Taking Risks In Creative Non-Fiction: Episode 2—What Do We Put On The Line When We Write?

This week, I want to explore the idea of taking "risks" in creative non-fiction - and this post is dedicated to my friend and fellow writer, Marylou Butler. Marylou passed on, but her writing is something I think about all the time - that and her risk-taking spirit. Marylou, a former SFCC student of mine - and a friend to some of us here - went courageous places with her writing, never feeling afraid to look silly, get lost, try something that wouldn't work out, or over-revise. 

Her writing has been published (here's one selection for you to peruse!), but that's not why she wrote - she did it for the love of the process, and into the final days of her life, writing was an adventure for Marylou, a wild ride that she knew could take her anywhere. 

It pays to spend some time thinking about the risks you've taken in your own writing. Ask yourself: What does it mean to take a risk? Creative non-fiction is a risky genre for many reasons. We make ourselves vulnerable, for one, in a way, some might say, that other writers, like novelists and poets, don't. Their material isn't explicitly about their own lives, after all - although I believe all writing is deeply informed by our own experiences. 

Good writing, as most of us know, is often that in which narrators makes themselves vulnerable - they share, they probe, they dig deep, they proffer up what they've held back, hidden, kept down. And this is risky. Creative non-fiction writers also harvest their own experiences in ways that could hurt other people. The fact is, all writers hold within them the ability to offend, to do unintentional harm, to say the wrong thing. My writing mentor, Philip Graham, wrote about his parents - their characters thinly veiled in a novel - and his relationship with his folks was irrevocably damaged afterwards. We risk injuring our friends, our family members, and our loved ones when they read what we've written and don't like it, or don't like the way we've portrayed them, or don't realize we thought the way we did about something important to them. Writing is risky in this way, too, and many writers simply avoid loaded topics altogether - their parents, their siblings, their childhood, their broken relationships - because of this very reason. 

 But to me, the riskiest part of writing is where we can take ourselves. Sometimes, we don't want to travel down certain roads. We're afraid of "going back," of being forced to remember and reflect. Writing about something you fear can be risky. Writing has this funny way of teaching things us we didn't know we knew about ourselves - sometimes unflattering things - and of showing us the past - and the present - through lenses we hadn't considered or examined before. It can hurt to revisit a painful relationship or a loss, for example - and sometimes, it's hard to shake those old feelings, those memories and triggers once we let them back in. "Risk" means something different, I suspect, to every writer. For some writers, the act of writing means risking one's life - quite literally. For others, risk means trying a new form, something that's never worked before. It means revising something with gusto, and "killing your darlings" as you go - cutting that which you love for the sake of the work. 

The question today is this: What does risk in writing mean to you?