Consider This—Fact or Truth

            In an earlier post I referred to narrative nonfiction as an act of making art out of real experience. It could also be said that literary or narrative nonfiction, sometimes called “creative nonfiction,” expresses real experience artfully. Basically, it uses fictional techniques in the composition of nonfiction. But it eschews fiction. The first person essayist does not make up facts.

           Yes, the boundaries often seem indistinct. Students question how much they can embellish facts to make their *stories more interesting. If the writer is calling it nonfiction, my advice has always been--not at all. If the facts are—for example—troublesome, awkward, or inconvenient, write about that trouble, awkwardness or inconvenience; make it part of the narrative if necessary. Otherwise, nonfiction writers need to inform readers of their intentions and methods.

          Today's New York Times Book Review deals with this challenge head-on in a review of The Lifespan of a Fact by John D’Agata and Jim Fingal. Lifespan, reproduces D’Agata and Fingal’s correspondence over nearly half a decade during the submission process D’Agata underwent to get a fifteen-page essay published when Fingal was an intern for the literary magazine The Believer. Here’s reviewer Jennifer B. McDonald:

The essay, finally published in 2010…tells the story of a boy named Levi Presley who in 2002 jumped to his death from the observation deck of the Stratosphere Hotel in Las Vegas. D”Agata used that episode to meditate on ideas about, among other things, suicide and Las Vegas, the stories Vegas tells about itself, the stories visitors tell themselves about Vegas, and what a city built on artifice tells us about the human condition.

That D’Agata “used that episode to meditate on ideas about [a distinct subject, place, time]…” places his writing firmly in what narrative essay writing does—grounds the writing in a subject about which the writer reflects and makes meaning.

However, Fingal  discovered multiple errors of fact beginning with D’Agata’s first sentence and expresses outrage and accusation while citing massive evidence. McDonald reports Lifespan as a “knock-down, drag-out fight between two tenacious combatants, over questions of truth, belief, history, myth, memory and forgetting.” D’Agata, a writing instructor at the University of Iwoa, defends himself by calling his tweaking and spinning of facts “art.” D’Agata is convinced, McDonald reports, that “fact and art are mutually exclusive.”

The question is: can factual nonfiction be written artfully? Can we report facts accurately and make personal truth of them? McDonald closes her review:

No text is sacred. The best writers know this. Fiction or nonfiction, poetry or reportage, it can all be endlessly tinkered with, buffed, polished, reshaped, rearranged. To create art out of fact, to be flexible and canny enough to elicit something sublime from an inconvenient detail, is itself an art. For D’Agata to argue otherwise—to insist that fact impeded the possibilities of literature, and that anyone who thinks otherwise is “unsophisticated”—betrays his limitations as a researcher and a writer, not our limitations as readers.

Consider this as you compose the truth of experience.

*I’m using the word story here as a journalist sometimes does a news article, as a narrative with a story sense. The first-person narrative—however much of it is based on memoir or personal experience—is an essay. An essay is by definition nonfiction.  

Consider this—Peter Schjeldahl on seeing and interpreting

A  critical part of memoir writing is faithful reportage, as accurate as possible re-creation of experience. The other, equally challenging part becomes our interpretation of that experience, our reflections and realizations, the meaning-making that turns our experiences into story. A writer's deftness in handling both the reportage and the reflection distinguishes effective memoir writing--with a goal of representing reality just "economically" enough to keep a reader's attention and, ideally, to create art.  

New Yorker art critic Peter Schjeldahl, always dependable as an elegant prose stylist and challenging critic, talks (The New Yorker, November 29, 2010) about absorbing visual experience and suggests that our assessment of that visualization is made familiar because of all we've experienced previously and what we want to experience.  We see something we want to see based on what we have known and what we long for.

from the Mary panel, Ghent Altarpiece

Schjeldahl ‘s article, “The Flip Side,” reports and analyzes the history of the location and restoration of the Ghent Altarpiece, begun in 1432 by Hubert van Eyck in Ghent, Belgium:

 I got to study them [the Mary panels] from a nose’s length away. Their sophistication is staggering. The intricacy and sumptuousness of the images are achieved with economical technique. Each of the hundreds of pearls that fringe Mary’s robes is just a dollop of gray hit with a spot of white, so perfectly judged in relative tone that, from any distance, it exudes pearlescence. A seductive softness in the flesh of Mary’s throat owes to one long stroke…. Van Eyck understood that realism doesn't require verisimilitude but only just enough visual cues to exploit the mind’s credulity. We know now, from brain science, that seeing is not a direct register of what meets our eyes but a fast mental construction that squares sensations with memory and desire: what we believe and wish reality to be.

 Perhaps like a viewer studying a work of art in a museum, readers of narrative nonfiction instantly absorb text, making meaning of their own, recognizing their own memories and desires in our stories. If this is so, if art can "exploit the mind's credulity," if a reader's perceptions are also "fast mental constructions" instantly created, it's easy to understand why writing requires such an artful creation process. So, how does Schjeldahl's idea match what you experience when you write your memories, when you compose and structure your writing in an attempt to make meaning of what you've seen and felt? Can you describe the challenge of expressing just enough reality to capture the reader's imagination and to tap into the universality of experience?

Consider attending one of my upcoming workshops

California: Laguna Beach on March 24 & the Bay Area on April 22

Abruzzo, Italy: May 27 to June 2.

Sign up soon as all have limited space. 

Consider this—Sips of Home, Bits of Memory

Photo: Moises Saman, NY Times

Yesterday’s New York Times Dining section features a lovely food memoir essay, “Sips of Home, Bits of Memory.” Writer and journalist, Alissa J. Rubin, rounds up her experiences seeking comfort in food when she lived as a war correspondent in Kabul.

The type of essay is sometimes called a "roundup," a composite of like experiences based in one locale, composed for effect to make a whole essay. Rubin evokes feelings readers recognize, thus making her distinctive experiences universal. 

Reading Rubin's essay recalls Amy Tan’s insight:  This is the paradox of writing and of life:  By capturing your own individuality, you often capture what is universally true.

The memoir writer's  goal is to write personal experiences as close to the truth as possible so they resonate universally. Ruben shows us how.

Reading the Genre: Blood, Bones & Butter

Sometimes memoir writing gets criticized as confessional, self-indulgent navel gazing. Sometimes that’s just what it is. But the best memoir writing isn’t; it’s thought-provoking, relevant and often surprising.  As V. S. Pritchett said, "It's all in the art. You get no credit for living." Just expressing personal experience isn't enough.

Many writers understand that memoir writing needs to focus on a particular subject (not the writer), a topic that provides a context for the writer’s reflections, a sort of armature to contain the narrative.

Readers see the subject—a place, a meal, an event, for example—through the writer’s eyes and experiences. The subject grounds the story and makes it whole; the reader experiences the subject through the writer’s particular perspective.

Some of the most popular narrative nonfiction today features food and place. Since we all eat and many of us love to travel, we devour these tales. Stories of food adventures particular to a specific place can be compelling. One of the most compelling memoirs published recently is Gabrielle Hamilton’s Blood, Bones & Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef. (Be sure to get the paperback edition as it includes a fairly pertinent epilogue.) Hamilton’s subject—food—drives her story and makes it relevant.

I’d say, read the book for its absolutely honest, gripping story and, if you’re a memoirist or aspire to be, notice as well what Hamilton includes and what she leaves out.That editing of content is regularly challenging for writers.   Recommended to me by a fellow student and now colleague, Linda Prospero, Blood, Bones & Butter is set in NYC and Italy, two wondrous places newly evoked here. It’s Hamilton’s story of her need to feed others while seeking to satisfy hungers of her own.

Note:  One of my goals in this blog is encourage a conversation about narrative nonfiction writing. I’d like to hear your ideas, questions, responses to my posts—below or via email.  Though I’m not particularly adept at doing so myself, please feel free to send my blog posts out to others who might be interested via your own email or Facebook & Twitter on the links below the post. 

Reading the Genre: Composing a Life

Narrative nonfiction, creative nonfiction, literary nonfiction…it goes by many names. Mostly, it’s not fiction. It’s story-telling based on actual experience, using fictional techniques. But our actual experiences, the ones we might want to relate, appear in our lives randomly and certainly without the dramatic sequencing of good fiction. Hence, the nonfiction writer creates literature as he or she narrates experiences seen in retrospect—through recollection, reflection, and reconsideration.

Mary Catherine Bateson talks about the random discontinuities in our lives, the actual crux of the stories we tell: 

      Often continuity is visible only in retrospect. There’s a process that occurs that you don’t even                 know is going on…The discontinuities associated [with challenging life experiences] allow more time for growth and change in a lengthened life span…Usually we think of wisdom in terms of lofty abstractions, not survival skills, absolute truths, not tactful equivocations. And yet the central survival skill is surely the capacity to pay attention and respond to changing circumstances, to learn and adapt, to fit into new environments…
                                                                                   (from Composing a Life, 1990)

Craft, Craft, Craft—Bird by Bird

My all-time favorite recommendation for a book on craft is Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life. If you read just one book on craft, read this one. Lamott is very funny, creates terrific images and gives pointed advice. She models an intimate and natural  first person narrative nonfiction voice, telling stories to make her points, surprising the reader with originality. Her writing is not at all elevated; she’s right down there scratching in the dirt and finding old, valuable coins.

She has comforted beginning writers everywhere with her “Shitty First Drafts” concept.  Here’s some of her wisdom:  A friend of mine says that the first draft is the down draft—you just get it down. The second draft is the up draft—you fix it up. You try to say what you have to say more accurately. And the third draft is the dental draft, where you check every tooth, to see if it’s loose or cramped or decayed, or even, God help us, healthy.

She’s a huge proponent of being kind to oneself—an idea that's sometimes hard to remember.

Consider This--Pico Iyer in San Francisco

I got to the Ferry Building last Friday night early enough to snag two seats in the front row to hear Pico Iyer talk about his new book, The Man within My Head, his meditation on Graham Greene, in whose life and writing experiences Iyer finds deep connection. I’ve never been particularly infatuated with Greene, but I could listen to Iyer for hours. He writes travel essays, travel books, general essays, and fiction. His words always invade my mind (TIME Magazine said that Graham Greene “invaded our minds.”) Here are some snippets of Iyer’s talk that resonated with me:

"Our subconscious makes irrational but powerful connections…anything you can explain isn’t really important...there is no magic in the writing process, but certainly mystery…we fight against our parents until we find we become them”
That last one is haunting, for sure.