Creative Nonfiction

a disclaimer

Over the last few years, this blog has been a book blog, a personal blog, a random blog, a poetry blog, or all of the above simultaneously. Lately I have been posting memoir-esque short stories, including my most recent series Hospital. For most of my creative writing, I use the tag "creative nonfiction."

The Creative Nonfiction magazine website describes this genre as the following:

"In some ways, creative nonfiction is like jazz—it’s a rich mix of flavors, ideas, and techniques, some of which are newly invented and others as old as writing itself. Creative nonfiction can be an essay, a journal article, a research paper, a memoir, or a poem; it can be personal or not, or it can be all of these.

The words 'creative' and 'nonfiction' describe the form. The word 'creative' refers to the use of literary craft, the techniques fiction writers, playwrights, and poets employ to present nonfiction—factually accurate prose about real people and events—in a compelling, vivid, dramatic manner. The goal is to make nonfiction stories read like fiction so that your readers are as enthralled by fact as they are by fantasy." (https://www.creativenonfiction.org/about)

Though I have tampered with creating characters and fantasy worlds, I find myself drawn to writing more about what I know and my experiences using a creative and poetic style. Or hopefully that's how it comes about.

And yet, this is a disclaimer. Because I don't believe that a writer can ever fully tell the entire factual truth. That even history tellers and journalists will always have a bias. All of this comes from a quarter of Contemporary American Lit with Norman Mailer's Armies of the Night and post-modernism and the rejection of form, etc. Not to get too English-majory on everyone but the two books in the narrative structure of Armies—“History as a Novel” and “The Novel as History”—come together as a solution for Mailer's problem of objectivity and truth telling in history. Toward the end of Book Two, Mailer provides an explanation for the book’s composition and why this structure leads to a comprehensive view of the March: the first book is

"nothing but a personal history which while written as a novel was to the best of the author’s memory scrupulous to facts, and therefore a document; whereas the second, while dutiful to all newspaper accounts, eyewitness reports, and historic inductions available…is finally disclosed as some sort of condensation of a collective novel!—which is to admit that an explanation of the mystery of the events at the Pentagon cannot be developed by the methods of history—only by the instincts of the novelist" (Mailer 255).

Book One is made up of the author’s personal history of the March, but written with new journalistic (“third-person point of view” and “the recording of the everyday") and novelist devices like “foreshadowing, flashbacks, scene-by-scene presentation, and extensive dialogue,” as noted by John Hollowell (Fact & Fiction: The New Journalism and the Nonfiction Novel, 91). Book Two serves as a companion piece; full of secondary sources and historic material, the second part supports Mailer’s claim that standard history telling is not enough to fully explain the March on the Pentagon, or any event in history.

Recap: Historians, journalists, and writers do not always tell factual truths because this is impossible due to bias. Writers though, using novelistic devices, can tell or present a greater truth about human nature, life, or what have you. This is one of the reasons why I believe Shakespeare's plays are still beloved by people today.

Mention Shakespeare in blog post. Check.

So what is this "creative nonfiction" that I am writing? Yes, it is based on events in my actual life. Yes, it is written by me. Maybe I embellish certain features. Maybe I leave out specific details. Maybe I am not trying to tell you the complete truth about my life. Maybe I am trying to communicate a greater truth. Read what you will. Though these are my words, as soon as I set them free for others' eyes, they become your words as well.

Also, I am a amateur. So feel free to pay me no mind.

For more of my writing, feel free to peruse the creative nonfiction tag and my London Encounters series. In the future, I may be editing old pieces of writing for your reading pleasure. Or dismay.

Thank you for reading.