Mere writers
I read a piece in Poets & graywaterblogWriters ostensibly about the writer, a former journalist now teaching in an MFA program, standing for honesty over invention in creative nonfiction. But his outrage wandered into a querulous cul-de-sac over experiments with hybrids between poetry and prose. And his aggrieved tone indicated an upset about more than some nonfiction teachers’ perceived unconcern about inventing scenes, details, and dialog. There was a straw man feel to his named villains.
Once and future journalists who stumble into the creative nonfiction world are naturally hypersensitive. Much of this unease is the insecurity of outsiders trying to elbow into the fun being had in the ivory tower. But there’s a structural division, too: fiction writers and journalists tend to emphasize narrative in nonfiction. The avant-garde is apt to deemphasize narrative in favor of deep reflection upon experience (back to the future with Montaigne!), or with lyric or collage forms.
The imperatives of narrative keep fiction writers, from Stephen King to Philip Roth, more or less hewing together to Flannery O’Connor’s famous sentiment: “Fiction is about everything human and we are made out of dust, and if you scorn getting yourself dusty, then you shouldn’t write fiction. It isn’t grand enough for you.” People, bless our hearts and forgive us, want stories: conflict, rising action, crisis, resolution, denoument. This keeps fiction from veering into an exercise for other insiders. Nonfiction, sporting both an epic lineage and proletariat leanings, is everywhere and would seem immune from rarification—but, showing one of its affinities with poetry, isn’t.