On writing fiction and nonfiction

I spent the month of January working on a short story that I saw as part of a longer work of fiction. I had some time to think about writing on the plane ride home from AWP, at which time I wrote out, in a notebook, several pages of description/plot outline of the novel I was writing. I’m writing a novel! is what I thought. I’d been thinking and writing about my characters for a while, but suddenly the storyline seemed clear. All I need to do is sit down and write this thing, is what I thought.

Instead, something kind of interesting has happened: I started writing nonfiction again. You may remember that for many years I was an avowed nonfiction-and-nonfiction-only sort of writer. I came from a journalism background and couldn’t separate myself from the facts, or so I thought. While enrolled in my MFA program I took 99.9% nonfiction workshops and got mad about James Frey and that woman in my workshop who thought it was “cool” to fictionalize her “memoir.” I felt (and still do) that nonfiction is given short shrift in literary circles. On the other hand, I learned that some seventy-something percent of books published are nonfiction. That nonfiction sells; that as an unpublished writer you have a better chance of getting a nonfiction book out there than a novel, let alone a collection of short stories.

I’m a practical sort, and all of those rules and career possibilities appealed. I wrote a travel memoir for my MFA thesis. I was happy/proud/relieved to have finished it. Then I put it away. Because wow, I was sick of it. I hated it. I did not think it was my best work. A while later I got pregnant and couldn’t (hormones?) write a word. And after the baby was born … it was strange, but I found that I couldn’t write a word that wasn’t fiction. A friend suggested that perhaps reality was suddenly too intense and thus fiction felt more comfortable. Maybe so. I’m still not sure.

Oh no, this post is growing much longer than I intended it to. Yes, the point, I’m getting there. Really.

I’ve been thinking a lot this month about the interplay between writing fiction and writing nonfiction. I went to a panel session at AWP on how to decide whether to write something as fiction or nonfiction. All of the panelists seemed to see little difference between the two, which I found both shocking and oddly appealing. One part of me wanted to yell, no, you’re wrong! You can’t just label something that happened fiction! You can’t just embellish nonfiction for dramatic effect! But even as I sat there I was thinking about re-writing my stodgy stick-to-the-rules travel memoir —without regard to, well, the rules. How would it turn out?

I’m not saying I wanted to go back and make things up. But somehow that panel gave me permission to think about writing my experiences in Korea as if they were fiction.

I’ve been writing only fiction for a few years now, and liking it. Struggling with it, but liking it. I got a story in a small lit mag called Clare. I was a finalist in a Glimmer Train Short Story Award for New Writers contest. I started writing a novel! And then. This post was named a finalist in a food blog contest held by Creative Nonfiction. As a finalist it won’t be published though, so I thought, I should really do something with this. And suddenly I saw that this snapshot of experience I had in Korea was not a standalone piece. In a way it wasn’t originally; it was a between-chapters interlude/vignette in that 275-page travel memoir I wrote five years ago. But all of the sudden I saw it as the end of an essay, and that essay flowed out very easily. And I remembered how much I like writing nonfiction.

Here’s the thing: Fiction writing is good for nonfiction writing, and probably the reverse is true as well. There’s a freedom in fiction that allows for considering all of the possibilities: the order in which events occur, who’s involved, where, etc. In nonfiction you’re limited by the facts. You can change the order in which you reveal a string of events to the reader, but you can’t change the order in which events occurred. And something about the freedom of fiction allowed me to rethink how to present material that five years ago ended up sitting limply in chronological order, hammered into boring, lifeless submission.

The limitless possibilities of fiction have lately felt an obstacle in the short stories I’ve been writing. What if my main character does this? Ooh, maybe I could have her do this! Or this! My indecision knows no bounds and has the power to bring any writing session to a halt. Should my character have brown hair and a blue coat? Or blonde hair and a red one? What if she doesn’t wear a coat at all?

And yet, giving myself more choices in writing a new essay about my experiences in Korea helped. I chose to leave some details out. I chose to tell the story out of order. I chose to relate three separate events that seemed unrelated before but actually provide lovely dramatic effect when layered together. I think it worked.

Oh, there it is finally, my point: Loosen up. Blur the lines. Get your genres confused. See what happens.

*Yes, I have been meaning to write my promised 2^nd post on story cycles but some things have come up. Mainly, the entire family has been sick AGAIN for most of the month of February. I promise, I’m getting back to it. Really. Coming soon to a blog near you.

April links: the personal essay edition

First: a piece by Joyce Carol Oates, “I Am Sorry to Inform You,” presumably excerpted from her memoir on widowhood. It is, as you might expect from Oates, deeply moving in subtle and unexpected ways.

And: My MFA classmate Lizzie Stark has written about the choice to have a double mastectomy at 28 over at the Daily Beast. It’s a powerful essay that manages to combine her emotions on the situation with humor.

And: This month was the AWP conference in Denver. I did not make it this year. Again. Every year I say I’m going to go, and, well, I haven’t been once. This year I decided to spend the money on writer’s workshops closer to home. If you didn’t make it to Denver, or even perhaps more so if you did, you might enjoy this AWP Postmortem on the Virgina Quarterly Review blog. I did.

Next year, you are so my year. I have no excuse not to make it to DC to attend AWP, as my Dad lives there and I won’t have to shell out for a hotel room.

But I digress.

Next: I have written before about dreaming in another language, and what happens when a second language begins to overtake a first. But I write stories and essays in my own language, and I can’t imagine what it would take to write creatively in a second (or third!) language, as Ha Jin and Aleksandar Hemon do. Which is why I found this essay, by writer Christiane Alsop, so fascinating.

And: commas! I overuse commas. Or at least, I use them a lot. I admit it. I don’t care. Not really. This  old essay, “In Praise of the Humble Comma,” by one of my favorite travel writers, Pico Iyer, explains it all:

The gods, they say, give breath, and they take it away. But the same could be said — could it not? — of the humble comma. Add it to the present clause, and, of a sudden, the mind is, quite literally, given pause to think; take it out if you wish or forget it and the mind is deprived of a resting place.

I’m in a cafe writing this, and I have actually bought a chocolate brownie that is too rich to eat. It seems impossible, I know, but it’s true. Do not buy anything called “chocolate praline fudge brownie,” and for your health, do not combine even a few bites of said brownie with caffeine. I think it is entirely possible that I am about to bounce off of something.

Finally: Chris Offutt’s Guide to Literary Terms cracked me up.

You should read…

I’ve put up a new page on FCW which details what I’ve been reading. You can see a list of what I’ve been devouring, words-wise, including short stories and essays. I often find myself thinking back to short fiction and nonfiction I’ve read, and noticed last year that I often forget what story or essay I am thinking about, or where I read it. So I decided to keep track. Turns out, I read a lot of short works. Hrm.

Anyway, a couple of recent nonfiction reads that I highly recommend:

On October 13, 2002, I woke up in a train station in Secunderabad, India, with no passport and no idea who I was or why I was in India.

So begins “The Answer to the Riddle is Me” by David Stuart Maclean, which appeared in the Winter 2009 issue of Ploughshares. Maclean gives a riveting account of memory loss that I wanted desperately to read more of, and so I was glad to hear it’s part of a full-length memoir on the subject — hopefully to be published soon. You’ll have to get your hands on a copy of Ploughshares to read the text (recommended), but Maclean also read an adapted version of this piece on a recent episode of “This American Life,” which you can hear the audio of here. Maclean’s reading starts at 36:00.

The night sky in North Korea might be the most brilliant in northeast Asia, the only airspace spared the coal dust, Gobi Desert sand, and carbon monoxide choking the rest of the continent. And no electrical glow competes with the intensity of the stars there. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, which had propped up its old Communist ally with cheap fuel oil, North Korea’s power stations rusted into ruin. The lights went out. Now when the sun drops low in the sky, the landscape fades to gray and the squat little houses are swallowed by the night. Entire villages vanish into the dusk. Even in parts of Pyongyang, the capital, you can stroll down the middle of a street at night without being able to see the buildings on either side.
Such darkness is a curse, of course, but it also has its advantages. If you are a teenager dating somebody you can’t be seen with, invisibility confers measures of privacy and freedom that are hard to come by in North Korea. You can do what you like without worrying about the eyes of parents, neighbors, or the secret police.

I’ve been fascinated by North Korea ever since spending a year in South Korea as an English teacher some years ago. And now I’ve found the book that I’ve been looking for ever since I visited the DMZ and stepped, for a moment, into that country: Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea. It comes from Barbara Demick, the Los Angeles Times’ Beijing Bureau Chief, who’s been interviewing North Koreans since 2001. I’ve read two excerpts from the book so far. Both were staggering in terms of content and detailed reporting. The heartbreaking “Not Like I Don’t Like You,” appeared in the Paris Review last fall. And “The Good Cook,” appeared in the New Yorker November 2, 2009. (Neither site offers the full text of the essays, so add the book to your to-read list. I have.)

February writing links

I’ve finally finished a freelance project that was hanging over my head and am trying to get back whatever it was I was doing before said freelance project. It feels like that was about 3 years ago, but it was only 3 weeks. While I was busy juggling mom-work and freelance work (there’s probably a blog post in that, if I could just find the time to write it) apparently February ended. Which means it’s past time for February writing links. Here they are!

This one’s a bit of a rant, but a rant worth reading/thinking about, by Leon Wieseltier at the New Republic. It’s an essay on what the “digital revolution” is doing to writers (impoverishing them!), and why “nausea is in order.”

On a somewhat related note, “crowdfunding” author advances … In which “crowdfunding” is a fancy way of saying “begging.”

Mentioned in the New Republic piece above, this one, in the Atlantic, argues for shorter newspaper articles. I’m not sure if I agree or not, though the examples here sure are good ones.  I think if I was teaching a beginning journalism class, this piece might be required reading.

The Millions’ excellent guide to fiction online.

Sorry non-tweeting reading public, this one’s on Twitter.  It’s the Twitter feed of @longreads, which provides links to long-form nonfiction/journalism. I keep getting sidetracked reading the excellent writing @longreads suggests.

This one’s been widely posted, but I’m posting it here again anyway, in case you missed it. The Guardian asked various authors to give 10 Rules for Writing Fiction and the results are here. Some of the advice is quite funny, whether it was meant that way or not (“Don’t have children.” – Richard Ford) and a lot of it is to-the-point and hard, which I suppose the best advice should be.

If, like me, you’re interested in creative nonfiction, then this one’s for you. Susan Orlean, she of Orchid Thief and New Yorker article fame, is teaching a nonfiction class at NYU these days, and she’s posted her syllabus online (scroll down to find it). I found it interesting to see what she’s assigned for reading material and so on. Or maybe I just wish I could take the class.

Finally, a day in the life of author Alexander Chee, part of a series on writers’ daily lives here. What struck me most: Chee has three writing spaces set up in his house, so that no matter what part of the house he’s in, he can’t escape the work of writing.

Word count woes

After two days of whacking at a 12-page essay with what feels like the editing sophistication of a machete,  I’m done. I’ve given up. I’ve run into a problem. It’s not a new one for me, but it’s frustrating all the same. I’ve got a pile of essays that I’d like to publish, and they are all too long.

Most of these essays came into existence while I was working on my MFA in nonfiction writing. My advisor, whose nonfiction workshops I took quite a few of, insisted that we turn in pieces in the 16-20-page range. He had found, he said, that requiring that length resulted in better, more complex pieces of writing. And, conveniently for the nonfiction book workshop I took with him, that length is a nice one for a chapter of a book.

It’s a bit ironic, this problem I’m having. Before I entered the MFA program, I tended to write five-page essays. They seemed monumental. I thought they were complete and complex. After two years in an MFA program, two years of being required to write longer, I realized that my earlier pieces were not complete, nor did they contain many of the characteristics of what I was learning were “good” essays: The dialogue, character and setting development that you might find in a work of fiction. My essays did not relate my experiences to a wider theme or experience, which I’d also learned was a must in a good personal essay. When I finished my MFA coursework, one of the things I could point to definitively as something I’d learned and valued in the MFA program was “learning to write longer.”

The types of essays I tend to write fall into the categories of travel, humor, and women’s interest (sometimes a combo of all three). These are not categories that tend to be popular with literary magazines, which do, often, accept longer essays. I have spent a lot of time researching publications that  accept travel and humor writing of the type that I do, and that’s where I’m running up against the word count limits: Generally, 800-1,200 words is what’s acceptable. This blog post is already 400 words. The travel memoir I wrote for my MFA thesis consists of chapters of abut 5,000 words. Yesterday, I tried to cut and rework a 3,500-word piece to about 1,000 words. I was unsuccessful. As a former newspaper editor, I know that there are often sentences, words, and even whole graphs that can be cut out — it is sometimes amazing how much of a piece is expendable. But when you start to loose the essence and meaning of a piece, you’ve gone too far.

And so, do I try to excerpt some of my essays – essentially rewriting them in shorter forms? I’d love to ignore the word counts and compile the essays into a book, but what agent/publisher would be interested in a book of essays in which none of the individual essays has been published yet? Do I just forget the essays, let them pile up in the back of my hard drive and concentrate on writing new, shorter pieces instead?

It’s funny, this morning I read this piece on Brevity’s blog (Brevity itself accepts nonfiction of 750 words or fewer. It’s an excellent mag all the same.) on how few places accept short essays. We writers are all looking for something that eludes us, it seems.

January writing links, part II – the State of the Union edition

Since my links post yesterday was all about fiction, I had to veer back into territory I’m more comfortable with: nonfiction. Alas, a lot of nonfiction these days is focused on the state of the publishing industry:

Ted Genoways, the editor of the Virginia Quarterly Review, weighs in at Mother Jones on the death of literary magazines and the proliferation of MFA programs. Coincidence? He thinks not. And man, is debate raging about that, on the Mother Jones site, and in the comments of a related VQR blog post.

While we’re talking about demise, the Wall Street Journal proclaimed the “Death of the Slush Pile.” But wait a minute.  Not so fast.

Since this is the State of the Union edition of January’s writing links, I give you the wisdom of Pulitzer Prize-winning author Junot Diaz, on President Obama’s first year in office:

A President can have all the vision in the world, be an extraordinary orator and a superb politician, have courage and foresight and a willingness to make painful choices, have a bold progressive plan for his nation—but none of these things will matter a wit if the President cannot couch his vision, his policies, his courage, his will, his plan in the idiom of story.

Finally, a beautiful short essay by author Edwidge Danticat on the Haiti earthquake and her family there.

How an essay comes to be.

A pigeon falls on your windshield. Or a similarly odd, potentially transformative event happens to you. Despite the fact that you’ve been remiss in your commitment to write regularly, you feel that familiar tug… you want to describe the incident of the bird falling on your car (or whatever. insert your event here). When you begin to type you realize that there’s something else going on, something beyond actual events, i.e. a pigeon falling out of the sky on to your windshield as you hurtle down the highway at 70 mph. Whump! As you describe how the sound of the bird hitting the glass was so loud that you thought your windshield might crack and how your heart pounded and how you felt thankful that the bird was not, say, a tire, or a ladder fallen from a truck, or a boulder, you think back through the flashing reel of other events in your life involving birds and realize there is pattern, and metaphor, and the potential for an essay, were these bird-related incidents grouped in the right way and tied to other meaningful moments. You may also consider that it’s a little odd that you’ve had so many accidental interactions with wild birds, but you let this thought fly away, unexplained. There is an essay forming in your mind, and you being to chronicle other times when your life has collided (so to speak) with a bird’s or birds’. In doing so, the other stuff, the meaningful moments, the life-changing events that were already occurring when the birds found their way to you or you found your way to them, that stuff comes out. Suddenly it’s on the page, and while it may be rough and perhaps a little odd, this intersection of life and birds, it’s soon an essay, one you want to rewrite and polish and send out to magazines. And it never would have come to be without that pigeon falling out of the sky, wing over wing, beak over tail, and leaving a gray smudge on the glass, a fog through which you must travel from now on.

Christmas rundown

I’m back from the East Coast and the blur of family activity that is Christmas. It’s rainy and cold in San Francisco, but somehow that seems brighter than the leafless brown scenery we saw at home — an actual winter landscape. Our part of California has seasons, but they are subtle and the current one lacks the grey lifelessness of a real winter. Which I don’t mind so much.

I didn’t write while I was gone (left the laptop at home to rest my arm) and I read only a little. I did get most of the way through the New Yorker’s fiction issue, and loved, loved, loved the Jhumpa Lahiri short story. I hope she has another collection coming out. Her stories are just so…engrossing. I didn’t want that story to end, and when it did, I had trouble going back to the novel I was reading, because the novel simply wasn’t as good.

What else? I got a copy of Paris Review Interviews for Christmas … looking forward to reading that and getting inspired to write. It includes interviews with Hemingway and Joan Didion, among others. I didn’t realize when I put this book on my Christmas list, but the volume I received is one of a planned four-book set. You can find out more and read some of the interviews here.

While I was home I had a chance to thumb through a recent issue of the Canadian nonfiction literary magazine, Brick. I’ve never seen it sold anywhere in San Francisco, so I was glad to finally be able to take a look. (And was surprised to find a large number of the contributors to that issue hailed from San Francisco.) It’s nonfiction, after all, and there are only a handful of journals that publish only in that genre. I’m always eager to see what they include. This one was a nice mixture of memoir, literary essay, interviews, letters and so on.

How do you define manly, anyway?

Some Thursday things:

-The best novel ever for a man. (on the Guardian‘s books blog). Must be some man-holiday that I wasn’t aware of, because I also ran across the Top 10 Most Manly Writers Ever, defined, apparently, this way: “in their fiction, the liquor is always strong, the women willing, and wildlife had best take cover”(enotes book blog, via Bookfox).*

-It’s the old what-should-we call-it? discussion of (creative) nonfiction. I’m not ready to lump myself in as a Realtor just yet.   And also, didn’t anyone tell Barbara Tuchman that there are trademark issues involved there? The proofreader/copyeditor in me wonders if the Chronicle of Higher Ed was wise to leave that label lower-cased. (via Practicing Writing)

-Who knows if there are any left, but Moleskine notebooks are currently on sale for $1.99 here. It’s a $20 value! Not available in stores!
Ahem. Clearly, I’ve been watching too much TV too close to the holidays. (via Moleskinerie)

-This video is a nice tie-in to my recent post on writers on the big screen.  (ReadingWritingLiving)

-And now, for silliness. This cracks me up.

*Seriously, have you ever seen a list like this for women? The Most Womanly Writers Ever? Or, the Best Novel Ever for a Woman?

There’s a reason you’ve never seen it, believe me.

This is where I get all nonfiction-y on you

All these favorite short stories made me wonder yesterday whether people could list 10 favorite essays as quickly or as excitedly. I wondered if I could. I read a lot of essays, and after a while, it gets hard to keep them all separate. I’m horrible at remembering titles, too, which doesn’t help. I tend to remember subject matter first.

But I could list about eight short stories without looking at my bookshelf or a file I have called, imaginatively, “favorite writing,” in which I keep things like that. For example: I sometimes rip stories or articles out of the New Yorker or elsewhere or keep handouts from classes I’ve taken…I had a short story course the first semester of my MFA program in which the professor gave us copies of at least 15 stories for the last class meeting, and so I’ve kept some of those that I liked in my folder. I have some essays in there too…

But favorite essays are maybe are a different kind of favorite? I wonder. The intimacy and contained world of a short story seems to create a real fondness in the readers who relate to that world or its characters. The same can happen in essays, but do readers form the same kinds of attachments? Can you list 10 favorites?

In any case, I give you my ten favorite essays/short nonfiction. Guess what? It was harder (and it took me a lot longer) to come up with this list than it was for me to come up with my list of short stories. I’m not sure why that is, and I admit to being mildly disappointed in myself. After all, I like to see myself as a nonfiction writer, and supporter of nonfiction writing. Hmm. Anyway, the ten:

“Why We Travel,” Pico Iyer (originally in Salon Travel)
“Goodbye to All That,” Joan Didion (from Slouching Toward Bethlehem)
“The Inheritance of Tools,” Scott Russell Sanders
“Once More to the Lake,” E.B. White
“Consider the Lobster,” David Foster Wallace  (from the book of the same name).
“Show Dog,” Susan Orlean (appeared in the New Yorker, and is in Life Stories or this collection)
“Storm Country,” Paul Crenshaw (find it here)
“No Name Woman,” Maxine Hong Kingston
“On Keeping a Notebook,” Joan Didion (from Slouching Toward Bethlehem)
“Why Bother?” Jonathan Franzen (from How to Be Alone)

Some runners-up: “Dog Trouble,” Cathleen Schine (find it here), and “Learning to Breathe,” by Alison Wright (in Wild Writing Women: Stories of World Travel).

Wanna thumb wrestle about it?

An opinion piece in the the San Francisco Chronicle this morning takes a look at truth in nonfiction, specifically, David Sedaris’ nonfiction.

True to form, the Chronicle piece follows on the heels of an article that appeared last month in the New Republic on Sedaris’ Naked, which reported that Sedaris went beyond mere exaggeration for humorous effect; that he took liberties with the truth. In the New Republic article (link above only gives the full story to subscribers; I read it on Lexis Nexis) writer Alex Heard investigates various scenes in Sedaris’ books but says that he is more concerned with the larger question of “whether ‘nonfiction’ means anything when you’re talking about humor writers who admit to flubberizing the truth for comic effect.”

In the end, he concludes that “most of his crimes are petty, making him a nonfiction juvenile delinquent rather than a frogwalk-worthy felon. Still, his work is marketed as nonfiction, and there’s a simple rule associated with that: Don’t make things up.”

Agreed.

The Chronicle opinion piece seems to agree too, pointing fingers at publishers, agents, and writers. The author of the piece, Oscar Villalon, wonders why a writer would “take the risk” of calling something nonfiction that isn’t.

And that’s when I started to get seriously irritated with this article. I quote:

Why take the risk of a public shaming?
There are a couple of reasons for it. The first is purely cynical: Nonfiction sells a lot more than fiction. For many readers, books must have some sort of utilitarian purpose — you have to learn something “real” from it — and they don’t see any point in investing their scarce free time in reading make-believe. It’s an ironically ignorant stance, but it exists. Publishers or agents, by calling a work nonfiction that isn’t, are hoping certain readers will be more likely to pick it up.

The second reason is laziness: In another irony, a writer doesn’t have to work as hard to create the verisimilitude and the nuance a novelist must render to make his world recognizable and true when he already has the reader’s suspension of disbelief. The book is labeled nonfiction, so however incredible the actions and descriptions therein, they must be believed. After all, truth is stranger than fiction.

Ignoring the fact that nonfiction writers “don’t have to work as hard” as fiction writers for a moment, Villalon seems to perceive readers as complete idiots without any sense of perception or understanding of grey areas. It’s either read and believe, or read and don’t believe.

My guess is that most readers know that Sedaris is exaggerating and that most readers probably assume that not every detail in his essays is factual. I know I do. And yet Sedaris is still wildly popular, which basically blows out of the water Villalon’s theory that nonfiction readers don’t want to waste their time with anything that remotely deviates from some absolute truth.

Back to the (from my perspective) more outrageous statement, that telling the truth is somehow easier than writing fiction because readers already believe that what you’re writing is true and you don’t have to suspend their disbelief…

To quote the New Republic piece:

In interviews, [Sedaris has] groaned about the time Esquire sent him to cover life at a morgue in Phoenix. The problem: He had to restrict himself to what actually happened. “I couldn’t exaggerate at all,” he told an interviewer. “It gave me a whole new appreciation for people who can honestly tell the truth, because people just didn’t always say what I wanted them to.”

Even Sedaris thinks writing nonfiction is hard, and for good reason. It is hard to maintain accuracy while also telling a good story that captures readers’ attention. For this reason, I could argue that nonfiction writing is harder than fiction writing (as some writers do), but I don’t believe that. They are both challenging; both must draw readers in, but by using different tools.

Villalon goes on to say that fiction is somehow getting short shrift out of all of this. Fiction! I find it amazing that someone could believe that nonfiction has somehow come out on the more credible side while fiction writing is now considered “second rate,” particularly following the James Frey fiasco, Augusten Burroughs’ legal woes, and the fraud of Jason Blair in the NYT and Stephen Glass’ pieces in, yes, The New Republic. If anything, I think readers are a lot more skeptical of nonfiction than they’ve ever been. And fiction: Fiction writing is at the heart of every MFA program, most literary magazines, many prestigious writers’ colonies and grants, and many of the big-name, big-money awards. There is status in writing fiction that nonfiction writers rarely achieve (unless their books are blessed by Oprah) despite the fact that, as Villalon points out, nonfiction sells more.

Which made me wonder, who is this Villalon guy, anyway? Turns out he’s the 30-something book editor at the Chronicle, and he’s on the board of the National Book Critics Circle, the group that gives out the prestigious awards. He’s also an author. Of a book about thumb wrestling.

Labels: They’re not just for high school anymore

My MFA was in nonfiction writing, not fiction or poetry, which always surprises some people. Oddly, it’s writers who seem to be most thrown by this admission.

For example, a conversation I had upon being introduced to an author (of fiction) last year at a party:

Mutual acquaintance, before disappearing to get a drink: This is Elizabeth, she’s an MFA student at [school].
Author: Oh! Great! Are you doing fiction, or poetry?
Me, deflated: Um, I’m concentrating on nonfiction, actually.
Author: Oh.
Author, her eyes darting frantically around the room for chance of escape: So, what kind of things do you write? Biography?
Me: I’m writing a travel memoir about a year I spent in South Korea.
Author: Oh, how … interesting. Memoir. Like James Frey.

Non-writers are sometimes equally surprised, but the judgment is less often there. Many are even savvy enough to ask whether I write memoir or something “more journalistic”? (Both, and thank you for asking.)

I’m unsure of whether the problem lies in the supposed relative newness of creative nonfiction (it’s not, really, but it is newly a part of MFA programs, compared to fiction and poetry) as a literary genre, or in all of the labels and categorizing. There are a lot of labels:

creative nonfiction
literary journalism
new journalism
gonzo journalism
neo-gonzo journalism
new new journalism
the fourth genre*
nonfiction novel
narrative nonfiction
nonfiction prose

Not to mention all of the fancy ones (the literature of fact, the literature of reality, the art of fact, the art of truth….) and all of the sub-genres: memoir, biography, essay… And, there’s also the subject categorizing of nonfiction done by bookstores and libraries (science, history, current events, politics…). All of this, I think, makes for confusion among, well, everyone. I studied creative nonfiction writing and I don’t usually know how to refer to what I do. I tend to just stick with plain old “nonfiction,” because I find that it invites fewer judgments. The word “creative” tends to elicit comments about — and sometimes even comparisons to– James Frey, as in “Oh, so you’re like James Frey?”

So I’ve started to think it comes down to truth, or more perhaps, as Stephen Colbert says, “truthiness.” Because the uncomfortable reactions to the writing of nonfiction tend to escalate, I think, along with people’s discomfort levels over the idea of truth being bent, massaged, or exaggerated. It’s a topic that can really set people off (including me). Everyone has an opinion about this, opinions that are, I’ve found, pretty steadfast. For example, someone I was talking to recently kind of shrugged off James Frey and said that memoirs are all pretty much fictional … that memoir authors always bend the truth.

The point is that we all, whether we realize it or not, approach the writing that we read with certain judgments or assumptions already in place. I used to approach fiction thinking that everything is made up and was pretty dismayed to find out how much of some books wasn’t — I was dismayed to find out how much was true! Me, the nonfiction writer. It’s the same way with nonfiction; everyone approaches nonfiction in all of its forms with different ideas of what kind of liberties with the truth are ok, and which ones aren’t ok. When those assumptions are upended, we are generally either pissed off, as if we’ve been duped, or thrilled at the artistic license, the bending of the rules, and the blurring of the lines. Mostly just pissed off though.

It’s kind of strange writing in a genre that elicits such visceral reactions even in introductory conversations, like the one I had with that author. I suspect that genre fiction writers get similar reactions, particularly in MFA programs, where sci fi, romance, and mystery are pretty much absent from the curriculum. Hmm.

*The Fourth Genre is a label that irks me, as it implies that nonfiction is somehow last, after the first three genres of fiction, poetry and drama. What’s with the ranking?