8. My Manifesto
***This is work from an 8-part series (Truth, Lies & Bullshit in the Art of Creative Nonfiction): Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Works Cited (includes intro and sections).***
All of this information is good for categorizing and developing short elevator speeches for describing what we do as creative nonfiction writers when we are talking with Aunt Ellen at the family reunion. But it does little to help me as an artist, as I go about making my own decisions surrounding my work. I cannot deny the temptation late some nights when my own story bores me and I am signaled that something in my writing has gone awry. Some stories, like arguments with old lovers and last words to dying relatives, beg for more entertainment, more profound insight than I remember ever occurring. When I am the only survivor or originator of my truth, desperation helps me have some compassion for those not so truthful choices of James Frey and the rest of the bullshitters and liars in the creative nonfiction field. However, I am quite clear that my art would suffer.
As a creative nonfiction writer, my art is not only those grammatical and stylistic guidelines sent forth from Strunk & White, or modeled after Joan Didion or Virginia Woolf. My art is also in the courage I find to display — and truly live — an intimately displayed life. All the talk and debates and rules surrounding truth in nonfiction rarely speaks of the emotion and vulnerability behind this brand of art. If I write about molestation or domestic violence the victim is on the page, she is not a creation. The little girl in me that stole candy from the corner store and got caught, and the shame of being a little thieving ass thief until I was about 13, is on this page right now. Those that read this, and then see or interact with me, should best believe they are interacting with an old, abused, candy-stealing, grown-up girl. That is one hell of a power differential between writers and readers of creative nonfiction.
Add to that the particular delicacies of branding and persona and it is more than evident, to this writer, that creative nonfiction art is both on and off the page. The intimacy we hold with readers is the major influencer of my own covenant to tell my readers truth and to offer them transparent literature to the best of my abilities; to let go of control and allow my muse and truth to take me to places not often seen in real life reading; and not to fake any heroism or sweet character traits just because of my desperate, unabashed need to be liked.
Creative nonfiction should be based on a deep organizing of the author’s Truths and not cutesy little truths transformed to fit a theme like what was highlighted in the D’Agata, Cooper and Obejas examples presented earlier. Every writer should be able to determine for him- or herself what is actually true and write to those points. Likewise, creative nonfiction should be appreciated for the writer’s ability to strike at objectivity even through living through the story, having survived the story, and in most cases continuing to broker in those relationships described in the story. In good creative nonfiction objectivity can be lent to the details the writer chooses to highlight, scenes invested in, care with dialogue and an adherence to the factual truth in the art, i.e., just because a writer’s editor or publisher wants one thing to happen, a true creative nonfictionist will not “make” that thing happen just to bolster the story. Instead, she will try workarounds like Talese mentioned, working with the available information to find a reasonable and true way into the narrative (creatively).
Also, persona, should be properly balanced to protect and portray the writer of creative nonfiction. Even if the written words are true, if the writer’s persona is more glamorous or reclusive than what he or she actually lives, the moral dilemma of this fakery is bound to negatively effect the writing. Likewise, a persona that dictates being too open and too available, too “on,” can foster innumerable negative consequences to good writing, whether in fiction or nonfiction (but especially so in nonfiction); this because in creative nonfiction, readers get to have two conversations with writers. One conversation is about survival, the other is about the art in all its drudgery, shame and surprise. The level of honesty of any work has everything to do with the quality of the author’s inter- and intra-personal honesty and the author’s public personifications, especially given the use of social media in marketing books and the intimate details that memoirists tend to share (look to authors like Elizabeth Gilbert, Anne Lamott and Cheryl Strayed as examples of art-persona and how it meets marketing on Facebook and Twitter).
All of these principles are presented to give support and cushion for the reader’s sweet spot: that moment in writing when the reader falls in-love, when the writer has delivered words or a scene, ideas or themes with such universality that the reader sighs and feels the “me-too” of the moment. Those are the moments that bound readers to writers and creates their metaphysical intimacies based on Truth. Those are the moments that compel us to bother with factual truth in the first place.
***This is work from an 8-part series (Truth, Lies & Bullshit in the Art of Creative Nonfiction): Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Works Cited (includes intro and sections).***
