What is Creative Nonfiction?

Writing is service.

That is to say, a writer's duty is to bend herself toward building human wellness on every level: individual, interpersonal, local, societal, and global. This is the potential that lies within creative nonfiction: to draw from the wellsprings of the personal in order to illuminate the inner workings of the systemic. And the primary tool of nonfiction: truth.

Before we can come to understand truth, we must be able to recognize its three servants.

First, nondualism: the partner of language is silence. Therefore, a writer must learn to wield both simultaneously. Reality is seamless, yet language is discrete. The attempt to communicate truth takes the writer to the edge of language. There, one finds a range of options. At one extreme lie detail and literal precision. At the other, metaphor, multilingualism and polyvocality, sensory details, vernacular, juxtaposition, half-words and half-sentences, experiments with form, and good oldfashioned silence.

Silence is important not only within text, but also within the writer as human observer. To tell the truth one must be able to perceive the truth, which requires, firstly, participation in life, and secondly, listening with all the senses – physical, emotional, spiritual, and intuitive. The practice of silence (for example, through meditation) is indispensable. Additionally, in order to write readably, one must be aware of one's audience – in other words, the writer should listen to the reader even in the act of writing. This is another form of silence.

Second, context: The writer is a human with a specific identity in a particular context. The topic of any piece of writing also exists within its context. My training is in anthropology: without context there is no truth. One of the great strengths of creative nonfiction is that it makes context explicit – it prioritizes the observer and the observation equally, and it recognizes that they are inseparable. Other fields are currently struggling to break down the power hierarchy of “subject” (the researcher) and “object” (the person or population under study). The proper relationship of subject and object is already native to creative nonfiction, in which it is axiomatic that the observer acknowledges his/her subjectivity and is a visible, invested participant in the milieu that is described in the text, while the other participants in the milieu are very often among the text's audience.

Third, insight: This quality is nearly indivisible. Either it is present in a text, or it is not. Insight is one of the great pleasures of writing nonfiction: the precious moment of epiphany, and then the thrill of communicating epiphany to others so that it multiplies within them. Additionally, by manifesting insight in textual form, we take part in the human endeavor of creating a corpus of wisdom that has its own independent existence, spreading through space and time, predating each of us and outlasting each of us. Living with awareness is a form of qualitative research; writing down insight is a way of participating in knowledge production.

Truth, then, is reliant on nondualism, context, and insight. Truth in writing means naming reality through language (and through the judicious use of silence).

One of the great cultural sicknesses of our era is the centralization of narrative. As distances gradually collapse due to the development of transportation and communication technologies, we increasingly apply a single set of norms and assumptions to an ever larger, more diverse population. What Clear Channel does to sterilize the radiowaves, and what big-box stores do to homogenize the suburban landscape, is also occurring on the level of narrative. The vaster the population within a given cultural narrative, the more nondescript and generic the narrative, and the less it resembles human experience (any human experience, even the experience of the most privileged). Therefore, now more than ever, it is essential to tell specific truths, to make visible the experience of individuals, as well as the experiences of communities which are not reflected in the master narrative. In this way, text can break silences – or, perhaps more importantly, it can break through meaningless noise. On the level of the family, or the institution, or the culture, or the world, writing must talk back to “common knowledge” when “common knowledge” is designed to benefit the powerful, while appearing innocent, natural, and inevitable. Naming the problem of power, naming the experiences that are not supposed to exist: these are the essential first steps toward human wellness.