Fictive Devices

Yes, it's a double-header this week folks!

A few posts back, I mentioned what I call "fictive devices"--creative liberties borrowed from the world of fiction that might find their way into your creative nonfiction essays (if you so choose). Unlike what we've been discussing in the previous posts about "Fraudulence," these techniques probably won't offend anyone's sense of fairness and ethics:

• Compressing time – I think this is almost a requirement of creative nonfiction--you cannot possibly tell us the entirety of your life, and (unless you are working on an experimental piece--the nonfiction equivalent of, say, James Joyce's Ulysses) you probably don't want to. As I said previously, on the day your daughter is stood up at the altar, we don't care what kind of cereal you had for breakfast, or how every bite tasted. Move quickly through those events that aren't as important (or skip them entirely using white space) and get to the heart of the story.

• Exploding a moment – The opposite is also true. Our stories, as we write them, do not realistically honor the passage of time in that often we spend a lot of our words describing incidents that were very brief. The car accident, which took only milliseconds in real life, gets slowed down for dramatic effect. This is especially true when that particular scene or event is crucial to the theme of your essay (even if, at the time, it seemed very "minor").

• Compressing characters – A little more controversial, this one, and worth being selective about. For example, if I had three sisters--Anne, Margaret, and Beulah--and in my essay, they all give me basically the same advice about losing my eyebrows in a grease fire, I'm not going to pretend to only have one sister named Sadie for the sake of not repeating information. Someone's feelings are going to get hurt and Thanksgiving dinner is going to be rough. It also feels silly to combine people who are so prevalent in your life. If anything, I would either share just the advice that one of the three gave me, or I would say something like, "My sisters all had the same advice for me: use an eyebrow pencil." That being said, it's probably not a big deal to combine a couple flat characters (those who aren't as important and distinctive to your story--and, likely, your life) in the name of simplicity and clarity. For example, if you are writing about your tuberculosis treatment, you may find it tedious to describe every single nurse who came in and cared for you while you were in the hospital. And so you might combine them into one or two composite nurses, just to improve the narrative. Perhaps one nurse who exhibited all of the qualities you appreciated in a care-giver and another who represents the everything that's wrong with medicine today, as you see it.

• Changing character names – Protecting the identities of the innocent (or guilty, as the case may be)--some writers do this regularly. Some never do it at all. I tend to do it as a regular practice--not because I am afraid someone might see themselves in my writing and get angry. (If anything, people who aren't in my writing see themselves there anyway.) Instead, I do it because I don't know if they would like to be so easily identified in my writing to others. For example, when I wrote about my time at Penn State, I changed my girlfriend-at-the-time's name. Not because I had anything bad to say about her. But because I wasn't sure if she'd want a person (one of her students, for example) to Google her name and read all about the college experiences we'd shared. So I changed her name. Did I feel obligated to do so? No. It just made me feel better about telling the story I had to tell.

• Filling Blanks – We've covered this a lot already. When trying to recollect events that happened a long time ago (or even recently) there are going to be certain details that escape your memory (was that car blue or green? How long were those curtains?). The recreation of those remembered details is going to require a certain amount of creativity on your part, if you expect a reader to believe their authenticity. While you shouldn't take creative liberties in presenting the most important facts (e.g. Fraudulence), you have some leeway with the smaller details--those that exist simply to fill out the picture you are painting. Unless it’s a major plot point, it probably doesn't matter whether the car was blue or green, right? What does matter is that you find a way to describe it so that the scene feels realistic and alive—even if that      means taking your best guess.

• Non-linearity – Another very common device: framing your story in a way that plays with the chronology of events—in other words, maybe you open in the middle of the story (in medias res) for dramatic purposes and then flashback to earlier background events before catching back up with the present action. Life doesn't work this way, but stories often do.

• Imagining/Disclaimer – What happens when you want to write about an event that you weren't present to witness (e.g., the first time your parents met)? Creative nonfiction (as opposed to most forms of standard nonfiction) allows for you to illustrate the scene as though you were there. Likewise, it offers a medium through which you can speculate on alternative realities that didn't happen but could just as easily have happened had life gone differently. That said, unless it is absolutely obvious that you are fantasizing, it's probably a good idea to make it clear to the reader that you are using your imagination here by starting with something like, "I imagine . . . ."

As always, you as a writer must decide what approaches you are willing to take. It's not a question of comfort. (We often find ourselves having to write about things that aren't comfortable). And it's not a question of "feeling good" about your decisions. (Not everything we write feels good or even cathartic). It's not even about approaching the work with confidence. (I don't know many writers who feel confident about their early drafts.) It is a matter of figuring out what your ethical beliefs are in terms of your writing and then using them to guide your approach to the page so that you'll feel justified in the work you are doing.