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​A Creative Craft Blog

From the mind of Jason Kapcala comes an eclectic journal dedicated to the study of creative writing, rock music, tailgating, and other miscellany. The musings, meditations, contemplations, and ruminations expressed here are my own unless otherwise indicated. Please feel free to share your comments, thoughts, and opinions, but do so respectfully and intelligently.
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My Issues With "Truth" (Most of Them Largely Semantic)

9/19/2012

11 Comments

 
Okay, so in my previous post about the differences between Nonfiction and Creative Nonfiction, I suggested that what makes creative nonfiction unique is its use of fictive devices. I also suggested that the way those devices are employed is more important in some respects than supposed “truth.”  (Disclaimer: I write fiction almost exclusively, so I am probably biased.) 

I can imagine a statement like that ruffling some people’s feathers (assuming anyone is out there reading), so let’s talk about that position a little.

It might be good to start out with a definition: When I say truth, I mean accordance to “the way things really happened” in one’s personal history. I don’t mean, matters of public record that we might look up on in a textbook or almanac (such as, is the Sears Tower 1,729 feet high or 1,279 feet high?). I think, when it comes to factual details like that, it’s our obligation to make every effort to get our “moons in the right skies” (to steal a quote from Eudora Welty), if we expect to be taken seriously as people with something intelligent to say.

But what about those personal histories? What are our obligations? It’s a tricky question, one that rolls back on itself the more you try to talk about it, I think.

I’ll be clear here in stating my bias: I start getting twitchy whenever I hear writers talk about “truth.” You hear it all the time—that nonfiction may not tell the objective Truth (capital “T”) but that it tells a truth (lowercased “t”). Truth is truth, I say. There are no variations. The moment you qualify it, it’s no longer truth by definition. It’s subjective interpretation. I hear fiction writers claim that they “lie to tell the truth” or that they are striving to convey an “emotional truth.” I don’t buy any of that. Lying to tell the truth? Give me a break. To do that, you’d have to know what the truth is. And when people claim to know the truth, my bullshit detector starts beeping. Maybe some other writers—writers far better than I am—feel confident that they have discovered truths, and maybe they feel obligated to share them with the world. Who am I to say?

All I can say with any certainty is that I have no such truths to tell. And I’m not particularly interested in acquiring any. When I sit down to write a personal essay--which, admittedly, I don't do often--I only have two motivations for sharing my story:

          1. I think it's interesting enough to put out there. I live under the assumption that, if it interests me, it might also interest 
              someone else.

          2. I hope my story makes someone else feel less alone, even if only for a few minutes.

If you're looking for company, I might be able to help. But if you want universal truth, moral lessons, someone to pass judgment on himself or others, I'm the wrong writer for you.
But let me step off my soapbox here for a second because the point I'm making is probably more semantic than anything else, and what I would advocate for is probably not that new or controversial. Besides, I suspect the only reason writers spend so much time going on about truth is that we are self-conscious--we're afraid that if we don’t have a good answer to the question “Why Do You Write?” then we’ll be seen as frauds, hucksters.  And I have an answer to that question already (fodder for another post, perhaps?).

Where am I going with all this?

Though I bristle at the word “truth,” I don’t advocate for fraudulence in Creative Nonfiction. We all remember the not-so-distant scandal surrounding the author James Frey and his book A Million Little Pieces, which was marketed (by Oprah among others) as a memoir of Frey’s struggles with drug abuse in a twelve-step rehabilitation program. When it was discovered that Frey had made up or embellished large parts of the story, readers were furious.

Now, one might be inclined to say, who cares if it’s made-up as long as it’s a good story? Well, for one thing, Oprah cared because she endorsed the book (though we could have a field day talking about “truth” there). More importantly, all those readers who felt duped by the author’s lies, well, it turns out they cared, too. The publishers cared. And, I’m guessing plenty of people who'd overcome alcoholism and/or drug abuse felt a bit exploited, as well. Had Frey been up front about the fact that he was taking “creative license” with the material, he might have avoided some of the criticism, but presumably he knew that nonfiction memoir sells better than fiction because contemporary readers seem to be increasingly interested in reading stories based on real-life events, so he manipulated that market. Whether or not he did it to make a buck or because his personal philosophy about nonfiction writing allows for such liberties is not something I’m interested in weighing in on. I don’t know the man, and so I have no idea what his motivations were. What matters is, he wrote the book that way and it ticked plenty of people off.

I think one thing we can all agree on is that it wasn’t an accident.

My memory is quite faulty, and I don’t feel much need or obligation to fact check it or apologize on its behalf. Such is the way I live most of my life. If a reader wants to tell me that the way I remember something is wrong, I’ll be the first to admit that he/she is probably right. If he/she wants to get hung up on that, fine, but that kind of quibbling is uninteresting to me. That said, I'm fairly positive that I would remember something like hitting a cop and spending 87 days in jail. I wouldn’t just imagine something like that. And, if there were any doubt about an incident of that magnitude--one that comprises the bulk of the story I am planning on telling--I would confirm it before committing it to paper. Or else I wouldn't tell it.

Why?

Because for me it’s a matter of craft. If, as a creative nonfiction writer, you are not confident in the story you have to tell—if you cannot make it interesting enough to share with an audience without inventing incidents that never happened—you either aren’t telling the right story, or you aren’t skilled enough to be practicing the craft. I think of what Richard Russo says in his essay, “Location, Location, Location: Depicting Character Through Place”: “the simple truth [there’s that word again!] may be that there’s no place in the world, and no object either, that can’t be brought dancing to life when seen by the right eyes.” As you can guess, Russo is talking about fiction here (specifically, the settings we choose to portray), but in my opinion his words might as well apply to our personal histories. So often I hear students say, “I live a boring life; I have nothing to write about.” Most of the time, there is nothing wrong with their subject matter. The issue they are facing is that they do not know how to unlock what is interesting, poignant, heartbreaking about the story they’ve chosen to tell. In those cases, the answer is to keep pondering it, keep writing, keep revising, keep studying your craft. Not spice it up by throwing in a car crash, some explosions, a one-legged prostitute.

I’m not someone who believes in the claim that writers (nonfiction or otherwise) have a contract with their readers to tell the truth. I’d be dumb to make promises I can’t possibly keep with people I've never met. And, anyway, I don’t remember signing on any dotted lines (though we’ve already established that my memory is lousy, so the joke may be on me). That said, I am also not interested in pretending to be someone who I am not. My own self-image is subjective enough as it is; I don't feel the need to go out of my way to inject my life with fraudulence in the hopes that someone else might find it titillating. My hope is that a reader might like what I've written for the way it is written, not because I've managed to market myself as heroic, tragic, sorry, naughty, debauched, pathetic, and so on. To me, such attempts to make the writer into "celebrity" only draw attention away from the writing itself. Instead, I try to convey the pictures in my head as accurately as they appear (without omission or hyperbole) because I can’t write productively if I don’t.

I also have strong feelings that we lose a little of what makes us idiosyncratic (our essential self) whenever we decide to co-opt or exploit someone else's suffering, but that’s not strictly a point of craft.

In the end, every writer of Creative Nonfiction has to decide where to draw the line for him- or herself when it comes to truth. But perhaps the most important thing to remember is that readers of creative nonfiction understand and accept a writer’s limitations. No one expects creative nonfiction to be unfiltered, objective, irrefutable, or absolute. They only expect writers to tell their stories and to do it with so much skill and beauty that the need to embellish becomes moot.

Note: In my next entry, I’ll try to identify a few of those “fictive devices” I’ve been mentioning and how they might come into play in our essays and memoirs.  

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11 Comments
Dominique
9/22/2012 01:40:40 pm

I think this is fascinating! I have some questions about the cognitive elements behind your logic. By this I mean how our brain works out telling a “true story” or telling a “story.” So maybe this isn’t a craft question as much as a process question, but they might be related… I spent most of Thursday and Friday reminding my students that just because we don’t necessarily think in linear terms. They still need to be organizing their papers, organizing their outlines, ordering their bullet-points, and-at the very least, creating a salient argument structure that allows me to see what’s at stake in what they are doing. A lot of them met this idea with resistance. One of my students said, “But Ms. Bruno, I don’t THINK that way, so I would rather just draft out my paper and figure it what I need once its’ on the paper.” From the vantage point of academic writing, as opposed to creative writing, you can see why I had to endorse my system: I need to see the evidence that my students are thinking about their paper topics! I even managed to convince a few of them that when there is more data to synthesize, and when their research points all become muddled together in their minds, they will be grateful for the outlines that they have made, and the annotated bibliographies. Organization on paper prevents you from being overwhelmed in your mind.

Our minds don’t operate on a linear model though. My students are correct. This idea of progression, of our lives moving from beginning, to middle to an end is a fabrication. It isn’t TRUE. This week, I read Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism by Hayden White, who reminds us that, “We do not live stories, even if we give our lives meaning by retrospectively casting them in the form of stories” (emphasis mine). It’s this “retrospective casting” that gives me the trouble in creative nonfiction, however we have defined it thus far. What is the connection between creative nonfiction and History (with a capital “H,” as opposed to Truth with a capital “T”)? I ask because two of my students are veterans of the war in Afghanistan, and one of them writes creative nonfiction essays, short stories and poetry (a habit that began when he was on his boat on the Arabian Sea and wanted to entertain his shipmates). He lets me read most of his creative work, which I have been enjoying all semester. While his subjects mostly center on life in Morgantown, a few deal with his experiences while he was deployed. I asked him why there were so many Morgantown stories, and he told me that since he tries to write at least one essay or poem a week, he ends up writing what he knows. I told him that he knows the navy just as well as he knows Morgantown, and he said,

“Yes, but this is what I am living now, and I am not living the Navy now. I am older than my classmates, and…this is weird, being here.”

“So,” I said to him, “It’s weird enough to write about. It’s like living your life in reverse.”

His eyes totally lit up right there, and he said, “Yeah!”

I know what I said implied progression, what happens “forward” and what happens in “reverse,” but since my student is writing about his experiences in the form of essays, they have to have progressions! They have to have beginnings, middles and ends.

Most of what my student is writing now is personal history. Deeply personal! Yet, what he is referencing in his stories about the war aren’t History per say, or at least they are his history, and he appears to be shying away from making it about History. In my comments on his creative writing, I tend to stress how he could improve issues of style and construction. I have not dealt too much with points of craft or plotting, because there I don’t want to exploit his work, his experiences or what he had to endure overseas. (I just gave him his first “You will have to kill your darlings” speech on Friday). But I am still interested in where this “line” is between the life and the art that I am trying to walk right now. When I tell my student that he has to “kill his darlings” and maybe even sacrifice some of his favorite essays to create the best version of the book that he wants, I don’t want to be a jerk, but is my problem also that I don’t want to touch the war in the Middle East? That would make this stuff about me, and me wanting to avoid contending with his pain. I don’t want to do my student a disservice. Am I avoiding the truth, here? Maybe I don’t understand creative nonfiction well enough…

My student is friends with Colby Buzzell, who wrote My War: Killing Tim in Iraq. So, he is going to Colby talking about publication, but he likes that I read his work,

Reply
Kap
9/23/2012 06:21:50 am

Wow, thanks for the awesome comment, Dominique! It’s hard to know where to even begin with this because it is such a big question. Before I say anything else, that your student is finishing a piece every week and focusing in on a project of that scope is great. No one can guarantee publishing/success/etc., but he’s doing all the things he should be doing if he loves writing, and he will see the benefits of it one way or another—I can guarantee that. I know that my comments are going to get cut off for being too long, so let me post a few thoughts about some of the points you've raised, and then I will focus my entire blog entry next week on responding to that quote you included (as well as your question about "History"), that way I can continue giving it some thought, and I can be, what I like to call, "charmingly long-winded" (though some would just call it "long-winded").

I don’t believe that all essays do need to have progressions—unlike short stories, they aren’t required to arc. (That, to me, is the single biggest difference between essay and story.) Many do arc, but there are plenty of essays out there that are not personal, and there are plenty of essays that are not narrative. Now, it sounds like your student is writing personal narratives, which does seem to imply the need for some trajectory. Again, that brings me back to the impossibility of truth. You are absolutely right that our lives do not unfold as a series of stories, and yet, to convey what we need to convey on the page in an essay of this type, it seems almost requisite that we pretend as though they do. (That was a great quote you included, by the way.)

To me, that's what White means by “retrospective casting." First, in order to convey what's valuable about our story, we must first distill that story to its essential form (often by using fictive devices), so that it emphasizes what we intend for it to emphasize. (In other words, we don’t need every single detail of what happened on the day of your daughter’s marriage—how many Cheerios were in the bowl—just the illustrative details).

Second, I think White's quote speaks to that reflective component found in good creative nonfiction—the ability to step back and take an intelligent position on what you’ve just written.

In response to your question about the entire class, I don’t have my students write outlines, make bullet points, create mind maps, write up flash cards, or anything else like that. I have them think on the page through the process of writing. Then I have them refine what they’ve written through the multi-stage process of revision. I believe that all those other so-called “brainstorming” activities we get taught to do in composition classes are more damaging then helpful. They don't reflect, in any way, what I know to be true about the process of writing, and so I don't teach them.

Some people disagree with me--they say that what works for creative writing doesn't work for academic writing, but I reject that notion. Writing is writing at the end of the day. Certain conventions may change based on your genre, of course, but the core values do not. Nor should the process.

That being said, I do have students sometimes write up regular inventories about their topics in the most basic sense (so I can check to make sure they [a] have a topic, [b] are doing the work they’ve been instructed to do, [c] I can answer any questions they may have), and I do have them create annotated bibliographies for longer research-based papers. That doesn’t seem too unusual to me. I conduct rigorous research before I start writing—whether it be through reading or observation, and I take detailed notes on what I discover. So should our students. I want to know that they are not only doing the necessary leg work, but that they are understanding and pondering the implications of what they find. Annotated Bibs. are excellent for that. I also encourage my students to continue conducting research even after they’ve begun drafting, and I don't require them to use everything they find. Again, I believe a classroom should, as much as possible, reflect what my students sometimes call "real life."

That's just my approach though. I realize that instructors sometimes need to do whatever they need to do in order to get their students to learn certain points or to meet all of the “assessment criteria.” The classroom structure—getting a letter grade on your work after X number of drafts—changes some things. (Usually, not for the better, in my opinion, but higher education is never going to abandon this method of evaluation.)

Reply
Susan Sauter
9/25/2012 01:28:22 pm

Whew and double whew. Great conversation thread. Yeh, Dominque, I totally see why you'd want to have academic evidence to track student work. But for this guy who served the U.S. government in Afghanistan, might you suggest lyric essay as a form, my/kaps/our CWW class's most recent assignment? It's so freeing--of course, I don't know what your syllabus is nor what your class is titled so this may be a way-out suggestion. BTW, Kap had said in class that lyric essay seems to be freeing or binding based on possibly the way people are wired, in essence (not a direct quote!) and I would say that is true--I tend to have brain popcorn so the idea of writing a picture or an essence appeals. Not sure if I really measure up to it however, not having turned in my essay until Friday and workshopping coming after that. But knowing that your student--who I expect has experienced more pain than I could in several lifetimes-- writes a piece weekly somehow rightly aligns the daily turn of the universe. Loved reading both comments of yours and Kaps.

Reply
Susan Sauter
9/25/2012 01:37:55 pm

Um, how bout syllabus vs synopsis? Oops.

Reply
Susan Sauter
9/26/2012 08:08:28 am

Susan, Clearly your brain popped something last night, but you already had it right in your comment.

Reply
Dominique
9/26/2012 01:14:49 am

Look at me, hijacking the blog for my nefarious pedagogical purposes! But Kap is right on, as always, and Susan you have given me a lot to think about (considering two more of my students' essays are in my inbox this morning).

Reply
Dominique
9/26/2012 03:09:59 am

BRAIN POPCORN!!!! New blog name, anyone?

Reply
Carol
10/11/2012 04:14:50 am

I am responding to the part in Jason's blog about his motivations for writing a personal essay...first, that he thinks if he finds his story interesting, some one else might also, and, secondly, that the story might lessen the loneliness of a reader for a few minutes.

I think that Jason (or perhaps someone else) has also said that it is not necessarily the contents of the story itself that makes the story interesting but the way it is told.
For the class narrative essay assignment, I would like to continue writing about the Stonelea Place of my childhood. I do not think the story itself is especially interesting but Iwould llke to accept the challenge of telling the story in an engaging way. Is this sufficient reason to proceed?
Carol

Reply
gay
10/11/2012 05:06:41 am

I would like to see Carol proceed. I too believe that any story can be told in an engaging manner and capure the attention of the reader/ listener. Case in point: How many of you have heard Bill Cosby (or maybe a spouse) tell the same story over and over and still found it amusing? Isn't that what revision is all about? I say go for it, Carol..gay

Reply
Susan Sauter
10/11/2012 09:22:50 am

I agree. I think stories well told, even if the subject seems mundane, can take their reader to similar places in memory and offer joy/insight by the writing. Keep on, Carol!

Kap
10/13/2012 08:19:39 am

As the others have said, I think Stonelea can make for a good essay--or perhaps provide the structure for an essay. What you are probably thinking of is my comment in previous classes about Fiction--that there are no new stories (they've all been told before), and that it's not our job to write new stories, but to write old stories in new ways. Same would apply here: any story can be brought dancing to life when filtered through the right persona.

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