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

                           

When Memorists Deceive

Woman Reading with Tea, Henri Matisse

If a story were ever to be written truthfully 

from start to finish, it would amaze everyone.

                                                                          Henri Matisse

We all know the stories--"memoirs" that are partially or completely fabricated. Some manuscripts initially submitted for publication as fiction got no bites, so the writers labeled them nonfiction and publishers bit. For decades news journalists have been exposed and censured for inventing "facts" and events of all sorts. Although misrepresentation of the self in various degrees is fairly common among humans, committing it to print is irreversible. 
     Why? Why write fiction and call it nonfiction? One answer is that it's easier to get nonfiction published and sold than fiction. Dishonest writers who don't have the skills to make facts appealing on their own can embellish easily. Or the cause is laziness and the motivation simple self-aggrandizement, hope for high sales or notoriety. 
     So part of the challenge for the memoirist is to keep the line between nonfiction and fiction distinct, to respect life experience and write honorably. It's said that God doesn't write good drama. So, because our lives often seem a series of random events, memoir writers have to craft personal experience into something God might have written (had she been so thoughtfully inclined) while still maintaining the integrity of actual experience. 

Woman Reading with Peaches by Henri Matisse

     So much has to do with the implicit contract of trust between writer and reader. So much depends on the writer's intent. Readers need to recognize and depend on a narrator's sincere purpose. Matisse also said, "Creativity takes courage," a quality that's in short supply in our world nowadays. 


Please share your thoughts on this sticky subject. my ideas here are preliminary musings, but I need more perspective--so fire away. In other words, go ahead and COMMENT herein.


Next week: Techniques for keeping nonfiction, not fiction--respectfully and honorably

Note: 
I'm in Italy this week teaching memoir writing at 
The Heart of Memoir Writing Workshop in 
Santo Stefano di Sessanio in Abruzzo. 
This week I'll be posting photos of our work and play on 
Facebook at Eat, Travel, Write Italy & France. 

The Genre: Narrative/Creative/Literary Nonfiction--Which Is It?

Charles Mingus, Jazz Composer and Bassist

Making the simple complicated is commonplace; 

making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that's creativity.

                                                                                                 Charles Mingus

AS it has always been, our genre is named after something it's not, rather than something it is. It is not fiction. Despite this, or perhaps because of it, the genre has evolved in the past fifty years into a blend: factual reporting enhanced with something like fiction (but definitely not fiction). 
     In the1960s and 1970s, along with much else in our world, cold, hard-news fiction transformed into a more human form. Called The New Journalism at the time, nonfiction was defined as writing that "not only seeks to explain as well as to inform; it even dares to teach, to measure, to evaluate."
     As a child and adolescent, I read only fiction--and biographies. Other nonfiction writing seemed distant and academic, news-oriented and analytic. But in the mid 1960s, Truman
Capote's In Cold Blood served, at least to me, to make nonfiction suddenly sexy, and completely compelling. Reportage became story.


What we're talking about is labeled, variously, narrative, creative or literary nonfiction. 
     It's narrative because it tells a story and has the general components of a story arc--rising action, climax, denouement. Children acquire a "story sense" around two years of age; by three they can tell a story--true or not--that has a beginning, middle and end. And a point. Composing life experience with the story arc of fiction allows us to engage our readers on a human level. Life experience doesn't occur, however, in neat story arcs. That's why writers craft life events into memoir.
     It's creative because--in addition to reporting facts--creative nonfiction writers employ the techniques of fiction writing: scene, dialogue, setting, characterization, interior monologue, for example. The creative nonfiction essay, story, or article appeals to readers because it reads somewhat like fiction. The facts are structured and organized in order to appeal to a reader's innate sense of story.
     It's literary because the writing has the definitive elements of literature: "excellence of form or expression and expressing ideas of permanent or universal interest." It is literary when the writer composes the narrative using creative techniques with the intent of satisfying a reader's need to understand the world and human relationships more thoroughly. It's literature when the writer composes beyond mere plot, or, in the case of memoir, beyond mere life event. Life experience can be made into art, the angle of the writer's perspective highlighting significance. And when the writer simplifies the extreme complication of human life, her writing benefits everyone who reads it. 


This post is mostly thinking out loud, then writing to figure out what I think to see if it makes sense. Writing's good for that--composing forces us to clarity--at least for the moment. Let me know if it's clear and makes sense. Add your perspective here, your understanding of the memoirist's task, through your lens. I'd love to hear it.


Next week: Thoughts about deception in memoir writing.

Research Your Travel Essay--Part II

Carry A Notebook
Always carry a small notebook to document, document, and document some more.

• Record overheard conversations that strike you as interesting or revealing of cultural distinction.
• Record your reflections about the effect of a place: a few sentences about how a place makes you feel, and how that feeling connects to other experiences you've had. 
• Write down proper nouns and adjectives from a tour guide's speech; that way, you have precision in the basics and can later research to find out more.
• Document the sounds, smells and visuals everywhere you go. Do it on the spot or at night, collected and documented in the tranquility of your room. 
• If you're lucky enough to be the recipient of a song--as I was from a group of children wandering home from school in Samoa--breathe deeply, listen carefully, and when they finally wander off again, madly scribble down every word and lilting note. Collect stories about encounters with children, and you'll have a lovely tale to tell. 
• Sketch, rather than photograph an interesting doorway, an intriguing shape in a painting, a table and chair sitting empty next to you in a sidewalk cafe. (Sketch while you sip and nibble, and you will live longer.) Tuck a tiny set of watercolors into your bag to create quick, colorful impressions. You will be amazed at how quickly the mood of such an encounter is preserved and recalled each time you look at the sketch or small painting.

Collect Ephemera

• I bring home paper coasters, ticket stubs, hotel stationery, postcards, business cards, and such. I still use a paper coaster from Soba, an Indonesian restaurant in Amsterdam where my mother and I dined with our tour guide twenty-five years ago; it reminds me of how much she enjoyed the multilingual tour guide's lively company. Every time I see the illustrated exhibit ticket for a Bonnard and Matisse exhibit at Victor Emmanuel Monument Museum in Rome pasted in my notebook, I laugh remembering the guard who flirted with my friend, telling her that he "wanted an American woman because Italian women were too expensive." There's surely a story there. 
• Take, buy and carry maps of your destination. Collect hand-drawn maps from hotels, tourist kiosks, and restaurants. use them for guidance and keep them for information and illustration. 
• I still have a small poster advertising a Parisian book fair that I noticed in a bookstore window twenty years ago. Because the fair had just ended, the shopkeeper gave me the poster. It shows books stacked on a chair in an ancient library and the phrase, Vous etes chez vous, which, though I know better, I've always translated as, "You are most at home with yourself and books."
• A business card in Italian, taped in my 2011 notebook, reminds me that Marcello, who is most likely the kindest cab driver in Rome, speaks fluent English. And now that I think of it, I have some stories about other cab drivers to tell--that one in Samoa, named Rambo, who offered a tour of the island, and the family man in Washington D. C. whose zestful narration sparkled with pride in "his" town all the way to  BWI. These stories would make a nice "round up" travel article that shows how the real flavor of a city reveals itself in a speeding yellow cab. 

Keepsakes are for keeping and reminiscing--and for sharing too.

Talk to Locals, Ask Questions, Listen

When I was a child in the 1950s, probably about ten years old, I wandered around Balboa Island (Southern California) one day when kids could still do that and came upon an old Craftsman bungalow with a broad front porch facing the bay. 

The wide painted railings surrounding the porch and many wood shelves contained dozens of jars of sea specimens--jelly fish, octopus, sea horses and so forth, all floating in formaldehyde. I was fascinated and spent many hours that summer talking to the old man about his life-long collection. That experience probably initiated my own life-long love of he sea and its gifts. Although I don't have an actual photo of his specimens, the one in my mind is crisp and fresh. You can get good information and enduring memories from local residents. 

Go With A Purpose

Decide on a focus before leaving on your trip (and leave leeway for changing your mind). You might plan to "research" local weekend markets in Barcelona, or study the methods of cappuccino-making in Rome, or test all seven Paris city walks that the guidebook recommends. After such concentrated research, you're ready with a topic for a travel article, one about food centered on the variety of greens Barcelonans cook with, another concerning the saucy language of Roman baristas, or a delicious analysis of the flakiness of Parisian croissants determined through pointed visits to every boulangerie on each of the seven walks!

That's it--plan now, keep records, compose in tranquility. Buon Viaggio! 

Research Your Travel Essay--Before You Decide What to Write

It's great when a travel story--even the entire narrative--burns into your consciousness on the plane ride home. And it does happen. But, as someone told me recently, good luck comes from good planning. So if you want to write a travel story after your summer travels--whether you travel around the block or around the Mediterranean, think ahead and collect details purposefully. It could be those details tell you what to write.

Here's the first half of "Eight Tips for Researching Your Travel Essay--Before You Decide What to Write."


PAY ATTENTION
Be sure not to ignore critical advice from rodeo photographer Louise Serpa who cautions us: "Never don't pay attention." She, of all people, knew that if you don't pay attention for a brief second, you will surely miss the cowboy's slide into the manure or the clown's slide into the bull. 
So keep your eyes and ears open, watch the cobblestones, and remember the writer's mantra: Everything is material.

TAKE PHOTOS OF PEOPLE 
Rather than more typically shooting monuments (you can find better ones online), take photos of local people doing their jobs or carrying on activities of daily life. Catch the barista making your cappuccino in Venice, boys playing soccer in the piazza in Monti, very old women working at a construction site in Bali, transporting dirt in baskets balanced on their heads. 
Capture the triumph of cooks in a tiny trattoria in Florence (who clearly added zing to that sauce). Seize the moment the nonna sits down to rest after making the day's pasta in Portavenere. 
Ask first. If you tell people you will be writing about their town, they will most likely open their arms and you might embrace a memoir essay.

PHOTOGRAPH SIGNAGE 
Take photos of significant wall text in a museum, hotel signs, handwritten warnings ("Don't Tuch!" outside an Amsterdam museum). Great stories can come from small incidentals.A favorite photo in my album is the Lucca train station because its sign brings back good memories of  an entrancing walled city where late one night college-age boys called out  "Lucca, Lucca," the humor in their voices echoing back and forth across piazzas and winding streets. I was never sure whether they were touting their town or searching for their buddy, Luca. 


PHOTOGRAPH THE UNUSUAL  

Notice the plethora of three-wheel trucks in Sicily, entrancing door knockers in Barcelona, flowers spilling off balconies in San Miguel de Allende. Find a holy niche in nearly every corner in Florence and preserve the Madonna in all her incarnations as she watches over the stony streets. 
A thematic collection of such photos can illustrate an article you might eventually write describing the change that came over you as you strolled the streets of distant towns. 

Next week: 
All about notebooks, ephemera, 
chatting up locals and finding a 
purpose before leaving home. 

What (or Who) Makes Good Writing?

Last Thursday night, my friend Kathleen and I attended a City Arts and Lectures program at Herbst Theatre in San Francisco. It was a great evening for foodies: former editor of Bon Appetite Barbara Fairchild interviewed the venerable and very down to earth Jacques Pepin in conversation with Daniel Patterson, a Bay Area wunderkind chef. What a delight, especially listening to Pepin talk about his days cooking with Julia Child for the renowned PBS series. 


During filming both chefs worked in front of the camera without recipes, just cooking fresh ingredients without measuring or weighing anything. They didn't plan what they would cook or who would do what. 
After the episodes were filmed, PBS found viewers wanted recipes for every dish, something neither Pepin nor Child had any interest in determining. So PBS had to hire someone to watch each episode and decide the weights and measures of each dish, to make order and structure out of the great drama and spectacular chaos Pepin and Child had created. 


Sitting on the vast stage of the Beaux Arts designed building, wine glass at hand, Pepin explained what it takes to cook free-style, "It's a myth that you can learn to cook easily! It's not true. My cooking is idiosyncratic and not replicable outside my kitchen." He claimed the "bedrock quality" of a good cook is a solid foundation in technique--and years working as an apprentice, a job he started at age thirteen in his mother's restaurant. And, not surprisingly, he pointed out "the love" a cook needs to add to every dish. It has nothing to do with recipes. It's the Carnegie Hall method every time.


There is a parallel in writing. Sometimes writers want formulas, or "corrections," or they want to know the shortcuts to good writing. There are formulas and techniques and accuracies of grammar to learn. But these do not produce good writing any more than knowing how to measure dry versus wet ingredients produces tender and light creme anglaise. 


Here's an showing anecdote from the South African photographer Sam Haskins about the source of quality work: "A photographer went to a socialite party in New York. As he entered the front door, the host said, 'I love your pictures--they're wonderful. You must have a fantastic camera.' He said nothing until dinner was finished, then: 'That was a wonderful dinner. You must have a terrific stove."


It's not the Moleskine notebook, it's not the latest model Mac, not the pen nor the antique writing desk. It comes from inside the writer, honed with years of practice, practice, practice--spiced up with lots of failure. Those disasters--dropping the wet chicken or writing nonsense-- teach us how to measure success. 
                                             

A Connection to Place

I was invited this week to post a short essay, "The Possibility of Community" about my connection to Santo Stefano di Sessanio on Helen Free's blog, Hang on to the Vine.  An Italian-American living in Washington D. C., Helen writes about her ancestral home in the Abruzzo region of Italy.We have visited the region many times--Helen more than I, yet every time we approach the hill town of Santo Stefano di Sessanio, I feel somehow stealth-like, amazed at my opportunity to enter its still-ancient world. 

Field below Santo Stefano di Sessanio               photo: Dayle Fergusson

People of the Abruzzo are proud of the region's motto, "forte e gentile," and that strength and gentility shows everywhere. 
It's in the massive, steep slopes of the Gran Sasso mountains, rising abruptly from a road where horses graze freely,where the land looks newly created.
It shows in its people's kindness and rugged know-how, their sure competence for making flavorful mozzarella, for example, from the milk of smelly sheep, its twisted shapes displayed dramatically, yet without flourish. 
Far from the tourist spots of Rome and Florence, the Abruzzo is very close to the Italian heart, and can provide a restorative and, sometimes, life changing sojourn. And now especially--three years since the devastating earthquake--a visit is a gift of support to these gentle and strong people. 


Consider joining me in Italy this May 27--June 2, as a gift to yourself. It just could change your writing life and maybe more. I have room for another writer. Go to Italy, In Other Words for photos, endorsements and enrollment information. 

Showing Writing

We hear it all the time--"Show! Don't Tell," but what does it really mean? 


When you cut through the plod of telling, and show what you mean, the reader "gets" what you're saying at a visual or gut level. Showing reaches the reader's imagination much more quickly than the more cerebral telling. Showing eliminates a level of interpretation, a filtering through the intellect. Unless, of course, your aim is to slow down the process, to encourage the reader's contemplation...then it's time to do some telling or summarizing. 

In narrative nonfiction, we show in scenes--adding dialogue, place details, characters' action, and so forth. We show with selective reporting--foregrounding the details that serve our purpose.


Case in point: I've recently added the Longform app to my reader, and the top article when I opened it Saturday, the day following Thomas Kinkade's death, was a a great piece of journalism Susan Orlean had written in 2001, called, "Art for Everybody." (Orlean's title will sound comforting to some readers; worrisome to others.) In a nearly "aw shucks" tone, Orlean reports her interview with Kinkaid, her extensive field work, and his reaction to art critics.


It's straight-forward writing, its point communicated purely through showing writing.  She doesn't tell the reader what to think or how to view Kinkade's art--which is as fiercely derided by art critics as it is embraced by its consumers. 


Orlean reports the facts of her field work in what might seem like simple narrative. Her biting interpretation of Kinkade as a self-described "Artist of Light" and her arch evaluation of his claim to be the people's artist come through in details she reveals, scenes she recreates and in the juxtaposition of details in the content. She smiles politely to her reader as surely as she skewers Kinkade, nails him, strings him up and ties him down.


Of course, Orlean is a pro and smart--like a fox. It's a delightful and instructive read, a model of showing writing.

Intention, Intuition and Improvisation

A competent teacher bases lectures, reading and activities on the requirements of a final product of some sort--whether it's a test or an essay or a painting. Yet, there's abhorrence to "teaching to the test" because such teaching stifles creative and critical thinking. Managing that task--encouraging creative and critical thinking and testing it--characterizes competent teaching.


There's a parallel in writing. Writers can't help but to be conscious of their audience as they compose. And it's important they write to their audience, but do not let the audience determine their curriculum, so to speak. Writers of serious narrative nonfiction aren't slaves to formulas and mass-market buzz topics and treatments; instead, they strive to connect with an intelligent and thoughtful audience. 

Ocean Park #79, 1975 Richard Diebenkorn

On a recent rainy Sunday, I spent an afternoon at the Orange County Museum of Art in Southern California immersed in an extensive exhibit of Richard Diebenkorn's large abstract paintings. It was easy to lose myself in the complexity he painted into these works. Their depth grounds the paintings and holds the viewer's attention at an intellectual and emotional level.
      
Curator Sarah C. Bancroft explains, "The artist worked and reworked the canvases, scraping and repainting, building up layers as well as atmospheric fields and planes, finally arriving at a solution through a combination of intention, intuition and improvisation."
      
Diebenkorn's effort creating the work, his layering of "intention, intuition and improvisation" reaps an emotional connection that washes over the viewer encountering the paintings. We realize the skill intellectually as we slow down and reflect analytically.


There's a parallel in writing. In order to reach an audience at a sophisticated level, we build layers into our writing. Los Angeles Times art critic Christopher Knight describes Diebenkorn's layering process: "The narrative in these paintings is a story of their making--of a vertical blue line that gains a violet-rose shadow as it tracks down the edge of a canvas, turning off at an angle like a refracted ray of light and then sliding beneath a wash of luminous gray, only to emerge at the other side as a little wedge of canary yellow. Or, of a field of brushy green that, the longer you look, slowly gives up layers of under-painting in hues you can't quite put your finger on."


Likewise, we layer our stories in multiple drafts and readings to create subtle turns and refracted understandings--with, for example, tense shifts, points of view, back story, foreshadowing, flashes back and forward. We follow Emily Dickinson's vision to "tell the truth, but tell it slant." We write as Diebenkorn painted--to integrate surprise, to turn the obvious on its head. And we know the more sophisticated the reader, the more we need to fight predictability in our writing, the more we need to "solve" the word problems in our stories.


Diebenkorn said it simply in the video at the museum: "I paint for an ideal viewer, not just for myself." And he said about the end product: "Now, the idea is to get everything right. It's not just color or form or space or line--it's everything at once." Effective narrative nonfiction likewise reveals complexity, all "at once," though the process comes from all the "scraping and repainting" and "building up layers."