There are fliers posted in my building to advertise a course entitled "Introduction to Creative Nonfiction." The course description consists of nothing but a series of loosely-connected quotes from writers whom I don't recognize. I had to look it up.
Now I know what "creative nonfiction" is. It is nonfiction writing, but the quotes on the flier express the sentiment that writing nonfiction doesn't mean the author needs to write things that are true. Do our undergraduates, who have only a tenuous grasp on truth and how to express their ideas accurately and concisely, really need more confusion? Introduced on purpose?
Tuesday, June 30, 2009
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19 comments:
Isn't that a euphemism for "marketing?"
This is a bad idea.
Or for what a lot of us bloggers do, supposedly. And a whole lot of writers of all sorts of popular media.
What I don't get: why do we need to append "creative" to the non-fiction title? It implies that science writing isn't creative, that research writing isn't creative, and so forth. But all that stuff takes loads of creativity and thought.
Oh, so it's a journalism class. Or what passes for journalism these days.
I'm just a dumb scientist. WTF is "Creative Non-fiction" Writing what the people should have said and done like a story about the last cruise of the Thresher?
Google suggests that the term is a self-promotional marketing effort by one man.
Angry Prof, I'd be curious to read some of those quotes....
I know what literary nonfiction is. Like John McPhee, or Mark Kurlansky. I love their work. Is that the kind of thing they mean?
I sincerely hope that they meant nonfiction writing that was done in an interesting way, like a book on Sumo that I read that was totally nonfiction but used many aspects of novel writing. It was fascinating and accurate, and I still have no interest in sumo, but I would reread that book just for entertainment.
I would be interested to read some of those quotations, too.
Having taught that strange beast that's sometimes called "Creative Nonfiction" (and used the Gutkind anthology Vance links to) (also, Hi Vance!), I can set your minds at ease: it's just literary journalism, i.e. stuff like John McPhee's Annals of the Former World, Joan Didion's Slouching Toward Bethlehem, &c. In other words, it's reportage structured into narratives, like the stuff you find in The New Yorker.
It's also personal essays. As for the truth factor, think S. J. Perelman, for example, who wrote screamingly funny vignettes about his travels abroad, or _Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas_, of which I doubt every word is true but which recounts a real journey.
There's room in the genre of memoir, too, for the poetic truth when writing of one's internal experience.
I was teaching a graduate level class in Editing a while ago, and one of the students refused on principle to do the presentation for the exam....which was to create a style guide [a set of justified rules for shaping content in a journal, website, or other publication -- what heading styles, what editorial choices, what fonts, what organizational principles... Setting the style and editorial policies for a publication is a pretty complex task]. He said he rejected the assignment because it was 'too restrictive' -- He was going to write creative non-fiction and so this task wasn't 'relevant' to him.
Granted, I should have just thanked him for saving me the work of grading his performance and let him fail immediately. But I wanted to know how he would even know whether he was writing 'creative non-fiction' without some stylistic boundaries [which then could have become the basis for a style guide].
I asked him to define 'creative non-fiction'. He said it defied a pat definition. I asked him how he would know if he was doing it or not. If I wrote a newspaper article, would that count?
He rambled on about 'authenticity', stories that 'illustrated greater truths' without necessarily describing exactly what happened in a given situation.
But in that case, I asked, what distinguished 'creative non-fiction' from 'making things up to suit your personal vision of events'? Why not write a novel?
Then I asked him how he was going to know which journals to send his writing to: how would he know which of the thousands of possible publications, small presses, or other venues would be likely to accept his prose? If you don't know when you're accomplishing a task, and you don't know how to evaluate it, how is this system supposed to work?
I know I was giving him a hard time, and the students in the class were amazed that I didn't just dismiss him from the classroom and be done with it. Some students tried asking my questions in different ways, but each got back a defiant sort of ignorance that really confirmed my decision to flunk him on the exam.
I know there _are_ ways to talk about the creative non-fiction productively. But if you've taken an advanced course in Editing and you can't articulate a rationale for your choices, you don't get to pass....
[sigh]
Rethoryk's student sounds just like the ones enrolled in art courses who refuse to work at draftsmanship or technique and say they want to do "Modern Art," having no idea what they are talking about.
Wonder if "creative nonfiction" includes anything based on a true story? My ow novel has taken that turn. Hmm.
I've been teaching CNF for a number of years, though we used to call it literary journalism. For me, when talking to folks who have never heard of it, I just suggest that a news story in a newspaper is likely journalism. A feature article in a magazine - about the same topic, events, people - is likely CNF. I've heard it said that CNF writers use some of the techniques of novelists to tell a true story. Memoir falls under CNF, as well, and we are certainly living in a rich time for memoirists.
I've taught the class to sophomores up to grad students, and find that sophomores don't have any problem recognizing that the truth or actuality is still important.
"Creative nonfiction" does make it sound as though you're playing fast and loose with the facts. It's really a personal essay. I don't know if I'd call the insights that (hopefully) come out of this genre "greater truths," but they're much more subjective, and not the sort of thing that you would exhaustively document in Chicago style. (One of the many things *The Waste Land* does is to aptly satirize what would happen if a Modernist poet were simply to source all the ideas running through his mind during the act of writing.) Doesn't excuse Rethoryk's student from learning how to write and document scholarly articles, though. Seems to me that would be a prerequisite.
But Anonymous, do the grad students?
Disclaimer: I am a grad student at a relatively prestigious school ;)
Amen to Anonymous 9:01 AM.
I too have taught creative nonfiction to undergrads -- who themselves understand perfectly well that the writer's "contract" with the reader is that the piece is essentially factual, although some bits -- a reconstructed conversation from childhood, for instance -- might be fictional in the strict sense.
After years of writing expository essays and papers, some students enjoy stretching their wings a bit.
Anyone who has ever had to write a "root cause" email to a client after a major systems crash knows exactly what creative non-fiction is.
Oh, most of my students don't even know the difference between fiction and nonfiction.
Of course, many of them cannot grasp what those silly quotation marks are used for in research papers, so my sample might be skewed.
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