As you know, my thesis is a series of creative nonfiction pieces. I have been struggling with what to include in my stories, how much truth there needs to be and whether everything must be shared.
The complete essay can be found here on the NY Times site. Here are a few exerpts from the essay that I thought I'd share:
I have never written fiction, and this memoir may be as close as I ever get to it. No more than a biography or a novel is memoir true to life. Because, truly, life is just one damn thing after another. The writer's business is to find the shape in unruly life and to serve her story. Not, you may note, to serve her family, or to serve the truth, but to serve the story. There really is no choice. A reporter of fact is in service to the facts, a eulogist to the family of the dead, but a writer serves the story without apology to competing claims.
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Now you may ask: Just what is the relation of your memoir to the truth?
It is as close as it can be.
The moment you put pen to paper and begin to shape a story, the essential nature of life -- that one damn thing after another -- is lost. No matter how ambiguous you try to make a story, no matter how many ends you leave hanging, it's a package made to travel.
Everything that happened is not in my stories; how could it be? Memory is selective, storytelling insists on itself. But there is nothing in my stories that did not happen. In their essence they are true.
Or a shade of true.
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What do you think about these ideas?
2 comments:
I think it shows the difference between writing creative non-fiction and writing journalism.
But it also shows the importance of editing, choosing what to leave in and what to leave out.
And what to embellish.
I agree. And to me that's inspiring, because I always want to include every detail -- and feel that I'm not doing my "duty" if I don't -- even if all of those details do not necessarily advance the story.
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