Since one of our editors discussed writing short stories, I figured I’d join in with tips of my own for writing nonfiction. Granted, nonfiction doesn’t receive as much of the clamor and romanticism shared by poetry and fiction. Writers portrayed in the movies are often either poets or novelists. No one ever made a movie called Dead Essayists Society. I rest my case.
But I think people should write nonfiction more. More than poetry, or fiction, it is the form of literature everyone engages in, day in and day out. We don’t all write, but we all engage with nonfiction. For starters, news stories, whether on paper, on the TV, or online are forms of nonfiction. So are academic journals, textbooks, and manuals. Even your friends’ tweets and Facebook status updates, and the random stories you tell your mates, boyfriend, or girlfriend about your day all fall within this genre. Society is in a constant and neverending process of churning out narratives, and if the world was a library, 90% of it would be nonfiction.
I wasn’t actually a nonfictionist even when I joined ALPAS as a nonfiction editor. For most of my life --at least the part of it where I wanted to be a writer - my plan was to be a novelist. It still is. But a lot of my recent work has fallen within this genre, mostly by circumstance. Having taken a college degree outside of the arts and literature sphere, most of my time then was spent doing other things. And now that I work full time and do postgraduate studies, I have to sacrifice sleep in order to get any writing done. Somehow, things work out. The first piece I ever got published was nonfiction, an account of World War II based on interviews that I did with a war veteran. This was followed by two Young Blood pieces, the second of which found its way into the recently released YB6 collection.
So how do you write nonfiction? I have no idea. What I do know is how I write my nonfiction, and how that has changed through the years. The following are things that I learned as a short story writer/frustrated novelist in an essayist’s skin:
1. Know the repercussions
In one of my stories, Prinsesa, a young boy is molested by a teacher. Sensitive stuff, yes, but workable grounds for fiction. Not always for nonfiction. Consider this a declaration of your Miranda rights: whenever you flaunt the genre’s tag, everything you say can and will be taken against you and everyone mentioned by name. So before you even begin to write, before you even consider your idea, know what it could mean to you and the people around you. If you are writing about sensitive material, ask their permission first. If you’re accusing someone of a crime, or any image-destructive act, make sure you have evidence that will hold up in court. Can nonfiction pieces be used as evidence in court? I don’t know. But I do know that they can be used for a libel suit, so tread carefully.
2. Get your facts straight
There’s an author, I forget who, who said somewhere that while a single truth in a piece of fiction is magic, a single untruth in a piece of nonfiction is destructive. This reminds me of a Black Mirror episode where a character notes that memory is organic: accessing it entails firing up the same neurons that stored its details, and in consequence, overwriting those details by the tiniest amount. Those tiny amounts can add up in a span of days, months, and years. So even if you’re writing a memoir, don’t rely too much on memory. Do your research. There is an unwritten agreement between the nonfictionist and reader that everything said from the first to the last sentence will be true. The moment you break that agreement, you risk losing your reader. And if it happened to be a sensitive detail, it could risk your career too.
The first two go hand-in-hand. While you can write nonfiction and publish it as fiction, you cannot just do the same vice versa. Someone actually did this back in 2003. James Frey wrote a semi-fictional novel titled A Million Little Pieces but, when it failed to get any attention from publishers, decided to publish it instead as nonfiction. It is now notorious as one of the biggest acts of literary forgery.
3. Get ready for your friends’ suspicions
Something a lot of my friends say whenever something interesting, weird, disgusting, creepy, funny, or whatnot happens to or around us: “Are you going to write about this?” Especially when they do something embarrassing. I can’t blame them. Even in my fiction, I write about things that happen in my life, including all the witty lines my friends have uttered in real life and that I stole from them. (To be honest, this is why I carry notebooks around.) I’ve made a reputation of constantly turning my life into literature, and you will, too. This is mostly true for nonfictionists since friends don’t seem to bother you as much when they think you’re only dreaming up plots.
4. As much as possible, contextualize yourself within history
This is something I learned in a creative writing elective that I took back in college. The magic of creative nonfiction is that it is, in its own way, a form of history. Because you are writing about real places, real people, and real events, you are recording a small, micro-sized piece of history. Always keep this in mind when writing your nonfiction piece. Just like in fiction, nonfiction pieces have their own setting, and the setting is crucial to understanding why people would talk a certain way, or do certain things.
This advice is often misunderstood to telling the writer to always mention what year it was, or who the president was at the time, or what the exchange rate was. You don’t have to do any of that in fiction, and so it is in nonfiction. But always keep in mind that your tiny history is a chunk of a larger history. Give your readers a feel for that. Make your characters talk the way they would have, at the time. Make sure they are preoccupied with the things that preoccupied society. Make them breathe, and live, and think, in the correct time period. Understand that you are writing about things in the past, despite being already far away in the present. Overcoming this bias is a lot harder than it seems, and it takes research, research, and more research.
Never buy into the ignorance sold by people like the late dictator’s son, who believe that history is to be left to the historians. Nothing is independent of history. We are all in dialogue with it, as in the words of the Franco-Czech novelist Milan Kundera, “partway along a road, in dialogue with those who preceded [us], and even perhaps (but less so) with those still to come.”
In the end, because I was a fictionist first, and a nonfictionist second, I am apt to make the personal avowal that the two genres have very little in contrast. Even in content: both fiction and nonfiction works deal with realities peopled by characters equally natural, and concerning themes that resonate equally within us as readers. The only difference lies in the fact that nonfiction deals with a reality shared by billions of other people, and therefore must be handled sensitively. Suddenly, assertions gain consequential weight, and the value of fact becomes necessity. Handled well, both fiction and nonfiction become vehicles by which we approach the truth - whatever that truth may be.
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