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.

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.