“These, our bodies, possessed by light. Tell me we’ll never get used to it.”
Being aware and asking questions are perhaps the most important qualities that good creative nonfiction writers have to have. Good creative nonfiction writers never take things for granted, stay alert in the drudge of every day life, they “never get used to it”. This allows them to find inspiration in real people, situations and themselves.
I spent half a summer producing around thirty pages of creative nonfiction and more pages about writing creative nonfiction. I loved it. It’s a genre that I have an affinity for. I’ve been narrating my life as long as I’ve loved stories, which means as long as I can remember. Creative nonfiction is just finally putting those stories down on paper and explaining them to someone else. In the end, meaning is found. Creative nonfiction is special because it finds thematic meanings in real life that we usually just save for literature. The one creative nonfiction piece I have that survived the Great Laptop Crash of ’12 (albeit in altered form) is about the costs of pursuing perfection. It was also about my lazy eye. The others were about the struggle between parent and child and embracing difference, big things, yet I wrote about my mother hating my driving and my annoyance with some of my classmates in Japanese. Writing creative nonfiction has really helped me find inspiration in my surroundings and ask questions. One question: “Why did I have to wear an eye-patch?” eventually spawned three pieces of work.
Creative nonfiction is a strange kind of exposure. Whenever, I write creative nonfiction I’m always paranoid that I’m convey more than I intended, that I come off as a jerk and/or that I don’t have all the facts so I really shouldn’t be commenting. One person who peer reviewed my work said my writing was like being inside my head. I didn’t know whether or not to take it as a complement or even believe it. My head is a chaotic place. Half my thoughts are snatches of songs and all but one percent of the rest are food cravings. Yet, he wasn’t wrong. Writing creative nonfiction shows you how you construct the story of your own life. This requires you to be reflective as you live your life, reflective as you write your essay, reflective as you revise it and reflective if you talk to any one else about it. Creative nonfiction as a framework promotes the reflective aspect that all good writers have. However, reflection isn’t that easy because memory isn’t that easy nor is appreciating your experiences (is distance from them an asset or a determent when writing?) Once again, I’m reminded of the poetry of Richard Siken.
“Looking back is easy for a while and then looking back gets
murky. There is the road, and there is the story of where the road goes,
and then more road”- Richard Siken, “Road Music”
If you want to see an example of creative nonfiction, I’ve posted my essay “Vision Correction.” I also wrote an essay about the practice of writing creative nonfiction called a “Creative Honesty.” As always, for more information, please go to my Works Cited page; it has far more than just the bibliography in it.