WHAT IS CREATIVE NON FICTION?

“There is no autobiography, only art and lies”

Jeanette Winterson

Essay << >> Essai to try

What Montaigne tells us about himself is peculiarly, charmingly specific and daily: he is on the short side, has a loud, abrasive voice, suffers from painful kidney stones, scratches his ears a lot (the insides itch), loves sauces, is not sure radishes agree with him, does his best thinking on horseback, prefers glass to metal cups, moves his bowels regularly in the morning, and so on. It is as if the self were a new continent, and Montaigne its first explorer.

Phillip Lopate, The Art of the Personal Essay 

Characteristics

PERSONAL Exploration Confusion Focus on style Poetic language Reflection Artful truth

“Just the facts, Ma’am”

Information Thesis Tries to be

unbiased Third person Truth

Creative Non Fiction NOT Creative Non Fiction

Author as Narrator

Tension

Details not remembered exactly

Reconstructing Dialogue

Purposefully changing a detail

Creating a composite character

Making stuff up

TRUTH

LIES

Perhaps, it never did snow that August in Vermont; perhaps there never were flurries in the night wind, and maybe no one else felt the ground hardening and summer already dead even as we pretended to bask in it, but that was how it felt to me, and it might as well have snowed, could have snowed, did snow.

Joan Didion, “On Reading a Notebook”

What happened to the writer is not what matters; what matters is the larger sense that the writer is able to make of what happened. For that the power of a writing imagination is required.

Vivian Gomick “Why Memoir Now”