4: Content

Answer the Journalist's Questions and Embrace the Et Cetera

The classic questions a journalist must answer for the reader are who, what, when, where, how—the creative side, then, might include why. According to Ballenger, it’s the author’s job to also include the “So What?” When we write for an audience, advises Ballenger, “the insights also have to be relevant to others. Though they may begin as an essayist’s personal desire to understand himself or herself, the best essays ultimately transcend the small, self-interested world of the author and have something to say to someone else….the best essays ultimately arrive at someplace we all recognize—our struggles to love or feel at home with ourselves or find joy in what is extraordinary in otherwise ordinary things” (23).

"Write what you know," the teacher will tell you, and sometimes, the teacher will credit Mark Twain with having given that advice. He did, but not verbatim. He wrote about what he had done and where he had been, but he never explicitly said the words. Certainly start with what you know, but watch out for the limitations this advice will impose. Also write about what you don't know, but learn everything you can about it. Talk to people. Watch people. Read. Read some more. Gather what you learn and present it in a way that only you can, with your unique voice. Everything is material for creative nonfiction.

Author Jessica Handler offers the nonfiction writer permission to write about what's NOT there:

A dearth of facts can create a fertile space in the construction of a creative nonfiction narrative. Try considering, on the page, why you deem certain material important or where you and your narrative are without those facts. Tell the story of your research—its rewards, twists and turns, and dead ends. Write about the acts of myth-making and myth-uncovering. Write about what you don’t know.

...I’ve faced that empty space in my own writing. Before my father died, he told me his great aunt had been buried in a coffee can under a hedge on his parents’ lawn. This can’t possibly be true for countless reasons, not the least of which is that she’d have to have been cremated, which isn’t part of the Jewish burial tradition. I have no facts about my great-great-aunt other than a photo of her with a paper moon, probably on Coney Island. My grandmother and her brother are there, too—little kids then, long dead now. At first, this might seem to leave me with nothing to write about, at least not as nonfiction.

But I have so much. I have the fact of my father’s belief in the coffee can story, and I know firsthand of his affection for his great aunt. I have what I know from my own experience about my father’s penchant for strange stories and how I wish I could have seen Coney Island in its heyday. If I were brave enough, I could go to my father’s childhood home and ask the strangers who live there now if I could search their hedge for an ancient coffee can. Someday, if I’m ever in the neighborhood, I might. That’s a plot element right there, regardless of what I find—or don’t find.

Instead of being limited by the missing facts, advises Handler, make the search part of the story. Investigate in every way. Go to the library. Call distant relatives. Search news archives. If the story still isn't complete, finish it with the tale of your own journey. "Creative nonfiction," celebrates Handler, "is a gloriously flexible genre. What we don’t know or can’t know doesn’t have to wreck our writing. Instead, what seemed at first to be only an empty space can be an opportunity to shape and expand a narrative, exploring the gaps and writing our way through the myths."

Character

Casting your SELF accurately

The heading of this section is problematic. Accurately? Objectively? Maybe “Fairly” is better. Human tendency leans toward three jagged points of a triangular spectrum when writing about ourselves. We may see ourselves as the villain, making stupid choices when we should know better. Perhaps we see ourselves as the hero, making all the right moves as those around us flounder. Third, we see ourselves as the victim, being acted upon instead of acting. Any of those points may be correct, but the challenge of interacting with other humans is that our selves probably flop around in the middle of the triangle at any given moment. Further, what makes us a hero to some will make us a villain to others.

When writing about yourself, as you are likely to do in a nonfiction writing course, consider how you cast yourself as a character. Try to be fair. Write about mistakes you have made and what you have learned. Tell a story about a home run or a spelling bee championship. But try to balance the way you present yourself so your audience trusts you as a reliable narrator. One great way to gain perspective on an event you’re writing about is to ask someone else who was part of that experience. For instance, “That day I won the school spelling bee in seventh grade, do you remember what I did when I won?” You may be picturing yourself as awkward, gangly. Your Aunt Jenny may remember you shaking hands with your fellow competitors in a gracious manner. How can you present a balanced picture for your reader?

Check out this link to explore more about self-perception as you figure out how to cast yourself as a character in your nonfiction writing:

https://www.bustle.com/p/7-fascinating-ways-you-see-yourself-differently-than-others-see-you-15643306#:~:text=%22In%20general%2C%20people%20tend%20to,differently%20than%20others%20see%20them.

Setting

Toni Morrison and Wallace Stegner, while celebrated for their fiction writing, were also prolific producers of nonfiction. They are both champions of setting.

A strong sense of place can bring dimension to a story or essay in a unique way. How much do you offer? Writer Brandi Reissenweber suggests, "Engaging setting starts with strong description. Focus on specific details that define the essence of the place and invite the reader to imagine it fully. Don’t compartmentalize setting. Instead, lash description of place closely to the action."

One great example is a 1973 essay Toni Morrison wrote about a family cookout. Note the intertwining of movement and setting. By the end, the reader is sitting next to the family, waiting to eat some fish.

The fish were already awake, the potatoes were sliced and simmering next to the onions, and this whole tribal effort to have a day-long fish-and-cookout at Turkeyfoot Lake in honor of the eldest member of the Alabama wing of the family was beginning to draw Mama's and Aunt Millie's lips together in annoyance. For one thing, the Blue Gums (the Akron group of the family) thought Uncle Green belonged to them more than to us because they were more his age and remembered Alabama the way he did long before the migration North had begun: the first day the general store down home sold light-bread; the farm of 88 acres when it was prosperous and could feed 17 people year round; and other family reunions which were never ever called cook-outs in spite of the fact that they roasted corn and skewered fish over pine-cone fires on days just like this one.

The setting is the story in Stegner's essay entitled, "Finding the Place: A Migrant Childhood." Here's an excerpt:

The town grew around us, and incorporated us, and became our familiar territory: Main Street with its plank sidewalks, its drug and grocery and hardware stores, its pastime theatre, its lumberyard, its hotel and bank; Millionaire Row with its four our five bungalows with sweetpeas and nasturtiums in their yards; poverty flat where the two Chinese and metis had shacks (7).

Weather, flora, fauna, era, music, etc.

Reissenweber advises, "Not all stories demand that extensive attention to setting, but all writers need to be aware of how integral place is to the human experience. We don’t just notice a place when we first see it and then forget about it entirely. Setting surrounds us, influences us, and we interact with it constantly. The same relationship should be true of our characters and their settings."

Morrison intertwines the setting with the movement in an essay about a family fishing trip. Stegner builds an entire narrative on the complex setting of a town that is a central character in his story. Both writers create momentum in different ways. In a more recent work, Katherine Boo constructs her setting in the prologue of her 2012 book, Beyond the Beautiful Forevers, a nonfiction narrative about a family living in a Mumbai slum. First, however, she creates an urgency that requires an understanding of the setting. Here's her opening sentence: "Midnight was closing in, the one-legged woman was grievously burned, and the Mumbai police were coming for Abdul and his father" (7).

Clearly, she has not begun the story at the beginning--see the notes on playing with narrative structure in Chapter 5--but she has opened with a powerful chunk of information that requires telling the reader what Abdul needs to do next. Here's how Boo gives us what we need to know in terms of setting just a couple of paragraphs later:

He cracked the door of the family Hut and looked out. His home sat midway down a row of hand-built spatchcock dwellings; the lopsided shed where he stowed his trash was just next door. To reach this shed unseen would deprive his neighbors of the pleasure of turning him in to the police. He didn't like the moon though: full and stupid bright, illuminating A dusty open lot in front of his home. Across the lot were the shacks of two dozen other families, and Abdul feared he wasn't the only person peering out from behind the cover of a plywood door. Some people in this slum wished his family ill because of the old Hindu Muslim resentments. Others resented his family for the modern reason, economic envy. Doing waste work that many Indians found contemptible, Abdul had lifted his large family above subsistence.

The open lot was quiet, at least—freakishly so. A kind of beachfront for a vast pool of sewage that marked the slums eastern border, the place was bedlam most nights: people fighting, cooking, flirting, bathing, tending goats, playing cricket, waiting for water at a public tap, lining up outside a little brothel, or sleeping off the effects of the grave-digging liquor dispensed from a hut two doors down from Abdul’s own. The pressures that build up in crowded huts on narrow slum lanes had only this place, the maidan, to escape...

Now, among the feral pigs, water buffalo, and the usual belly down splay of alcoholics, there seemed to be just one watchful presence: a small, unspeakable boy from Nepal… (7)

The gravity of the moment is enhanced by the fragility of the setting, the easily-toppled structures and relationships, and the "stupid bright" moon. The journalistic questions are answered within the first three hundred words, and the next 164 pages create millions of dimensions upon each answer as the story evolves.

Audience

When writing in a classroom, you have a decent concept of your audience. You certainly know who is giving the grade. Whether you keep your prose to the classroom or submit it for a larger audience, a crucial ethical consideration is not to convey hate. You lose your audience immediately. Remember them and respect them.

Word choice and inner dialogue can land anywhere on a broad spectrum between connecting with a reader and alienating a reader. Granted, everyone who looks at your words, including the person assessing them for a grade, will see the message through their own lense of life experience. William Zinsser advises, “Don’t try to visualize the great mass audience. There is no such audience—every reader is a different person.” Do, however, write with compassion. Watch for hasty generalizations; watch for objectifying or reducing humans or populations. You can write authentically while still rendering yourself readable and gaining the trust of your audience.

Ethical Considerations

Truth, a concept that seems so concrete when we’re younger, gets wobbly as we grow and share experiences with others. New York Times writer Megan O’Grady says this about our process of true storytelling: “The tenuous relationship between memory and imagination, once seen as a failing of the genre, becomes a kind of asset in this light: It takes not only truth but vision to counter our culture’s received ideas, to invent ourselves in our own way, on our own terms, against what Hartman calls ‘the silence in the archives.’”

O’Grady observes the fluid nature of truth based on the lens through which an event is viewed. “The fantasy that you can say something so perfectly and with such absolute authority that it never needs another version told from another point of view, as my grandfather might have believed, is long over.” As you dip your mind and hands into this genre, be ready for the inevitability of clashing memories. If even one other human is part of your story, the odds are strong that the other human remembers the events differently, anywhere on a spectrum from, “That never happened!” to, “That happened, but the horse was named Flynn, and your brother didn’t shoot you with the bb gun on purpose.”

When an audience reads nonfiction, they expect truth, notes Bruce Ballenger in his book, Crafting Truth. “We expect that the events that are described actually happened and that the writers’ responses to these events are honest.” Ballenger addresses the struggle of writing truth by introducing a spectrum of how the writer might get some aspect of the narrative wrong in the process of storytelling. He calls this “A Continuum of Lies,” and advises the writer to decide where to draw the line on this continuum if we want to call our writing nonfiction. Here are Ballenger’s “lies,” listed in order of incongruity:

• Failure to remember a detail accurately
• Reconstructing dialogue
• Purposefully changing a detail
• Creating a composite character
• Making up something that didn’t happen

Ballenger offers peace to the writer of nonfiction, suggesting that authors are “certainly interested in getting at the emotional truth of things, a deeply subjective and deeply personal perspective of things remembered that may transform them into scenes few others who were there might recognize” (4). The writer, he says, must make decisions throughout the creative process in terms of where to land on the continuum.

If I’m retelling the story of the time I hiked around Crater Lake in Oregon and I want to offer the detail of what species of trees grew along the rim of the lake, I will do a quick web search of common species of trees around Crater Lake so I can add that detail (see Natalie Goldberg’s advice on giving things the “dignity of their names” in a later chapter). At the moment I grabbed one of those trees to keep from sliding down the slate and into the icy lake, I didn’t say to myself, “I’m grabbing this Whitebark Pine.” I probably just thought, Holy Crap, don’t slide into the glacial lake, you idiot. A little research tells me that, based on the area of the lake in which I was hiking, the hardy little tree that saved me was probably Whitebark Pine. I may have it wrong. The tree may have been a cedar. That’s OK with me. You, as a writer, will need to make those decisions at every turn in your journey of composing a story from memory.

The same goes with each of Ballenger’s “lies,” possibly until the last and most grisly on the list. If I want to paint a vivid picture of the last conversation I had with my older sister before she ran away from home when we were teenagers, I will probably not get the words exactly right since that happened in 1987. Will I get the emotional truth? From my viewpoint, yes. If I want to paint a picture with words describing the group of church ladies who descended upon my mother to help her after a grueling surgery when I was a little girl, can I create a composite character illustrating types of perfume, hairspray, and gigantic purses? That will be a decision I need to make in order to illustrate an emotional truth from that era. If I write that one of the church ladies smoked a joint in the back yard while listening to Led Zepplin, I have crossed a line, because that didn’t happen. Well, actually…that totally happened, but much later, and it wasn’t a church lady. It was a neighborhood buddy of my brothers’…and a different story altogether.

Lee Gutkind, editor of the seminal magazine Creative Nonfiction, says this about the ethics of telling true stories:

There are very few rules for writers of creative nonfiction. You can predict the future, speculate about the past, or imagine what could have happened or what someone might have been thinking, as long as you don’t violate the reader’s trust, and in the process your own credibility. There are, however, limits to the freedom and flexibility that make creative nonfiction so attractive and compelling—legal, ethical, and moral issues that are challenging and, in many ways, impossible to clearly define. Freedom and flexibility—and daring—are governed by responsibility, not just to the people about whom we write, but to those who read and publish our work.

So, tell your truth. Do your best. Don’t make up events. Recognize and make peace with the reality that others will recall the story differently. Tell your truth anyway. Remember O’Grady’s observation that “Memory is also identity, and…seizing control of one’s narrative has a particular power.”

“Memory is a river. Memory is a pebble at the bottom of the river, slippery with the moss of our living hours. Memory is a tributary, a brackish stream returning to the ocean that dreamt it. Memory is the sea. Memory is the house on the sand with a red door I have stepped through, trying to remember the history of the waves.

In telling this story, I have followed my river all the way down to the sea, treading as closely as I could to my memory of the people, places, and events that shaped my life…May each of you find your way back to the water.” ―Safiya Sinclair, Author’s Note, How to Say Babylon