Often in creative nonfiction, writing telling, well-crafted stories from our lives isn’t enough. Readers crave perspective, insight, interpretation, and sometimes researched information.
This panel discusses four new ways of crafting essays and memoir that move beyond “What happened?” to answer, at least implicitly, “So what?” as the genre seeks to add to our existing vocabulary on the subject.
The Shadow Knows
Philip Graham
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Many of the stories of our lives lodge within us for reasons that are clear, or reasons that are not so clear and so might remain unexamined. Yet if you focus more attention on a story’s details, from close up, or as if from a distance, or from the perspective of someone seeing them for the first time, you can add dimension to those details and they will gain more substance—so much substance that, from the light of your gaze, they will cast a shadow.
I believe that most of the stories of our lives cast shadows. Some shadows are obvious, while others wait for us to notice them. Either way, a shadow is what gives a memory, whether of a person, place, or event, its true life, just as chiaroscuro, the traditional artist’s technique of blending light and dark, gives depth to a two-dimensional surface. Looking more closely at the dinnertime anecdote, I realized that for my young son, the mysterious word “colleague” conjured up terrible, threatening creatures. With all my complaining I had brought what could be considered demons into my house, and they had frightened my child. Click here to continue reading. |
The Two Inmates:
Research in Creative Nonfiction & the Power of “Outer Feeling”
Miles Harvey
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The premise of this essay is that writers are often prisoners of our own stories. The more drafts we crank out, the more details we add or subtract, the more narrative strategies we attempt, the more we sometimes wind up feeling walled in—a creative confinement the essayist Debra Gwartney attributes to “the traps of anecdote.” Often, Gwartney explains, writers “get so attached to the episodic ‘what happened’” that we can’t free ourselves to “explore the narrator’s inner life, the “who am I” (Gwartney, 23-24).
Yes, but how do we make this escape? How do we find a way to probe the inner life, to gain perspective on the self, to transcend the traps of anecdote? As I wrestle with such questions in my own work, I often find myself meditating on a pair of men who lived pivotal parts of their lives in isolation. I like to think of them as the two inmates. Click here to continue reading. |
Making Fresh
Tim Hillegonds
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The immediate circumstance of every writer is this: it’s all been written about before. The thing that feels unique and personal is actually ordinary and general—and that makes freshness even harder to manufacture. However, writing about one’s life, about experiences lived that will surely be lived again, needn’t be stale. When Speer Morgan used the phrase “making fresh,” which is different than finding fresh or uncovering fresh, he began with the assumption that my subject was stale, but he also began with the assumption that it didn’t have to stay that way—it could be transformed. He acknowledged the power there is not in finding freshness, but in making freshness, in creating what Mary Karr calls “the sheer, convincing poetry of a single person trying to make sense of the past.”
Yet, while there can be—and often is—poetry to be found in sense-making, fresh-making demands more: “a single person trying to make sense of the past” must become a single person trying to make sense of the past for a reader. The transformation is subtle, yet vital, and represents one way the writer can venture beyond the arbitrary hope of freshness and set out on a specific path towards freshness—a new road where old ideas can bloom with new perspective. Click here to continue reading. |
Creating Meaning Through Structure
Michele Morano
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In writing, the first step is often motivated by a strong memory or emotion or by a desire to set something right. Particularly in nonfiction, we might write what has shocked or saddened or injured us. We might write out of anger or revenge or curiosity, to solve a mystery or learn more about an obsession. These are all fine impulses, as long as we don’t end with them. That you’re curious about something doesn’t mean readers should also be curious. If you’re angry or hurt or still in shock after all these years, that’s the starting point, not the end. In early drafts, we focus on getting it all down, on sketching scenes and filling in details, on making a three-dimensional experience come to life in two dimensions, but at some point we have to ask, “So what?” Why should readers care?
To answer this question, it’s important to remember that, generally speaking, we don’t read creative nonfiction in order to find out what happened. We read to understand how a writer makes sense of experience and carries it forward in life. We read for perspective. And perspective is often very closely tied on the page to structure. Click here to continue reading. |