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1 Introduction To Creative Nonfiction

Intro

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26 views36 pages

1 Introduction To Creative Nonfiction

Intro

Uploaded by

alimarfa3
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Nonficti

on
AN EXAMINATION OF PRIVATE LIFE AND PUBLIC DOMAIN
Creative
REFERS TO A SUBGENRE OF NONFICTION THAT INCORPORATES
WRITING TECHNIQUES MORE CLOSELY ASSOCIATED WITH LITERARY

Nonficti
FICTION.
Chara
cterist
• emphasis on building a narrative

ics
• avoidance of overly technical terms
• firsthand accounts from real world characters
who are emotionally invested in the story’s
outcome
• often explains the author’s personal
connection to the subject matter
• must be based on facts with no
embellishments that would lessen its veracity
The CNF
Writer
“I LOVE THE WAY WRITING CREATIVE NONFICTION ALLOWS
ME TO STRADDLE A KIND OF “BORDERLAND” WHERE I CAN
DISCOVER NEW ASPECTS OF MYSELF AND THE WORLD,
FORGE SURPRISING METAPHORS, AND CREATE ARTISTIC
ORDER OUT OF LIFE’S CHAOS.”
Brenda Miller,
2005
The
TO TELL THE TRUTH, YES, BUT

challe
TO BECOME MORE THAN A MERE
TRANSCRIBER OF LIFE’S
FACTUAL EXPERIENCES.

nge
“LITERATURE IS WHERE I GO TO EXPLORE THE
HIGHEST AND LOWEST PLACES IN HUMAN
SOCIETY AND IN THE HUMAN SPIRIT, WHERE I
HOPE TO FIND NOT ABSOLUTE TRUTH BUT
THE TRUTH OF THE TALE, OF THE
IMAGINATION AND OF THE HEART.”
Salman Rushdie
We go to literature—and perhaps especially
creative nonfiction literature—to learn not
about the author, but about ourselves; we
want to be moved in some way.
So, is it
okay to
When you write CNF,
THE WORK IS ROOTED IN THE “REAL” WORLD.
you make a
statement
“We like to think that an interesting life
will simply fall into place on the page. It
won’t. . . . writers must manufacture a
text, imposing narrative order on a
jumble of half remembered events.”
William Zinsser
Though the essay might contain some
elements of fabrication, it is directly connected
to you as the author behind the text. There is a
truth to it that you want to claim as your own,
a bond of trust between reader and writer.
Does this mean creative
nonfiction is self-
centered?
CNF often focuses on material outside the
life of the author, and it certainly need not
use a personal “I” speaker. It’s the “creative”
part of the term creative nonfiction that
means a single, active imagination is
behind the piece of reality this author will
unfold.
Creative nonfiction can focus on either
private experience or public domain, but
in either case, the inner self provides the
vision and the shaping influence.
CONSIDER BOTH YOUR INDIVIDUAL LIFE AND OUR
COLLECTIVE LIVES AS MATERIAL FOR CREATIVE
NONFICTION.
Readers will want to read your work not
because they wish to lend a sympathetic
ear to a stranger, but because of the way
your truth-filled stories may illuminate
their own lives and perceptions of the
world.
UNEARTHING YOUR MATERIAL:
THE BODY OF MEMORY
Memory begins to qualify the
imagination, to give it another formation,
one that is peculiar to the self. . . . If I were
to remember other things, I should be
someone else.
N. Scott Momaday
MEMORY
Memory itself could be called its own bit of creative
nonfiction. We continually—often unconsciously—
renovate our memories, shaping them into stories
that bring coherence to chaos.
MYTH
is not a falsehood but a comprehensive
view of reality. It’s a story that speaks to
the heart as well as the mind, seeking to
generate conviction about what it thinks
is true.”
John Kotre
By paying attention to the illogical, unexpected
details, we just might light upon the odd yet precise
images that help our lives make sense, at least long
enough for our purposes as writers.
RIVER TEETH
are autobiographical images. a metaphor of how
memory, too, retains vivid moments that stay in mind
long after the events that spurred them have been
forgotten
There are hard, cross-grained whorls of memory
that remain inexplicably lodged in us long after the
straight-grained narrative material that housed
them has washed away. Most of these whorls are
not stories, exactly: more often they’re self-
contained moments of shock or of inordinate
empathy. . . . These are our “river teeth”—the time-
defying knots of experience that remain in us after
most of our autobiographies are gone.
David James Duncan
MOMENTS OF BEING
Virginia Woolf calls these “river teeth” as moments of
being. They are shocks of memory. They are the
times when we get jolted out of our everyday
complacency to really see the world and all that it
contains.
“a shock is at once in my case followed by the
desire to explain it. . . . I make it real by putting it into
words.” Virginia Woolf
METAPHORICAL MEMORY
Many writers allow early memories to “impress
themselves” on the mind. They do not dismiss them
as passing details but rather probe them for any
insights they may contain.
The question to ask is not “what?” but “why?”

“WHY DO I REMEMBER THE THINGS I DO? WHY


THESE MEMORIES AND NOT OTHERS?”
When I woke from having my tonsils removed, I
knew for the first time that my body was not
necessarily a whole unit, always intact. At that
moment, I understood the courage that it will take
to bear this body into a world that will most
certainly cause it harm. Of course, as a child I
realized no such thing. But, as an adult—as a writer
preserving this memory in language—I begin to
create a metaphor that will infiltrate both my writing
and my sense of self from here on out.
MUSCLE MEMORY
The body, memory, and mind exist in sublime
interdependence, each part wholly twined with the
others. There is a phrase used in dancing, athletics,
parachuting, and other fields that require sharp
training of the body: muscle memory.
Once the body learns the repetitive gestures of a
certain movement or skill, the memory of how to
execute these movements will be encoded in the
muscles. That is why, for instance, we never forget
how to ride a bike.
Because memory is so firmly fixed in the body, it
takes an object that appeal to the senses to
dislodge memory and allow it to float freely into
the mind or onto the page.
The body can offer an inexhaustible
store of triggers to begin any number of
essays, each of which will have greater
significance than what appears on the
surface.
Sometimes, what matters to us most is what has
mattered to the body. Memory may pretend to live
in the cerebral cortex, but it requires muscle—real
muscle—to animate it again for the page.

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