What is Creative Nonfiction?

Most of the time, readers come into contact with nonfiction writing (writing that is based on verifiable events) through traditional journalistic forms, such as newspapers and online news feeds. This writing tends to adhere to that old Joe Friday mantra of “just the facts, ma’am.” Its straightforward purpose is to inform readers about events that have recently occurred or (in the case of textbooks) historical events by recounting facts and dates, names and places, using a basic, balanced, no-nonsense approach. I suppose we could argue about the quality of the news we have access to today—if you want to point out all the little pundits who get paid handsomely to say what they’re told to say, I won’t argue with you—but let’s for a moment all assume that, in an ideal world, objectivity is the goal when it comes to this brand of nonfiction. There may be varying levels of creativity present in the writing (and, unfortunately, in some cases, the facts), but the end result remains basically the same: a news piece that is designed not to entertain but to inform or educate.

But that doesn’t really help us define creative nonfiction. And, if you’re someone who works in the “fourth genre,” this won’t do much to keep people from saying, “Creative nonfiction? Isn’t that, like, an oxymoron?” whenever they find out what you do for a living.

So what is CNF?

It’s a form of nonfiction writing that emphasizes literary elements over facts.

Now, wait just a second there, you might be thinking. How can literary elements be more important than facts—that basis around which we form everything from our scientific understanding of the world to the justice system that governs us? 

My long answer has a lot to do with the nature of human interpretation, the fallibility of data, the undervaluing of empathy and emotion as ways of being in the world, but since this is my first blog entry, I’m going to go with the simple answer instead: I don’t know exactly why literary elements are more important than facts. They just are.

Or they aren’t.

We’ll return to this debate in a future blog entry. For now, what an aspiring creative nonfiction writer needs to know is that there’s more to writing a great personal essay or memoir than simply getting all of the details correct. Facts are nice, yes, and they help us when it comes time to make complex judgments about the world. But they don’t necessarily help us to understand what it’s like to be someone else.

Let’s try an experiment: Try to recall your earliest memory. For me, it’s sitting in the hallway between the living room and the staircase at my childhood home. I remember the nook in the stairs where my imaginary friends lived (they were very small), and in my mind, the sun through the windows is casting little slanted shapes on the pale wood paneling.

Am I telling the truth? Sure, that’s how I remember it. But can I really know whether or not my memory is serving me correctly? After all, this took place almost thirty years ago, and I have no way of knowing now if it happened on a sunny day or not. Maybe it was cloudy and my own rose-colored nostalgia added the sun—I can be an sap that way sometimes. Or maybe it’s all this thinking I’ve been doing lately about nonfiction and the quote from Brenda Miller and Suzanne Paola’s book Tell It Slant: “A turning point can be as subtle as Emily Dickinson’s ‘certain slant of light’ into a room, or Virginia Woolf’s contemplation of a dying moth in her study.” Maybe Miller and Paola are having some impact on the way I am remembering things. Perhaps, the day in question never happened at all. What if it's the composite of a number of days? There are limitations to the human memory (especially mine), interpretations and misinterpretations that stick with us. What I want to say now is that's okay. As we reflect thoughtfully on the significance of our stories, subjective interpretation is allowed—encouraged even.

So what do I know? I know I played near the stairs some point. And I know what the walls of my house looked like at various times of the day. What I’d eventually want to get around to talking about, if I were going to write this essay, would be those imaginary friends. It’s not uncommon for little kids to have them—in fact, almost all kids do. But I want to know who those characters were and what they revealed about me as a child—maybe even what they reveal about me now. That’s enough information to start my essay if I know how to make every word and every image count.  

And that's the key.

When we sit down to write creative nonfiction, our obligation is to create a compelling and artful narrative that enlightens readers, even as it entertains them. More often than not, to accomplish that, we will need to bring storytelling elements borrowed from the world of fiction to the forefront.

So what are some of these literary elements one might find in Creative Nonfiction?

• A personal point of view (usually, creative nonfiction essays are written using the pronoun “I”).
• Rounded characters
• Powerful dialogue
• Sensory detail and description
• Vivid settings
  
• Creative (even poetic) use of language
• An identifiable theme
• Dramatic scenes (rather than summative exposition)

And, in some cases (though not always)

• A narrative arc

In order to really conceptualize the differences between traditional journalistic nonfiction and creative nonfiction, it might be useful to look at a few examples. The first is from a news report on the 1991 University of Iowa shooting taken from The New York Times.

          A distraught graduate student went on a shooting rampage in two buildings on the University of Iowa 
          campus in Iowa City yesterday, killing four people and critically wounding two others before fatally 
          shooting himself in the head. 

          A university spokeswoman, Ann Rhodes, said the student, Gang Lu, a doctoral candidate in physics from
          China, methodically searched out his victims. He had been disgruntled over his failure to receive an 
          academic award for his doctoral dissertation, she said. 

As you can see here the focus is on answering the journalistic questions (who, what, where, when, why, and how). When we contrast it with Jo Ann Beard’s essay “The Fourth State of Matter,” (from The New Yorker) which recounts the same incident, the value of these literary elements and differences between nonfiction and creative nonfiction become very clear.

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For another interesting take on the various forms of nonfiction, check out “The Meandering River: An Overview of the Subgenres of Creative Nonfiction” by Sue William Silverman at her website.