Part II: Embellishing Nonfiction with Technique

Virginia Woolf, 25 January 1882

If you do not tell the truth about yourself, you cannot tell it about other people.

                                                                                                                                  Virginia Woolf


Here are more ideas for making nonfiction as vibrant as fiction.

• Write evocative scenes.
• Create visual images for your reader, rich with colors, smells, fabrics, furniture, and typical 1970s wallpaper, for example, so close to your childhood kitchen that your brother will recognize it with a pang of nostalgia (or anxiety, perhaps). Yes, you may have to remember the wallpaper pattern via a bit of web research, but that's easy to do.
• Weave reflection and scene and summary with a balance that is both satisfying and intriguing. 
• Keep the content lively by balancing passages of meaning-making with scenes and summary of scenes. Writing comes alive when reflection and philosophizing is punctuated with anecdote, scenes, allusions and metaphor.
• Express--explicitly or implicitly--a universal, permanent meaning to human experience. 
• Literary nonfiction, by definition, delivers more than mere life experience. We read memoir and first-person essays to learn about the world from another person's perspective. Note graduation speeches--those full of platitudes and those that have something meaningful to say. Find some dynamic ones here on Maria Popova's excellent blog, Brain Pickings. 
• Acknowledge faulty memory, ambiguity, bias.
• Here's the most honest way to be honest and authentic. Don't cover for yourself. Don't write what you think the reader wants or needs to hear. Write the truth realizing that everyone's truth contains faulty memory, ambiguity, and bias. 
• You can't remember everything, so let the reader know when you are imagining something: "I think she was wearing a heavy pea coat that disguised the pregnancy,but it could have been a caftan. It was a long time ago, but I do remember exactly what she said as I approached her."
•  Let the reader know when you aren't sure: "It could have been that I really wanted to imitate Alice Water's lifestyle or I could have merely responded through boredom. I was young and didn't know myself at all." 
• Let the reader know your bias: "His politics bothered me and I wasn't sure I could be civil knowing his narrow views."   
• Note: We are starting to get sign ups for The Heart of Memoir Writing Workshop to be held in the South of France in October. We expect full enrollment and a fabulous week of writing workshop and cultural excursions. Find details and photos: France, In Other Words.

Part I: Embellishing Nonfiction with Technique




Alice Waters



 We can't think narrowly. We have to think in the biggest way possible.  

                                        

                                                                                                           

Never refrigerate papayas.

                                                                                                              Alice Waters
  

In recent posts I've attempted to figure out why some writers have a hard time sticking to the truth in narrative nonfiction writing--travel, food, and memoir essays in this case. So I've put together some ideas based on my analyses of published memoir and of my own composing process.

Here are four ways to enliven nonfiction writing while keeping it true to actual life experience:

• Write exactly what happened, as close as possible to your best, thoughtful memory.
• The truth is often more interesting, shocking, and vibrant than what you can make up. I couldn't have made this up: The other day my cousin told me that her father announced her birth to his in-laws in the 1950s by saying, "The baby is a woman!" Funny, frightening and completely weird.
• Stimulate your memory. 
• Study childhood photos, maps of your hometown, or the location of your travel essay; web-search the 1970s in Morocco when you backpacked there from Spain, for example.  Talk to pertinent people involved--your siblings, parents, travel companions for their perspectives and memories. The same way knowledge builds on knowledge, memory builds on memory. Recollecting in a calm state, aided by such research, can bring forth more than you thought you knew.

• Re-create dialogue.
• Few can remember word for word conversations from the past--except all those admonitions our parents seemed to repeat hourly. But we can remember the tone and inflections of critical dialogue; we can remember the vocabulary different people use, and we can recreate dialogue that is faithful to the emotional truth of the memory.
• Conflate events and scenes. 
• Instead of listing every visit you made to Alice Waters' bungalow in Berkeley, you might conflate three visits into one. Writers do this for concision and impact. Unless the story depends on the three visits, at three distinct times, conflating them retains an emotional truth in the narrative. (This humorous food essay inspired the topic for my example. I have no idea how many visits Daniel Duane actually made to Alice Waters' home.)



Next week: Part II: Embellishing Nonfiction with Technique