Advanced Creative Nonfiction

A Writer's Guide and Anthology

Sean Prentiss, Jessica Hendry Nelson

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9781350067806
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781350067820
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Creative Writing
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Advanced Creative Nonfiction: A Writers' Guide and Anthology offers expert instruction on writing creative nonfiction in any form-including memoir, lyric essay, travel writing, and more-while taking an expansive approach to fit a rapidly evolving literary art form. From a history of creative nonfiction, related ethical concerns, and new approaches to revision and publishing, this book offers innovative strategies and ideas beyond what's traditionally covered. Advanced Creative Nonfiction: A Writers' Guide and Anthology also includes: · An anthology of contemporary creative nonfiction by some of today's most inventive and celebrated writers
· Advanced explorations into the craft of creative nonfiction across forms
· In-depth discussion of truth, ethics, and memory
· Practical advice on revision, editing, research, and publishing
· Writing prompts and exercises throughout the textbook A companion website is also available for the book at http://www.bloomsburyonlineresources.com/advanced-creative-nonfiction

Part 1

Craft

1

History of Creative Nonfiction

As Francis Bacon wrote, “The word for [the essay] is new, but the thing itself is ancient.” From the earliest Neanderthal cave paintings, red hands stenciled approximately 64,000 years ago in Spain, humans have used symbols to signify experience, to essay. We cannot be sure what these red hands signify (if anything), but they may be Neanderthals saying, I am here. Later, 35,000 years ago in Indonesia, a human draws an image of a pig on a cave wall. Five thousand years later in France and Romania, humans draw images of animals in caves. Are they saying, These are offerings to our god(s)? Or do they tell others about the dangers in the area (cave lions, panthers, bears, and volcanoes)? Or do they attempt to explain the larger, more complex world (birth, death, war)?

In 3400 BCE, the Sumerians of Mesopotamia (Mesopotamia is often referred to as the “cradle of civilization”) invent the first system of writing in the form of notches in clay, called cuneiform. The symbols serve as a rudimentary accounting system and help Sumerians survive the rapid changes that ensue from their prosperity—the degree of which had never before been achieved by humans—and their many inventions, including agriculture, the wheel, the first means of transportation in the chariot and the sailboat, the concept of time, astronomy and astrology, maps, cities, and mathematics. Writing, for the ancient Sumerians, is a system of accounting. Cuneiform evolves, but its function does not. It is a strict nonfiction, a matter of facts. I gave you this much, and you paid me this much, it says. It helps Sumerians grow their markets and account for commerce, and in this way the Sumerians flourish for almost five centuries. Their downfall, when it comes, is swift, ruthless, and irreversible.

When the waters of destruction recede, a story emerges, our first written myth, which comes from Ziusudra, the last king of Sumer, prior to the great flood. Here for the first time, in 2700 BCE, is written language for a purpose beyond accounting. Amidst the desolation of destruction and loss, Ziusudra writes to the future of humanity, in hopes that his advice might help us flourish once again. In this moment, Ziusudra’s new aims reshape written storytelling forever as he recounts the flood that destroyed the Sumerian cities while adding a series of practical yet heartfelt instructions to future generations.

“Friends,” Ziusudra writes, “let me share with you the advice that those wise ones tried to offer. Let me give you these instructions, and please don’t neglect them. Lessons from the past can still be useful for today, for any path that we may take in life is one that is treading the earth.” In this simple missive, we recognize the roots of the essay, that fundamental form of creative nonfiction, an attempt to make sense out of chaos and the will to survive it.

“Knowledge is not intelligence,” writes Heraclitus of Ephesus, around 500 BCE in Greece. It is a time of burgeoning governments, discovery, and unrest. Greece is fragmented by its motley landscape—steep mountains, valleys, and many islands—out of which hundreds of city-states have formed. Amidst the violence of feuding city-states, Heraclitus embraces instability, as both a constant and a mode of dialectical composition. “Change alone unchanges,” he writes, two centuries before Aristotle famously asserts that “time is the measure of change.” The conversational quality of creative nonfiction—sometimes in voice but always in aim—is reflected profoundly in Heraclitus’s work, (which exist only in fragments today):

The stuff of the psyche is a smoke-like substance of fine particles that give rise to all other things, particles of less mass than any other substance and constantly in motion: only movement can know movement.

The psyche rises as a mist from things that are wet.

A dry psyche is most skilled in intelligence and is brightest in virtue.

[…]

A psyche lusts to be wet.

In these exchanges, we bear witness to an internal debate, a quest for more than mere knowledge. It is an attempt to put order to the mystification of the world and give shape to the amorphousness of ideas. And there is salvation here, too, in the ways that Heraclitus makes a kind of sense out of the raw materials of observation. It is a fine example of an essay mirroring the movements of the mind and, wrested from the context of antiquity, as prescient today as it was during its time of composition. This is the timeless quality of creative nonfiction, which while structurally variable always attempts to give physical form to consciousness.

And, here, Heraclitus shows that creative nonfiction, more than other literary forms, functions as a dialogue in conversation with itself, other essays, and the world. Creative nonfiction replicates the movements of the mind, those digressive, dialectical exchanges between the narrator and themselves and the narrator and the wider world. The essay aspires toward relationships, a whispered intimacy, like the hushed exchanges between lovers at night.

Plutarch, of first-century CE Greece, understands intimately the link between narrative and identity. Outside of his roles as an administrative priest (interpreting the auguries of an oracle who presides over the Temple of Apollo at Delphi), mayor, magistrate, and ambassador, he hosts lavish dinner parties for guests from all over the Empire. He oversees dialogues with his guests that are recorded and collected, along with seventy-eight essays and other compositions, in Moralia. Individual essays in the collection range from “On the Fortune or the Virtue of Alexander the Great”—about whom he also writes in his famous collection of biographies, Parallel Lives—to “Odysseus and Gryllus,” a humorous dialogue between Homer’s Odysseus and one of Circe’s pigs. But Plutarch is not a staunch historian and often writes different interpretations of the same events, changes that he deems “expansions,” “abridgments,” and “transpositions.” For example, in several places in Parallel Lives, he recounts different versions of the conference at Lucca in 56 BCE, a last-ditch effort by Caesar to save the crumbling Triumvirate. The inconsistencies illustrate a common and persistent question about veracity and creative nonfiction. Plutarch resolves the contradictions by insisting that he writes lives, not history, and while this may not satisfy historians, it speaks to an essential difference between history and memory, between facts and lived experience. Human lives are not a sum of facts but a creation—mutable, fallible, and artificial. They are, to use Plutarch’s own words, expansions, an amalgamation of materials and imagination.

Plutarch is revolutionary in other ways, too. His essays are radical in form and if published today would likely be categorized amidst the “new” forms of creative nonfiction, those highlighted by digressions, anecdotes, and spare prose. His essay “Some Information about the Spartans,” for example, could be called a collage essay. Plutarch presents his subject through a series of stories, anecdotes, jokes, and asides stripped of explanations or expository analysis. In other words, he lets the material speak for itself, and like contemporary collage essays, short fragmented sections accrete in meaning as the essay progresses. Here are two such sections, which in juxtaposition and without exposition resonate across the white space:

Another mother in Sparta once said to her son: “I send you off to battle with this shield your father made. Through many years and many battles he kept this weapon safe. Let me suggest that you also keep it safe, for the terrors of the battlefield won’t be anything compared to what will happen if you lose it.”

*

There is the story of the Spartan boy who complained to his mother that the sword she had given him was too small for battle.

His mother replied sternly: “A real man doesn’t need a sword.”

This aphoristic, anecdotal style also shows up in the work of Sei Shōnagon, a courtesan to Empress Teishi during the Heian period in Japan, around 1000 CE. This does not demonstrate a direct lineage between Plutarch and Shōnagon but a form natural to patterns of human thought. Shonogan’s Pillow Book follows a long tradition in Japan of nightly journaling, called makura no soshi—“notes of the pillow”—which are kept in the drawer in the wooden pillows used by well-to-do women.

Shōnagon is well versed in Japanese and Chinese poetry, and the book contains witty, poetic observations about court life in tenth-century Kyoto. She adheres to the philosophy of mono no aware—“beauty is precious because it is brief”—and composes her Pillow Book in short, flash-like stories, anecdotes, lists, and images. Together, these disparate pieces create a prismatic portrait of the writer and the world she inhabits. In tone, Shonogan is astute, ruthless, funny, and direct. One entry reads simply: “Things people despise: A crumbling earth wall. People who have a reputation for being exceptionally good-natured.” Other entries are cultural commentaries, arguments on such far-flung subjects as religious piety and male flutists.

Her work foreshadows the insights of some twentieth-century female creative nonfiction writers, whose cultural observations and keenly rendered arguments forge space for women to more actively shape the cultural and creative landscapes of their day—Virginia Woolf, Maya Angelou, and Joan Didion, for example. In her time, however, Shonogan’s work was suppressed and only printed for the first time in the seventeenth century, more than six hundred years after her death. We might explain this stretch of time as Shōnagon’s longest white space, an extended pause in which her voice is suspended, only to reassert itself all those centuries later.

With this perspective, we see the performative quality of creative nonfiction, how it contributes to conversations past, present, and future. We might, for example, be able to imagine an exchange between Shōnagon and Didion, as when Shōnagon writes, “How ever did I pass the time before I knew you? I think of that past time as now I pass each passing day in lonely sorrow, lacking you,” and Didion responds, “A single person is missing for you, and the whole world is empty.”

Still more conversations traverse time and space until we reach Michel de Montaigne, who coins the term essai, which comes from Middle French and is translated as “a test,” “a trial,” or “an experiment,” to refer to his personal writing, and who quotes Plutarch so frequently it is as if he is in attendance at one of Plutarch’s famed dinner parties. Montaigne’s work marks a distinct and irreversible shift in the development of creative nonfiction writing, and many consider this the formal beginning of creative nonfiction. In 1571, at the ripe old age of thirty-eight, Montaigne retires from his legal and administrative career to spend the remainder of his days in prolific pursuit of wonder and self-knowledge: “Know thyself,” he etches into his ceiling. From the tower library in the family estate in the south of France, Montaigne breaks with the conventions of scholasticism with his bold use of the first person—a transgressive move in a culture dominated by doctrinal thought—and his embrace of skepticism, doubt, and confession.

In his essay “Of Cripples,” he writes, “We become habituated to anything strange by use and time; but the more I frequent myself and know myself, the more my deformity astonishes me, and the less I understand myself,” which can also be read as a metaphor for creative nonfiction itself. In Montaigne’s radical approach, the essay is a drama, an active pursuit toward knowledge. And yet, Montaigne doesn’t reach conclusions in his essays, only better-refined questions. “If my mind could gain a firm footing,” he writes in “On Repentance,” “I would not make essays, I would make decisions; but it is always in apprenticeship and on trial.” Here, Montaigne realizes that the human mind is more adept at asking questions than finding answers.

Montaigne’s writing style calls into question the authoritative practices of his day, particularly the dogmatic religious disputes of sixteenth-century France—he loathes the cruelties and hypocrisies of the religious wars. This is a profound shift in narrative prose, to boldly assert one’s own life and mind as significant and worthy subject matter. “I am myself the matter of my book,” he proclaims in the preface of the first edition of his Essais—which earns him a massive readership for his day. “You would be unreasonable to spend your leisure on so frivolous and vain a subject,” he continues in the preface. It’s a ploy, of course, and one that crumbles under the weight of his ambition and literary success. Indeed, even mighty Shakespeare is one of Montaigne’s devoted readers, and many believe that Hamlet (that most introspective of characters) would not exist without the inspiration of Montaigne’s muscular, meandering mind.

Only a few decades after Montaigne’s death in 1592, the Protestant Reformation in England under Elizabeth I gives way to a spike in literary culture. This creates space for English writers to explore creative nonfiction writing in a variety of forms, though the term “creative nonfiction” does not yet exist. During this time, Francis Bacon adopts a more formal and emotionally withholding style than Montaigne’s, although the French writer was one of Bacon’s literary inspirations. Both writers recognize the ancient origins of creative nonfiction, as well as the paradox surrounding it. “The word for it is new,” writes Bacon, acknowledging Montaigne’s coinage of the term essai, “but the thing itself is ancient.” As if in direct opposition to the volatility of life under Elizabeth I, Bacon’s signature style is controlled, aphoristic, and methodical. His work shares none of the whimsy and flourish of Montaigne’s work, and yet his style is marked by the fiery energy of his clear, decisive, and definitive sentences. It is not surprising that Bacon also formalizes the scientific method in Europe, as his essays are formal, process-based arguments, typically an accretion of carefully spun aphorisms, which Bacon finds to be fundamentally sensical and comforting.

Bacon’s aphorisms include: “Youth is the seedbed of repentance”; “Old men are afraid of everything, except the Gods”; “Pride is the ivy that winds about all virtues and all good things”; and “We think according to our nature, speak as we have been taught, but act as we have been ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents 
• List of Illustrations
• Credits and Permissions
• Part 1: Craft
• Part 2: Anthology
• Notes on Contributors
• Index
• Imprint