What Is Creative Non-Fiction, Exactly? Episode 1: Defining Our Terms

This month, I’m posting a series of mini-lectures on creative non-fiction—today, an overview of the genre, for anyone who’s ever asked: What is CNF, exactly? I'm a creative non-fiction writer myself—a label that can include the creation of "memoir" and the "personal essay"—but really, it all falls under the umbrella of creative non-fiction (CNF): taking the material in our real lives and in our physical world, and examining them through the lens of a creative writer. Though we CNF writers are describing what's "real" and "true," what "actually happened" and what "we know," we also harness the tools of fiction and poetry - including character, scene, dialogue, imagery, and metaphor, to name a few - to explore the tangible, visceral, "real" world we inhabit right now. 

What’s In a Name? 

When it comes to labels, I'm pretty flexible. To me, what matters most is that we feel free to write about the world we live in - from almost any angle we choose. That can mean a lot of things: Perhaps you want to explore one facet of your life more deeply - you want to examine your connection to a particular religion, maybe, or your relationship to the natural world, or your career, or a member of your family. Maybe you want to trace a certain story - a story you've been told, one that's been passed down, maybe one that you've only heard parts of, but always wondered about. It's easy to go down a rabbit hole of terms, labels, and arguments for or against every conceivable name, but the point is, you're writing from life, and you're acknowledging that it's not "made up"—not fiction.

Maybe you've travelled before - to another country, another state, another town, and you want to write about that. Heck, maybe you've travelled the rocky road of adolescence, and you want to explore those memories in your writing. Perhaps there's a relationship - past or present - that you've been wanting to write about - or maybe there's someone you've been wanting to write to, in letter form - someone you've known, someone you've never met, someone you've heard about all your life. Ta-Nehisi Coates does this in his 2017 book, "Between the World and Me," published as a letter to his young son. That's CNF. It's memoir, in my opinion, and it's personal essay, too - Coates writes from his own life out. 

The point is, so many topics are valid where CNF is concerned, and any experience, large or small, can take a unique form and still be memoir, or an essay, or CNF. What's been catching your eye these days? What's been caught up in your mind? What have you been dreaming about at night? What stories did you file ago years ago, swearing to yourself you'd write them down someday? Why are you here? 

 

Maybe you've got a specific goal where your writing is concerned: You want to work on essays for a collection you envision. You've got a subject you're dying to flesh out in writing. You've got a style that you've honed and evolved, and you want to take it to the next level - all fine! And, maybe you haven't written in years. Maybe you have no idea how the heck you got here, to this page, to this blog tucked away at the corner of the Internet. Maybe you're just curious, and you're thinking, "Eh, why not." 

Or, maybe you're extremely skeptical, because the term "memoir" has gotten a bad reputation over the years - some critics say it's a way to self-glorify an experience, or extort personal trauma for the sake of a story. As Timothy Goodman writes in the New York Times, "There was a time when you had to earn the right to draft a memoir, by accomplishing something noteworthy or having an extremely unusual experience...But then came our current age of oversharing, and all heck broke loose." 

Of course, I wholeheartedly disagree with these comments, but they're pervasive. I believe you stumbled onto this page because deep down, you know you've got a story to tell - at least one. You somehow understand the value of the personal experience. Zachary Watterson writes personal essays "to capture a brief period of time in my life that haunts me even now." When Tova Stulman published an essay which discussed covering and then uncovering her hair during her marriage, she "discovered the value of the personal essay. I gave voice to [my readers'] experience and, subsequently, lessened the loneliness they felt. The experience confirmed for me that all of us have doubts, secrets, and inner turmoil about things most frequently left unsaid." And the poet and essayist Robert Vivian writes, "Each essay we read is as close as we can get to another mind. It is a simulation of the mind working its way through a problem." There's plenty of reason to write from the first-person "I" - to educate and inform, to celebrate and acknowledge, to learn, to teach, to heal. I fully believe that writing has deep value even if it's never published, because the process is often the most important part. 

Wherever you are as a writer, you're here now.