The genre of “creative nonfiction” can seem like a contradiction: how can a piece of writing be both grounded in facts and reality and yet also be imaginative and involve the production of original ideas (as the Oxford English Dictionary has it)? Doesn’t the “creative” in “creative nonfiction” put undue pressure on the phrase, rendering its meaning unclear or imprecise? The writer Lee Gutkind classifies it as an “umbrella term” encompassing a wide range of literary writing, including memoir, cultural criticism, and speculative fiction. As I understand it, “creative nonfiction” is less a form of writing than an orientation towards it – both an acknowledgement that nothing is fashioned from nothing and an understanding that facts themselves are imaginative constructions (the geocentric model, for instance, was once understood as truth). To write creative nonfiction might then be to explore or test the relationship between reality and fiction.
Is the personal essay creative nonfiction? On the one hand, the task of personal narrative is often understood as an authentic telling of one’s individual experience and/or identity. And yet, a personal narrative is not a simple recitation of the facts of one’s life; it’s also not an argumentative piece. A strong personal essay rather draws on the resources of imaginative writing to say something true about one’s experience(s). This is, in effect, what the college application essay (or its corollary, the diversity statement) solicits from prospective students.
How might you begin drafting a personal essay or diversity statement? The possibilities are endless, but you might start with a specific object, for example, a cherished memory or a favorite restaurant. Describe that object as precisely and exhaustively as you can, and as a novelist might. Then, turn to reflecting on your own feelings about that specific object. Does it make you feel nostalgic, ambivalent, confused? Why? After you’ve generated that initial data, step back and try to situate the object and your feelings toward it within a wider personal and cultural context. What, for instance, might that object reveal about yourself or your community? You may need to do this exercise multiple times, until you discover the right object or objects to communicate something important about yourself to the reader: your character, your values, your dreams.
The personal essay is the purest example of creative nonfiction. The unique challenge it poses is the negotiation between the demand to tell a story and tell it well and that of staying close to the facts, to how things really were. The best personal essays, however, remind us that the imagination is not antithetical to the truth, but rather the best method of arriving at it.
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