Finding Your Truth : Avoiding the Pitfalls of Creative Nonfiction

As writers of creative nonfiction, we know that not everything we write is the absolute truth. For instance, how can we piece together exact dialogue from twenty years ago and how can we be certain that we wore that plaid red dress on the last Sunday in June in 1984? Readers forgive us if we give state that we may be foggy about some details, while showing our knowledge of the subject and our emotional truth. Emily Dickinson wrote, "Tell all the Truth but tell it Slant," which informs creative nonfiction writers today who are looking to enhance their work with techniques that will preserve their story's truth, while making it read like a story. We can write essays and memoirs that are "real" to both the reader and us as long as we stick to certain conventions of this genre that allow us to bend time and compress characters.

In addition, we also need to watch that we don't fictionalize our lives to make the story better. Writing creative nonfiction is more controversial than writing fiction because essays and memoirs discuss real people who are still living and may not appreciate having their lives revealed without mercy on the page. Writers also need to watch how creative they get with the facts. Sometimes authors deliver more fiction than nonfiction, after billing their work as creative nonfiction. James Fry of A Million Little Pieces (2003) and Anthony Godby Johnson of A Rock and A Hard Place (1994) come to mind. Both authors fictionalized their experiences so that they could sell more books. Mary Karr, who wrote about her dysfunctional family in The Liar's Club (1998), says, "My experience is there's no way you can manufacture events and find the truth. Great memoirs don't take bizarre experiences and make them more bizarre and outrageous.