Creative Nonfiction, As I See It

Recently, at a gathering of writers, a fiction writer happened to comment that nonfiction writing doesn’t involve near the level of creativity that fiction writing does. I wanted to respond in some way but I didn’t. I kept quiet because he has four books published and a fifth on its way and I have, well, none. And also because I wondered if maybe he was right.

It’s not the first time I’ve doubted myself as an artist. I’ve often wondered how creative I actually am. I’ve felt like a fake and a phony, like writing anything besides fiction made me unworthy of calling myself a writer. How creative do you actually have to be to write life? That’s what journalists do and they’re not necessarily classified as “creative writers,” nor are grant writers, pamphlet writers, flyer writers, instruction manual writers, and a whole slew of other writers who write facts. Then I thought that maybe the difference was that creative nonfiction writers use metaphor and poetic words, and many of the same elements as fiction writers. I write the facts but make them pretty.

But that still didn’t feel artistic enough to me. To create something is to make something that wasn’t there previously. That’s what fiction writers do. They spin lives out of thin air. They name people and imagine their favorite ice cream flavors and who they chased around on the playground when they were kids. They dress them and give them hair and eyes, a dislike of chocolate and a love of canned sardines. It was the complete opposite, it seemed to me, of what I did. I take a life that already exists and put it on the page. Where’s the imagination there? What is it that I’m creating?

But then I started thinking about visual art. A painter who paints a landscape the way it actually looks is no less creative than Van Gogh painting “Starry Starry Night,” or Picasso painting any number of his cubist works. The sculptures of Michelangelo are no less creative than those of modern artists. In fact, sometimes those things are harder to create. It’s not easy to pin life down and make it stand still and be able to do it justice.

In creative nonfiction writing, everything is already there, yes, but it’s up to the writer to decide what to do with it. How should it be spaced? What should be left out? What should be emphasized? Emphasizing one detail even slightly differently can sometimes cause an entirely other truth to be illuminated from the same events. It is indeed a creative craft. The writer has to play up certain details in order to make them glisten on the page the way they do in real life. You have to poke and prod the words, nudging them in, smoothing them and rounding the corners, putting indents here and creating bulges there. It’s not easy. It’s not uncreative. I am a writer.