Getting to the Truth: The Wonderfully Impossible Task of the Creative Nonfiction Writer

Taylor is teaching an upcoming workshop at Catapult this June on exploring the boundaries of nonfiction. * Imagine the following writing exercise: Write something completely true. Sounds pretty simple, right? Except here’s the tricky part: if you write something false, something that isn’t true—even a single word—all your loved ones will be executed immediately. Considering those rather […]

Taylor is teaching an upcoming workshop at Catapult this June on exploring the boundaries of nonfiction.

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Imagine the following writing exercise: Write something completely true. Sounds pretty simple, right? Except here’s the tricky part: if you write something false, something that isn’t true—even a single word—all your loved ones will be executed immediately. Considering those rather absurd terms, what would you write? What could you write? Would you dare to write anything at all?

This basic question—what do we actually know to be true, and can we ever really capture that truth in words—is a central dilemma the serious nonfiction writer is constantly wrestling with. Am I being honest? Am I really telling the truth? Am I laying bare myself, my life?

Art is a strange medium in which to try to capture reality, no doubt. On the most basic level, it can’t. Art is representation, levels and levels removed from the thing itself. Consider our own craft, writing: all these strange little marks on the page, which when grouped together in certain combinations represent certain concepts, which in turn represent actual things in the world. Do all these layers of representation remove us so far from the truth that it becomes irretrievable? Is all writing doomed to be falsehood—symbols piled upon symbols, illusion upon illusion? Is all writing story?

You might think that the term “creative nonfiction” is an oxymoron—but there’s another sense in which that’s the only kind of nonfiction writing there is—creative. After all, even if you attempt a kind of objective journalism, and do your best to stick to the facts—just the facts, ma’am, just the facts—still, you are crafting a tale out of them, selecting which facts you deem important and disregarding the rest, picking and choosing, editing reality to your whim. Even science, which strives to describe the physical world in the most stringent of ways, recognizes (among other inherent complications) that the presence of the observer alters every experiment—in the end, even science becomes a kind of story. Or to put it another way, there is no such thing as objectivity in any field, much less in art. Perhaps the closest one can come is to take these inevitable distortions into account, allowing for the fact that every human truth has been filtered. This is why I believe that, strangely, the first person might actually be the most honest kind of nonfiction writing—after all, you’re not pretending some sort of objectivity—you are making the reader acutely aware of your presence, letting them know that this is your perspective, your version, your truth. In nonfiction, we are all unreliable narrators of a kind—but at least we can be straightforward about it.

This is not to suggest that a nonfiction writer being loose with the facts is OK—it’s not. The great memoirist and poet Mary Karr, when interviewed in The Paris Review, sums it up nicely: “It pissed me off when I saw James Frey on Larry King saying, ‘You know, there’s a lot of argument about the distinction between fiction and nonfiction.’ You know what? There isn’t. If it didn’t happen, it’s fiction. If it did happen, it’s nonfiction.” And while her point is irrefutable, and right on the mark, the only problem is that people don’t always agree on what exactly happened. Consider courtroom accounts, where witnesses remember the circumstances of the crime in different ways—the van was blue, the van was white, there were elephants there, there were unicorns. Sure, you can do research, compile different people’s perspectives, try to get at what really happened—and you should—but it will still be your version you gather together, your truth. In the end, it’s all you can really offer, this truth, and you have to stay devoted to it, no matter what. Betray it by consciously making something up—say, by describing abuse that never happened because you think it will make for a better story—and you are not only betraying yourself and your craft, you are betraying the reader’s trust. And this is a line that must never be crossed.

So if in nonfiction you can’t intentionally be creative with the facts, what can you be creative with? My personal feeling is: basically everything else. Use poetry, use repetition, use rhythm, use style, use history and science, philosophy and religion, similes and metaphors, use plot, use omission, use your voice, use your heart, use your imagination. (Imagination? Yes, imagination!) When it comes to getting at the truth, why limit yourself? You are a writer, employ all the tools at hand. Even Mary Karr allows the memoirist some leeway in this realm: “Using novelistic devices, like reconstructed dialogue or telescoping time, isn’t the same as ginning up fake episodes.” These fictional techniques are of course what the ‘creative’ of creative nonfiction is usually referring to. As John McPhee puts it, “With nonfiction, you’ve got your material, and what you’re trying to do is tell it as a story in a way that doesn’t violate fact, but at the same time is structured and presented in a way that makes it interesting to read.”

But it’s not just in making the work more readable that creativity functions… Ironically, it’s this very creativity—the art of it—that allows writing to reveal the truth in a unique way. Fact-based reporting on its own can’t get there, because so often truth is beyond the facts, bigger than them. Instead, capturing reality requires imagination, it requires an inventiveness—not of facts, but of language. And something magical can indeed happen in literature—the way, for instance, when the words are just right, a description can seem even more real than the thing it’s describing. Yes, even with all the layers of symbols and representation, all those levels of removal, writing at its best can end up feeling truer than the truth, somehow. Or as the great American novelist Ken Kesey explains the phenomenon: “Fiction is when you twist what’s out in front of you and stylize it so it’s more clearly seen by the reader—just the same way that the Indian carvers can create an eye that looks more like an eye than an eye… That’s what good fiction is always about. Reading Moby-Dick, you see a whale more clearly than you could see him by going over to the coast and watching through a pair of binoculars.”

This is what all great storytelling does—be it fiction or non, it reveals the world in a fresh light, allowing the reader to see it as if for the first time, so that for a moment they can catch a glimpse of the bare naked truth of it.

Great art can indeed be simple, but what it reveals is rarely, if ever, an over-simplification: almost always, it opens up mystery rather than explains it away. Truth is not fixed, and it does not fit easily into pretty packages. To quote Kesey again, “The answer is never the answer.” This is why, often, the greatest realization we can come to about a subject is to discover we didn’t really know it at all. Yes, to see the reality of something is to recognize the mystery of it—how big and strange and unknowable it is. Again, any truth that suggests otherwise is not just incomplete, but most likely, not even true.

All the great matters—what do we really know about them? What cold hard facts are there about love, god, death? We do not know, and to pretend we do is to betray ourselves and our readers. And it’s not just the big subjects, it’s everything. Again, what can we really know? For the nonfiction writer, to contemplate this can be paralysis—what can I write that will really be true? But it can also be freeing—what can’t I write to try to get at that truth? And what fun to try! Your goal, after all, is the near impossible one of writing something completely true: how are you going to do it? Well, barring that one absolute of “don’t make shit up,” the simple answer is: any way you can….

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Want to learn more about writing with truth and creativity? Sign up for Taylor’s six-week workshop, Exploring the Borders of Nonfiction, here!