the reader.
Just want to sign in with my real name so I can be part of your discussions. Where can I find Jon Krakauer’s article about Three Cups of Tea?
Hi Virginia –
You can find a good excerpt of Krakauer’s “Three Cups of Deceit” here:
http://byliner.com/jon-krakauer/stories/excerpt-three-cups-of-deceit
At the bottom of the excerpt is a link to buy the full article from Amazon (it was offered for free on Byliner for the first week or so).
Also below it are further “debunkings” by Krakauer that he has written up since that piece was published.
Holy cow, Greg….
It’s a big step to go from disputing “facts” to calling them “intellectual conceits.” I am just in from a great trail run,on a beautiful hot sunny day here in Port Alberni. So, OK, some might dispute the “fact” of whether I was “running” or merely “jogging”… but the facts of the trail itself, the forest, the sun and the heat… unless you are going to dispute reality itself, and try to go for that argument that maybe we’re just figments of somebody’s imagination (didn’t we do that one in high schol?)… well, no one is going to dispute those fundamental facts. (And, as Terry notes, if we’re really going to start debating abstractions, and whether or not anything is real at all… well that’s somebody else’s job).
Even if we are all figments, we have been imagined in much the same way. Our powers of observation and interpretation are remakably similar overall. No one in this town would believe me if I told them I got caught in the pouring rain today, or got snowed upon. So I think we have to accept that there are some fundamentals that most of us would observe and agree upon: Was the bathing suit blue or was it red? And that there are subtleties that we all might see differently: was it really blue, or was it cyan, or perhaps tending towards purple? If we can’t agree on “facts” at that level – yes, it was a bathing suit and not a cualacino, and yes it was some shade of blue – then really this is not a discussion about writing.
What interests me far more is the memory aspect of writing. So if Wayne writes about a light blue bathing suit, which is what he genuinely remembers – but then comes across an old photo that shows that the bathing suit was indeed red – should he revise the writing to reflect this new information? Or can he leave it as it was – true to his memory, if not true to what really happened.
Also, I am very interested in the idea of “contract with the reader.” I think there is an unwritten but implicitly clear contract with the reader in some types of memoir – e.g. if you are writing about something from your childhood, or if you are relating dialogue from a conversation in the past, the reader will (should!) implicitly understand that you are writing from memory… things may not have happened word-for-word as you state it.
But how about when it is not so implicitly clear… e.g. you are writing about an old house you saw 6 months ago on a trip to Cuba or wherever… and dang, you didn’t have your notebook, you didn’t take any photos, but now it’s something you are inspired to write about. You don’t remember it clearly enough to paint an accurate picture for your reader – you want to say something about the bright colours, the faded shutters, the flowers in the front garden. You don’t want phrases like “To the best of my memory…” or “I think the door was red…” But you do want to have some visual images… And, importantly, these details are just to help build atmosphere or mood or setting… they are not crucial to the “truth” of what your essay deals with, or to any “events” that happened.
So what do you guys think, Wayne, Terry, anyone? Can you embellish details like that, where your exact memory fails you, and that do not affect the truth of what the story is actually about?
And, if you do, do you need to somehow disclose that to the reader?
Krakauer’s essay is brilliant. It’s at byliner.com. You have to buy it (A couple bucks as I recall) but there’s a long excerpt here:
http://byliner.com/jon-krakauer/stories/excerpt-three-cups-of-deceit
Sorry Jacqeline, hadn’t seen your reply to Virginia.
Anyhow: You don’t want phrases like “To the best of my memory…” or “I think the door was red…” But you do want to have some visual images… ” I think I dealt with that adequately, or to as best I could, but you raise the point of more recent memory and ask: “Can you embellish details like that, where your exact memory fails you, and that do not affect the truth of what the story is actually about? And, if you do, do you need to somehow disclose that to the reader?”
The only truth the writer of non-fiction is capable of revealing is the truth revealed by facts – which leaves you with the entire known universe to play with, and the entire body of known conjecture about the rest of the universe besides. That should be enough, I would have thought, to preclude any resort to embellishment, which can not help but “”affect the truth of what the story is about” in unavoidably deleterious ways. The distortions and phantoms of memory are a very big part of the factual record of any “true” story that relies on memory. This a good thing, not a hindrance. To pretend that those distortions don’t exist, or to invent memory by way of embellishment, is simply to avoid the hard work involved in the trade, and it will draw not only your reader, but yourself, further and further from the truth.
Contract with the reader:
At its best, the experience of creating a narrative work from the found materials for the known world lends itself not exactly to the “‘contract” metaphor. It will do, but what is also happening is something rather more magical. What is involved is a triangular relationship between the words, the writer and the reader. The very act of writing non-fiction after the exacting and demanding methods of the trade (Didion, Orwell, McPhee, krakauer, et. al.) can reveal “truth” to the writer.
The words stare back at the writer from the page and make their unforgiving demands, on the reader’s behalf: Is this really true? Is this the exact meaning you intend? Are you absolutely sure the word you’re using in this sentence is exactly the right word? Did it really happen just as you describe?
So you fight hard to be sure that you can answer “yes” honestly to each of those questions, and if you can’t, you find that you have given an unintended meaning, or left an untoward inflection that the reader can only be expected to take the wrong way, or you’ve failed to say what you really mean,or that the words really aren’t the right ones, the true ones, and the experience can be as epiphanic for the writer as, one hopes, the story will be for the reader. Even when you may think you know exactly the facts of the story – the truth of the story – you start to write it, and the words tell you, no, something else is going on, look deeper, work harder.
The “contract” idea is okay, but it’s a collaboration between writers, words, and readers, and there’s trust involved. It’s why we should take it very seriously.
Plus what Dinty said.
The issue for me in nonfiction comes in the form of dialogue. Here is where we have to trust that our readers understand that the dialogue is made up of best recollections rather than specific, recorded quotes. But in the function of storytelling, dialogue is often very important.
Late to the party, here, after having provoked things with my original post. Thanks Jackie and to everyone who has posted – some really great insights into the challenges and choices.
Did anyone here read any of the Jo Ann Beard memoir pieces from her recent collection? I still struggle with the labeling of (at least some of) these. Even if we implicitly agree that a writer recalling her three year old self is inventing or re-creating details, Beard seems to stretch that. I love the writing but wonder if it should be labeled “story” rather than “memoir.”
And as a closing note, I think as writers we need to be aware that memory and recall are very different things than facts and objective truths. Studies show, for example, that eye witness recollections of crimes are often wrong on the subjective facts. There’s no way around that for the writer, I suppose – assuming we all try to be truthful. But the process of writing is one of editing and choosing, and often subjectively we choose a version of reality that subtly adheres to our world view.
[…] last month we talked about truth in non-fiction. But it is so often said by writers that the greater truth is […]
When writing a non-fiction event in a narrative format, by necessity one must fabricate certain aspects in order to create a functional story. I think there are elements that are understood to have been fictionalized, for example, dialogue. If a story is based off of recollection and memory, one would be hard pressed to find an individual who could perfectly remember every single word that had been said. Also, with memory, it is hard to recreate events just as they happened even when trying to be true to the “facts,” hence why in a court of law witnesses can be less than reliable.
With the word creative being in the title, the reader is supposed to understand that certain liberties have been taken in creating the story. In writing my first novel–about a homeless woman that ends up in a mental institution–I sometimes would find myself writing about events that happened several months prior. Though I could remember generally what happened, I could in no way remember things specifically enough to be entirely factually accurate. Because of this, I outright said in the work that the things represented may not have happened literally as I wrote them, and that it was up to the reader to interpret the events as they will.
When it comes down to it, Creative Non-fiction is about telling a story, and is sort of the bastard child of Non-fiction and Fiction. Generally, the story must have some basis in fact, but if it is supposed to be entirely factual, it might as well just be a textbook.
Robert:
The example you cite is from your novel. A novel does not purport to be non-fiction, creative or otherwise.
The difficulty with this discussion seems to be that we are talking about entirely different things, but using the term “creative non-fiction.” If it’s “a bastard child of fiction and non-fiction,” then I must be completely illiterate. What you describe does not exist outside certain small journals and certain sections of certain creative writing university programs. It doesn’t exist anywhere else, to my knowledge.
I have written seven books that have been situated in the literary taxonomy as creative non-fiction. All the writers I admire most write “creative non-fiction.” As the editor of the Transmontanus imprint at New Star Books, I’ve nurtured into print 20 books that fall within (at least what has long been known as) creative non-fiction. I’ve taught in the MFA creative writing program at UBC and I’m currently teaching what would otherwise be called creative non fiction at this year’s Harvey Southam lecturer at UVic.
If what you say is correct, then all these years I have been writing, reading, editing and teaching another genre entirely, and I’ve been mistaken all along, and “creative non fiction” is something completely different than I thought it was.
Hey Terry and Robert –
This is really interesting – because in part it comes down to the really dumb name we have for our genre. As I have heard Wayne Grady say, we label it by what it is not: “non-fiction.”
And then we have this modifier “creative.” I have to say that I am 100% with Terry on this one – but I also agree that the confusion comes from what that word “creative” is referring to. If it means being creative with the facts – well, then, the “non” in “non-fiction” becomes pretty meaningless. It is fiction.
To me, there can be no “bastard child of fiction and non-fiction.” The definition of “non-fiction” is pure: nothing is made up. Once we make up any of it, it is fiction. Even if the story is 95% true – once we start inventing, as a classification, it has to be called “fiction.”
But I can totally see how views diverge on this because of that stupid adjective “creative.” But, like I said, if that modifier means we can be creative with the facts, then the actual noun being modified, “non-fiction,” becomes meaningless. If we take the meaning of “creative” that way, the phrase really is an oxymoron.
So to me, that “creative” is about the writing, the language – and not about the facts. So we really need a better term for this genre, to get rid of this confusion and alternative interpretations. Because then we can have writing that is what Terry is talking about (and what I also agree with as being CNF) – which perhaps we could call “literary non-fiction” (because then the modifer more clearly relates to the writing/language, not to the facts). And then we could also have what Robert is talking about, which would be something like “fiction, based upon the true story of…” or just something like historical fiction (true-life setting, some real characters, but also some invented characters – i.e. much of the story is factual and “true,” but not all of it).
That all said… I still do have the niggling doubt of how far a writer can go to make something literary, without betraying the truth of a story.
So Terry, I have a question for you. I have a draft of an essay that I would classify as “memoir” (i.e. non-fiction). It has never been submitted or published anywhere, so at the moment what it is classified as is irrelevant (there is no contract with the reader, because it has no readers!). There is a scene where I am flying from BC to Toronto to visit my dying father. That actual flight was overnight (in winter) – but I wrote it as if it happened in daylight in winter (a flight that I have really done many times), partly to get the metaphor in of the barren coldness I was seeing below (and also feeling) and also partly to establish setting (viewing the Rockies and then the prairies, so I did not have to say straight out where I was flying from and to, it was implicit I was flying east from the coast).
So, like I said, this is still a draft. I am not sure how I feel about that level of invention. It does not change the truth of the story in anyway. I have done that exact flight before, I did not invent the views. I think it actually adds to the truth of the story, as it gives much more emotional depth through this metaphor, and it also adds to the literary value by me not having to write in a more journalistic way of saying I boarded the flight to Toronto in Vancouver etc etc. But the real flight out to my father was at night, not by day. Strictly speaking, that scene is not exactly true. I feel that it adds much dimension to my story – but it is not 100% exactly the way things happened.
So, Terry (and anyone else) – what do you think about that kind of invention? Is that fair enough for “creative non-fiction”? Or do you think I have to really stick 100% to the facts, even if that removes a huge literary component of the piece… essentially moving it more towards journalism or just straight narrative, without the creative and literary components?
I feel that my “lie” adds to the truth of the piece. But I still totally acknowledge that it is a lie…