A question of genre

So what is “creative non-fiction”?

Last year, I was delighted to be asked to judge a creative non-fiction (CNF) competition for the South Warwickshire Literary Festival (SWLF). But when I came to read the entries, I realised that different people have very different understandings of the category. Some pieces could have been lifted directly from works of reference and text books, while others would have been perfectly at home in speculative fiction anthologies.

This was a big surprise. I felt I had a clear intuitive vision of what the genre entailed and had assumed it was the same for everyone else. So, before I actually chose the winners, I spent some time clarifying my thoughts on what I was looking for and why. This article is based on the judge’s report that resulted.

The first thing to do was to look more closely at the term itself: “creative non-fiction”.​

Grounded in fact

I think we can all agree that CNF must be a subset of non-fiction. So it needs to be grounded in fact. But the qualifying adjective “creative” means that it needs to be something more than just plain, factually accurate, non-fiction. Non-fiction can be starkly informative, objective and impersonal — think textbooks and crime reports — but creative non-fiction needs something extra if it is to be anything more than technical reference.

So creative non-fiction must be based on fact, but needs to have an added spin on it, an added depth, some creativity in the interpretation of the facts, or in the presentation and ordering of information.​

I don’t think this creative element necessarily has to be hugely inventive: it could be as simple as the combination or juxtaposition of different topics to bring out a new perspective. It could be the addition of personal insight or opinion, or a pertinent anecdote, that illuminates and adds perspective to the subject matter.

It could even be the imaginative filling in of the gaps that occur between known and provable facts. Here, though, there is a risk of the created element becoming too extreme. There is much debate about just how much can be created, invented or modified before the writing crosses the limits and becomes a work of fiction. This is particularly the case in travel and other lifestyle writing, where the merging of several characters or conversations into one, or the conflation of interesting elements from half-a-dozen different trips into a piece that purports to recount a single typical visit, can be seen as dishonest when the piece is published as journalism.​

With a word of warning, then, about how far we should push the boundaries of “enrichment”, we might settle on the definition of CNF from American writer Lee Gutkind: “true stories […] enriched by relevant thoughtful ideas, personal insight, and intimacies about life and the world we live in.”​

Common elements

Reading through the SWLF competition entries, I found a number of common elements that could be extracted to help clarify the genre even further.

Perhaps most notable was that the strongest entries were all written in the first person. While I don’t think this is a sine qua non for CNF, it certainly helps when there is something of the author in the writing — a subjectivity, a spark of personal investment or interest, an element of involvement. It’s definitely possible to imbue third-person writing with such a spark, but for most of us it’s probably easier to do so when we’re writing about something that directly concerns us or that we experienced for ourselves.​

This spark is what makes the writing come alive and what makes it engaging. It’s what makes the reader respond emotionally. And this is what allows a competition entry to be selected for the initial “possibles” pile and take the first step towards becoming a potential winner.

This personal element means that anecdote, nature writing, travel stories and memoir are ideal candidates for creative non-fiction.​

In the same way that Wordsworth believed that poetry ”takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity”, I feel these types of writing often work better when there has been an opportunity for the writer to separate themselves from the facts and when they have had space and time to gain perspective. This separation also provides a space in which to gather comparable or contrasting experiences that can be put alongside to illuminate and reveal hidden truths or patterns.

Not limited to first-person

There are other CNF subgenres that are less likely to be written in the first person, including historical and biographical. There is no reason why a writer shouldn’t retell the story of an actual person or take a real-life event and retell it through the lens of personal experience or insight. And it’s up to them whether they do this with the distancing granted by the third person, or if they write in the voice of a first-person narrator who is observing the action first-hand.

Again, there probably needs to be a word of warning about how much is invented. If, for example, I write an account of the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, I’d be able to document the facts of the occasion accurately from first-hand accounts, newspapers and other media of the time, and I could probably write something that remained true enough to the facts to count as non-fiction, even if told it from the point of view of an imagined person in the crowd — thereby making it creative non-fiction. But if I invent two people who meet in the crowd and write about what happens to them on that day, I may find I’ve pushed the Coronation into the background and am merely using it as a setting for my story, which would then need to be classed as fiction.​

One thing to note here is that word “story”. Some writers would insist that CNF needs to include all the same elements as fiction: that it needs to have characters who develop, and a plot with a beginning, middle and end. I’m not so sure. In the same way that literary fiction is more driven by the characters than by the plot, I believe that the story in creative non-fiction can be secondary. In a full-length CNF book, there might be a need for more of a plot or more clear character development, but if we’re looking at 800-word competition entries, I’m happy to read simple descriptive — and insightful — vignettes.

Personal preferences

My personal preference in any genre is for writing that isn’t ornate: I like description, but, while it’s important to use the correct lexis for the subject matter, the piece doesn’t need to be written in “five-dollar words”. In the same way, the incident or the setting being written about doesn’t need to be unexpected, unique or exceptional. Our personal authorial perspective and our interpretation of an everyday occurrence can be the creative key that adds the spark of life to the writing.​

Yes, we can write about murder, about tragedy, about unique one-of-a-kind experiences, but these things already have a value that sets them apart and they are less in need of an author’s creative brush. If you single-handedly stopped a rogue elephant from trampling a NICU ward of premature babies, the facts probably make for a good story however it’s told. There may not be a whole lot more that you can add to make it better and, in the worst case, frills of creativity and imagination may actually devalue the facts.​

I think, then, that there can be a lot more power in shining a light on everyday situations and images, things that could happen to anybody. By seeing them from a distance and in the light of our own personal experience, we can add depth and value and can reveal bigger truths.

A few specifics: balance, tense, lexis

My favourite pieces from the competition entries shone a spotlight on a few other techniques that worked particularly well in each case. These are not generalisations, but are worth considering when writing CNF.

One runner-up dealt with precisely the kind of BIG experience that I feel often doesn’t work. The grand theme of a world-shattering event could have been too big, but in this case, the macrocosmic was balanced by a very personal, microcosmic view.

In another piece, the narrative present helped create a timeless snapshot: rather than tying it to any specific moment, it described a non-event that could happen to anyone, anywhere and on any day. And the winning piece used the vocabulary of landscape, boats, water and weather, combining this rich language set with real place names to create an immersive, almost hypnotic atmospheric soundscape that appealed to my poet’s ear while remaining anchored firmly in reality.

Each piece used techniques that suited the subject matter. While based on fact, each included an element of imagination, insight or creativity. And each succeeded in evoking an emotional reaction in the mind of the reader. And, really, there’s not much more that you could ask from any writing, whatever the genre.