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nonfiction

Defining Creative Non-Fiction

Posted on Thursday, December 6, 2012 10:08 AM

If calling myself a historical novelist leads readers to expect something I don't deliver, then I need a new description. But is "creative non-fiction" a better term? Here's a working definition:

Literary critic Barbara Lounsberry — in her book The Art of Fact — suggests four constitutive characteristics of the genre, the first of which is “Documentable subject matter chosen from the real world as opposed to ‘invented’ from the writer’s mind.” By this, she means that the topics and events discussed in the text verifiably exist in the natural world. The second characteristic is “Exhaustive research,” which she claims allows writers “novel perspectives on their subjects” and “also permits them to establish the credibility of their narratives through verifiable references in their texts.” The third characteristic that Lounsberry claims is crucial in defining the genre is “The scene”. She stresses the importance of describing and revivifying the context of events in contrast to the typical journalistic style of objective reportage. The fourth and final feature she suggests is “Fine writing: a literary prose style”. “Verifiable subject matter and exhaustive research guarantee the nonfiction side of literary nonfiction; the narrative form and structure disclose the writer’s artistry; and finally, its polished language reveals that the goal all along has been literature.”

That's pretty much what I try to do. My books have:

portrayals of the real life stories of real people
details based on lots of research (letters, diaries, official records)
full descriptions of the era and places about which I write (Civil War South Carolina)
at least a bit of literary style; they read like a novel, not a history book

So that settles it, right? Not so fast. Once I started reading more articles about this "new" mixture of fiction and nonfiction, I kept finding cautionary warnings.

Dan Poyner writes, "Creative nonfiction is the latest name for fact-based writing that can perhaps be best understood as the union of storytelling and journalism." And leaping onward from that definition, several other critics demand that the same ethics that apply to journalism apply also to creative nonfiction. Everything must be 100% verifiable.
Using the term "nonfiction", I was told, requires an author to be accurate. Articles often point to James Frey as a cautionary example. His "A Million Little Pieces" was a memoir that turned out to have several fabricated incidents. The minute he adds a character, or creates a conversation that no one heard, or imagines a scene that may never have happened, he has crossed a line -- one that may forever destroy his credibility and reputation as a historian. Uh-oh!
Lee Gutkind says an author can never fabricate a conversation unless someone remembers it. And then he warns, "One way to protect the characters in your book, article, or essay is to allow them to defend themselves--or at least to read what you have written about them."

And there's the problem. My characters are all real people, but they lived 150 years ago. They can't defend themselves. Neither can I interview them, or ask others around them to help me reconstruct what happened or to describe a conversation. I have no videos, or tape recordings, or sworn testimonies. Sometimes the existing evidence (as happened with the life of Nellie Chase) is completely lacking. Sometimes (as happened with the Laura Towne diaries) it has been edited beyond recognition. Facts tend to get lost between the cracks of passing time. My books cannot live up to the standards of journalism; therefore, they are probably not "creative nonfiction, either.

So perhaps I need to coin my own term. How does "biographical fiction" sound? We'll look at that tomorrow.

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Defining Creative Non-Fiction