Week 6
Readings:
Write Moves: A Creative Writing Guide and Anthology:
Grammar: The Dash and Parentheses
This Lecture Will Cover:
Introduction:
In this lecture, we will look at writing creative nonfiction, adding to the material from the textbook, and then we will turn to the grammar for the week.
We will start by looking at the range of creative nonfiction. The examples in the textbook chapter on creative nonfiction and in the anthology at the end of the textbook are very good, but they are generally quite serious and somber in tone and subject-matter. Creative nonfiction is as diverse in tone and subject-matter as fiction. So, we will start by broadening our sense of what creative nonfiction is and can be.
After this, we will look at your responsibilities when writing creative nonfiction. You are writing about real people and real events, and that means that you need to think carefully about what your responsibilities and obligations are. We will break these responsibilities into Legal, Ethical, and Social responsibilities, and look at each in turn.
We will then look at truth in the context of creative nonfiction. As writers of creative nonfiction, we have an obligation to be truthful, but this is a bit more complicated than it may initially seem. What is true differs from person to person, and our ability to give an accurate account of an event may be hampered by any number of factors, including a faulty or incomplete memory. We will look at how to understand truth in the context of creative nonfiction, and then cover a series of strategies for dealing with situations in which your access to the events you are writing about is limited or uncertain.
Finally, we will close our discussion of creative nonfiction by reminding ourselves that, like other forms of writing, it is for an audience. This is a crucial lesson to keep in mind. When writing creative nonfiction, we tend to foreground ourselves and our own experiences, and, if we want to do this without turning our writing into an exercise in narcissism, we need to remind ourselves that creative nonfiction is written about us, but for others.
We will end the lecture by looking at dashes and parentheses. First, we’ll look at how to use both to insert material into sentences, and at their differing effects. Second, we will look at how to use the dash to add material to a sentence that involves a twist or turn.
The Range of Creative Nonfiction:
Your textbook gives you excellent advice on how to approach writing creative nonfiction, and its recommendation that you look at small meaningful moments is particularly useful advice for approaching the Flash Creative Nonfiction assignment, where you are working with a limited number of words. The examples in the anthology at the end of the textbook are excellent, but they tend to deal with traumatic events with emotionally profound and often quite difficult subject matter. The reality is that much creative nonfiction does deal with this kind of material. However, not all of it does.
Creative nonfiction can be and is as diverse as fiction. It can be emotionally profound, but it can also be light, funny, weird, quirky, thoughtful, intellectual, etc. The textbook contains a story by David Sedaris. Although Sedaris does write fiction, he is most famous for his creative nonfiction, for essays that are touching and meaningful, but that are, most importantly, very funny. One of the more significant genres of creative nonfiction is travel writing. Travel authors often focus on how they negotiated their understanding of new places, of new people, and different ways of seeing the world. These are just a few of the many possibilities open to you when writing creative nonfiction.
So, when approaching your Flash Creative Nonfiction assignment, feel free to write about emotionally profound subject-matter, but recognize that is one of many different approaches to creative nonfiction, and you can be just as successful writing funny creative nonfiction as you can be exploring deeply personal experiences.
If you do choose to write about something that is deeply personal, it is important to keep in mind that your assignment will be workshopped by your peers and graded by your instructor. So, only choose to write about experiences that you are comfortable having looked at and evaluated in these ways. As we will see later in this lecture, one of the keys to effective creative nonfiction is establishing some distance between yourself and the experience that you are writing about. If you aren’t comfortable sharing an experience in the context of a workshopping group or having it looked at by an instructor, that is often a good sign that you should set that experience aside and return to it later.
Creative Nonfiction and Responsibility:
Last week, we looked at the kinds of responsibilities you have as a writer of fiction. We explored the potential negative impacts of telling stories that are not yours to tell. Just like fiction, creative nonfiction comes with a set of responsibilities that you need to keep in mind when writing.
This is pretty obvious, and most people have an intuitive understanding of these responsibilities. Creative nonfiction is about you, and it foregrounds your experiences. However, as the saying goes, “no one is an island”: creative nonfiction is also inevitably about all of the people who partake in your story. As a writer, you are accountable to those people, and responsible for writing about your story—which is also their story—as accurately as possible.
We are going to start with the legal responsibilities that you have. When you write about real people, you can be held legally accountable for what you say, and it is important to understand at least a little bit about how libel and defamation law works in Canada. We’ll then look at your ethical responsibilities. Just because you are legally permitted to write something doesn’t mean that you should, and just because something is true doesn’t mean that it is something that you should share publicly. Finally, we’ll look at your social responsibilities. Just because you are legally permitted to write something and it is ethical to do so does not mean that the people you are writing about will like it. One of the most important things that you need to think about is the impact of what you are writing on your relationships with the people about whom you are writing.
Legal Responsibilities:
It is worth noting that if you are simply writing a creative nonfiction story for yourself or sharing it privately among peers in a confidential classroom setting, you will not have to worry about this aspect. If you plan to publish it or share it in any public setting, then it is a very important consideration.
On paper, Canada’s libel and defamation laws look relatively permissive, but, in practice, that is not always the case. The reality is that, if you publish something about a person or organization, such as a corporation, you need to be prepared to prove in a court of law that what you wrote is true. This may seem extremely limiting, but the reality is that this only really matters if you are writing something that people care enough about to sue you for writing. A lot of creative nonfiction is simply not about the kinds of things that become the subject of lawsuits.
However, some of it is, and, if you are writing about this kind of subject matter, you need to think carefully about what you write. For example, a number of Canadian writers have written personal essays about their experiences of sexual assault. This is a difficult but important topic, and one with clear legal implications. Before they are published, these essays are often reviewed by a lawyer who removes identifying information, making the perpetrator anonymous. This is not to protect the perpetrator. This is to protect the writer. If there are no identifying details in the personal essay, then the perpetrator cannot sue the writer for libel. If you ever write a piece of creative nonfiction that either directly or by implication accuses a person or an organization of wrongdoing, this is the kind of thing that you need to think about.
If you ever plan to publish a piece of writing that you think could become the subject of a lawsuit, it is always best to seek legal advice. Even if you do get legal advice, and a lawyer vets what you have written, that does not mean that you will not be threatened with a lawsuit or sued. If there is no basis for a lawsuit, it will eventually be thrown out, but the only thing stopping a person or organization from launching a lawsuit is the cost of filing one. And, even if a lawsuit gets thrown out, the process of getting to that point can be stressful and expensive.
So, if you find yourself planning to publish something that could be the subject of a lawsuit, you need to ask yourself a few important questions: can you defend what you have written in a court of law? And, if you can, are you willing to go through the stressful and often expensive process of defending it?
This is not a very pleasant thing to think about, and most of us will never find ourselves in a situation where we will need to ask ourselves these kinds of questions, but it is an important dimension of writing and publishing some kinds of creative nonfiction. And it is important to be aware of the fact that the words we put down on the page may have legal implications and to be prepared to deal with those implications if the need arises (i.e., if it is published).
Ethical Responsibilities:
As I said at the beginning of this section of the lecture, sometimes you can legally say something, but you can’t ethically say it. The question is, what are the ethical limits of writing creative nonfiction?
To answer this question, we are going to look at it from two perspectives. First, we’ll pick up the ideas from last week, and consider whether a story is ours to tell. Second, we’ll look at how our writing can cause harm.
When we tell our own story, we also inevitably end up telling parts of other people’s stories. Look at Ivan E. Coyote’s “This, That and the Other Thing” (pg. 256). In this personal essay, they tell a story about food and cooking, but it is also the story of their relationship with their parents, their parents’ divorce, and their mother’s growing independence. If you paid careful attention to the story when you read it, you will know that running through the background of these stories is the story of their father’s alcoholism. On the one hand, that is very much Coyote’s father’s story. He is at the center of it and it belongs to him. On the other hand, it is Coyote’s story to tell because, as much as their father’s alcoholism is a personal struggle, it has impacted Coyote’s life. Because of the impact of his drinking on their life, they can write about it, but it is really only ethical for them to write about it to the extent that it has impacted their life, and that is what they do. They write about their father’s alcoholism from their perspective, from the perspective of someone it has touched, without violating their father’s right to own and tell his own story.
Just because someone’s life intersects with your own does not mean that you have the right to tell their story. Just as you do when planning to write a piece of fiction, if you are planning to write about someone in a piece of creative nonfiction, it is worth asking yourself, is this my story to tell? The answer is often that you can tell their story to the extent that it intersects with yours, to the extent that their story is a part of your story. When you reach past that, when you reach beyond the limits of your experience of another person, you are often, although not always, crossing an ethical boundary.
The other thing that you need to consider is that, even if something is ethically permissible for you to say, even if it is your story to tell, it can cause harm. Think about Brian Doyle’s “Leap” (pg. 264). The pair of people he writes about are anonymous, but what if they weren’t? What if we knew who they were? What if their families knew who they were? Would his speculation about the two people’s motivation be acceptable? It is honest. It is well intentioned. It is sensitive. But, even with all of that said, it might be enormously painful for members of the couple’s family to read the piece, and, out of respect for them and their loss, it could make a lot of sense not to write it.
This is the kind of question that you sometimes need to ask yourself when writing creative nonfiction: will telling his story hurt someone? And is telling it worth hurting them in this way? If the answer to the second question is “no,” that doesn’t necessarily mean that you can’t tell the story, but it does mean you need to find a different way to tell it.
Finally, it is worth pointing out that there is no room for gratuitous cruelty in creative nonfiction. Good creative nonfiction is about trying to understand events, not about settling scores. There is no room for writing creative nonfiction with a poison pen. In “An Insatiable Emptiness” (pg. 301), Evelyn Lau paints a quite unflattering portrait of her parents, particularly of her mother. However, it is not a gratuitously cruel piece because, although it is unflattering, it is a portrait of her mother that is grounded in empathy, in a desire to understand rather than to simply condemn her mother. If you find yourself writing in an overly critical mode, with excessive vitriol and viciousness, this generally means you are still too close to the experience. You most likely need to wait to gain more distance in order to focus on understanding rather than condemning.
Social Responsibilities:
Finally, although something might be legally and ethically appropriate to write, you have to consider the social impacts of what you plan on writing.
Let’s return to Evelyn Lau’s “An Insatiable Emptiness” (pg. 301). As I note above, her portrait of her mother is empathetic, but it is also a deeply unflattering portrait. What is an important context for this essay and for the portrait of her mother that it contains? Or, put more directly, what allows Lau to write about her mother in this way? As she explains in the essay, Lau has been estranged from her parents since she was 17. Whatever her mother thinks of this portrait of her—I can’t imagine that she would like it if she read it—Lau won’t have to contend with her reaction. This is not the case for most of us. If we write about the people in our lives, we can expect to hear what they think about what we have written.
It is important to remember that empathy and understanding are not always positive, especially when you are the person being described. Sometimes, there is nothing crueler than a mirror, and it is often the most honest portraits that are the most difficult to accept. Your job as a writer is to write about your chosen subject with all the honesty and clarity that you can muster (more on this shortly), and it is also your job to recognize that doing this can impact your relationships with the people that you write about. Some stories need to be told even if they damage our relationships, but it is also okay to accept that you can’t tell a story because the relationship at the heart of it is more important to you than telling the story.
Truth and Creative Nonfiction:
Thus far, we have been operating under the assumption that you have an obligation when writing creative nonfiction to be truthful. But what does that mean? There can be as many different interpretations of a single event as there are people involved, and, often, those interpretations contradict each other. To be responsible writers of creative nonfiction, we need to think about the nature of truth and what that means for our writing.
Let’s start with this: there is rarely an absolute TRUTH in interpreting factual events, but rather many lower cases truths of our various subjective experiences of a given event, moment, relationship, etc. And it is these versions, the lowercase truths that creative nonfiction focuses on.
This doesn’t mean that you can write whatever you want. It doesn’t give you liberty to lie or to be self-serving. Just because you are writing about a lowercase truth, just because you are writing your version of the truth doesn’t mean that you don’t have a responsibility to be as honest as possible. It simply means that your honest version of the truth might differ from someone else’s.
Your job as a writer of creative nonfiction is to be true to the experience that you are describing to the best of your ability. What does that mean? Most obviously, it means that you need to be honest. You need to tell your version of the truth even if that makes you uncomfortable. However, your responsibilities don’t stop there.
You have an obligation to check the facts. If you are writing about something that you can verify, you can’t just trust your memory. You need to check the objective record of events. Maybe you are writing about something that happened at a cottage your family rented one summer. It’s worth checking to see if that cottage is where you remember it being and if it looked like it does in your memory. You will often discover discrepancies between your memory and reality. These discrepancies can be negligible, but, sometimes, they can be significant, and a lot of creative nonfiction explores this disjunction between memory and reality.
If you have an obligation to check the facts, this means that you will sometimes have to do some research. You may need to dig into the archives at a library to find copies of old newspapers, or visit the locations you are writing about, or track down and interview people involved in the events that you are writing about.
Readers understand that writers and memory are fallible. They understand that you are presenting them with a lowercase truth, with a version of the truth, not with the absolute TRUTH of what happened. But readers expect that you make a good faith effort to make sure that your version of the truth is as accurate as possible and respects the objective facts of an event. If you make this good faith effort, then you don’t need to worry if you get a small detail wrong here or there. You have tried, you have done your best, and that counts for a lot.
What you absolutely must avoid is simply making things up. The textbook gives you the example of James Frey whose “memoir” A Million Little Pieces was fabricated, and, where it wasn’t fabricated, exaggerated. This sort of straightforward lying will, for obvious reasons, lose you your audience.
This should give you a sense of what we mean by truth when we talk about it in relation to creative nonfiction. What we are going to look at now are a few strategies for dealing with situations you might encounter when writing creative nonfiction.
Situation: You can’t remember, or your memory is hazy. Solution: This situation is more common than you might think. There are lots of reasons why the details of important, even life changing, events don’t stay with us. If you find yourself in a situation where you want to write about something, but your memory is hazy, incomplete, or nonexistent, you can write about your failure to remember accurately or at all. Chances are, if what you are writing about is important, digging into why you are struggling to remember will reveal something meaningful.
Situation: You are worried about identifying someone. Solution: Change their name and identifying details. If you do this, they might be able to see themselves in the work, but no one else will be able to. More importantly, this will protect you from a lawsuit. This is a relatively common practice. The one important thing that you must do is attach a note to the piece letting the reader know that the names and details of some of the people involved have been changed. If you do this, the reader knows that these details are manufactured, that there is a reason for it, and that you have preserved the core elements of the experience.
Situation: You are worried about being unreliable. Solution: This is just as common as not remembering something or remembering it incompletely. Your memory might be clear, but you might not entirely trust it. Parts of what you remember might contradict each other, or you may have discovered something that suggests that what you remember might not be the whole truth. The solution to this, especially if there isn’t any way to for you to confirm where your memory is correct or not, is to acknowledge and grapple with this unreliability. If you pay attention, you will see that a lot of creative nonfiction does this, and this means that, in one way or another, a lot of creative nonfiction is about the nature and fallibility of memory.
Notice that, at the core of each of these solutions, is being honest and forthright with the reader. If your memory is incomplete or you struggle to remember something, you share that with the reader. If you change the name and identifying details of someone in a piece, you tell the reader in order to reassure them that the core elements of the experience are preserved. If you are worried about being unreliable, you address and wrestle with your unreliability in your writing. This is really what truth boils down to in the context of creative nonfiction: showing the reader that you are putting in your best effort to convey the truth of your experience as you understand it.
About You, but for Others:
There is one final topic that we need to address before moving on to the grammar for the week: who is creative nonfiction for? Although creative nonfiction is always in one way or another about its author, it is written for an audience of readers. In other words, a piece of creative nonfiction is not a diary, it is not a rant, it is not an outpouring of unprocessed emotions.
All of these things have value. A diary, for example, is a great way to work out your feelings about your relationship to the world, and it may even be a great source of writing material, but it is fundamentally meant for you and you alone. To turn a diary entry into a piece of creative nonfiction, you need to rewrite it so that it has value for a larger audience.
Good creative nonfiction is about self-exploration, self-discovery, and self-examination. But instead of simply pouring an experience out onto the page, you will structure it and recreate it using literary tools such as scene, image, description, and voice—allowing readers to experience what you experienced for themselves. Good creative nonfiction should be immersive, urgent, and well-paced, like a good story.
It is also crucial to note that when you are writing creative nonfiction, you are still writing in a long literary tradition. Many authors have already written excellently about human experiences such as the death of a parent/grandparent, the suicide of a friend, fractured relationships, heartbreak, and so on. With so many personal essays already written on these topics, common/predictable/familiar ways of discussing them have emerged. That is why it is still possible to write in a cliché fashion about deeply personal experiences! If you want to be a writer of fresh and original creative nonfiction, you must also be a reader of creative nonfiction in order to learn how other authors have already approached these topics. This is also why it’s better to dig into the very specific details of your own experiences and relationships instead of speaking in broad generalizations about life, death, family, etc. The more specific and detailed you are about your subject, the more likely you will write about it in a fresh way.
Always remember that creative nonfiction is about you, but for others, and regularly remind yourself that you are producing something for an audience when writing it. Good creative nonfiction is always well-crafted writing!
Dashes and Parentheses:
Your grammar readings for the week cover dashes and parentheses. First, we are going to look at how to use dashes and parentheses to insert interrupters into sentences. Second, we are going to look at how to use dashes to introduce material.
Let’s start by looking at how to use dashes and parentheses to insert material into sentences. Although both are used to insert material, there is a key distinction between how they do this: dashes emphasize these interruptions, highlighting them as significant; and parentheses deemphasize them, including the material, but de-emphasizing its importance. The best way to understand how these two grammatical markers work and what we can do with them is to look at some of the examples of their use in this week’s readings.
In “This, That and the Other Thing” (pg. 256), Ivan E. Coyote uses dashes to insert a description of themselves into the middle of a sentence. Here is the sentence:
Notice how the dashes work to highlight the text between them. They make it stand out in the sentences. Notice also the importance of this text. It gives us a sense of the speaker, of their strength and determination. Now, notice how putting this material in parentheses changes the sentence:
When placed in parentheses, this is much more of an aside. The parentheses suggest that, although you shouldn’t skip it, you could if you wanted to, and it wouldn’t matter if you did.
This is a subtle difference, but an important one. Dashes and parentheses both allow us to insert material into the middle of a sentence, but they do so to very different effects.
Let’s look at another example. There are a series of sentences from later on in the same essay:
Now, let’s see what happens when we replace the parentheses with dashes:
Pour the sauce base and onions into the large pot, add the chicken, the potatoes, a whole whack of sliced mushrooms, zucchinis, squash maybe sometimes, carrots, and a can of chick peas—I myself never have time to soak the little fuckers—add a few more cups of stock and stir, like a cauldron, thinking always of your mother, even if she’s not a Mexican and doesn’t like to cook really, and simmer, adding more stock as you boil it off.
Notice how this foregrounds the material. If you look at this passage, your eyes are immediately drawn to the material between the dashes in way that they aren’t in the original. Because the material in the dashes contains a swear word, and swear words tend to stand out, this means that the material dominates the page in a way that it didn’t when it was in parentheses. The effect doesn’t help the passage, and you should be able to see why Coyote used parentheses instead of dashes.
The Canadian Writer’s Handbook walks you through several other uses of the dash, and one of them is of particular value to writers. The dash, it explains, can be used to introduce material that is surprising, that involves some sort of twist, or, at least, a contrary idea. This makes the dash particularly well suited to dramatic moments and reveals.
To get a sense of how to use the dash in this way, let’s look at the opening paragraph of Brian Doyle’s short essay “Leap” (pg. 264). Here is the original:
There are no dashes in this paragraph, but there are definitely some twists, and we can ramp up the drama of those twists by adding dashes:
The original passage works in part because of the contrast between the understated prose and extraordinary events it is describing. So, these dashes aren’t an improvement. However, you should be able to see how they highlight the swerves the passage makes. When you read “A couple leaped from the south tower,” you don’t necessarily expect “hand in hand” after the dash that now separates these two elements. Notice also how the dashes added to the second sentence increase the drama of the sentence, turning each new element into a reveal.
So, you can use dashes and parentheses to insert material into sentences, but dashes emphasize this material while parentheses de-emphasize it. You can also use dashes to introduce material that involves a twist or a surprise. The important thing to keep in mind when you do this is that, as with any kind of dramatic gesture, it is easy to overdo it.
· Look at your Flash Creative Nonfiction piece from the perspective of our discussion of truth and responsibility: o How are you handling truth? Are you being true to the experience? If you have any uncertainty about what you are writing about, how are you addressing that? How do you think the people who you are writing about will respond to the piece? Are you being fair to them?
· Look at your Flash Creative Nonfiction piece and ask yourself who it is for: o Is it too close to a diary entry? Or have you adapted your material to an audience? Is it well-structured and well-crafted, using literary tools such as images, sensory description, scene, and a distinct voice? Does it include specific details of your experience and avoid broad generalizations? Does it avoid cliché phrasing?