Fact Vs Creative Nonfiction

This week I am exploring that most tricksy of genres – Creative Nonfiction

The definition itself seems to be contradictory. If fiction is made up, does that mean that nonfiction must always be true?  What is the extent of the writer’s ‘creative license’ and how to you measure it? What is the tipping point for something that is ‘based on a true story’ to become fiction rather that creative nonfiction?

In short how much creative fiction can you cram into creative nonfiction before it isn’t nonfiction anymore?

Sorry – I don’t have the answers to any of those questions.

But let’s start with what I do know.

In an increasingly congested market, nonfiction writers need to make their stories come alive to attract readers. Embedding the factual stories in a familiar fictional framework makes these works more accessible to a broader audience.

There is an inherent gravitas assigned to creative nonfiction. This idea of ‘narrative truth’ however creatively wrapped, suggests an authorial intimacy that the reader cannot ignore. Stripped of the perceived artifice of a novel, a reader might rightly assume that they can hear the writer’s voice more clearly.

Nonfiction is not necessarily fact. Factual texts in their purest form are instruction manuals. Much like a recipe, you are told the facts in a specific order of importance and these serve to inform you of things you did not know before. These texts have corroborated their facts from multiple sources to give you the best version of the truth.

Memoirs, commentary, essays, travelogues are all creative nonfiction in as much that they include factual information but not necessarily for scholarly purposes. This blog could be considered creative nonfiction.

Creative nonfiction is much like fiction. It can have fully realised characters, a story driven by a credible plot, action that rises and falls and a satisfactory ending. What makes this different to factual writing is not all the elements need to be completely true. As a writer you are free to blur the edges of your characters, locations and plot points in service of the main story (much like you would in any novel).

Still, within any creative nonfiction work there must be an element of truth. That is not to say that fiction doesn’t need an element of truth to be credible but I feel that the driving incident or event, has to have actually happened and been observed by the author (which again gives rise to that notion of authorial intimacy) in order for it to be truly in this genre.

And what about me?

I took a brief foray into this genre in the first year of the MA. Using notes taken during my father’s illness and our journey to return his ashes to India, I wrapped some broader themes into the story about my sense of belonging and what it means to return home. Throughout I had to challenge my thinking; to determine what needed to be fact and what could ultimately be fiction, while at the same time remaining firmly grounded in the truth. The use of scenes and dialogues, flashback and ‘perhapsing’ elevated the memoir beyond that which I recorded in my notebooks and changed how I approach my research and observational writing. You can read it here.

If you are a fiction writer, I encourage you to try it.

References

If you want the creative nonfiction equivalent of Stephen King’s On Writing, try

You Can’t Make This Stuff Up, The Complete Guide to Writing Creative Nonfiction — from Memoir to Literary Journalism and Everything in Between (Gutkind, L 2012)

Bending Genre: Essays on Creative Nonfiction (Singer, M and Walker, N, 2^nd edition, 2023) is also excellent at reframing the questions around what this genre is (or could be).