Writing Blog Number 2

20240801 Non-Fiction Part 1: Creative Non-Fiction

Non-Fiction Part 1: Creative Non-Fiction

I decided to do a couple of columns on a pair of aspects of writing non-fiction. This first one comes from a question I received during my drabble activity: What is creative non-fiction?

Now, I guess I was under the impression that everyone who writes understood that term – it is used all the time here in Australia – but it seems it might not even be a proper term in the USA. It is in the UK, for what it’s worth, which is where I believe it originated.

So, non-fiction is writing facts. I am not going to go into false facts, into supposition, into opinion disguised as fact – that seems to be the hallmark of much non-fiction in the twenty-first century. I am also not going to look at “history is written by the winners” and associated arguments, as that has been happening since the times of the first writings, and the biases and inaccuracies have been there for millennia. Finally, this will not look at the “reality” of religion and religious belief; that is also opinion.

Opinion, for what it’s worth, is seen as a valid form of non-fiction; however, nowadays, people do not like indicating that their work is opinion because too many think their opinions are facts.

A non-fiction work is a recounting of a series of facts that are all related, either around a common subject or a common theme, or even as a generalist overview. An encyclopaedia is a non-fiction work of a generalist overview that is standard – it details facts with no opinion and no supposition. A biography works on a common subject and, if told by an outside third party, is generally a series of facts. A book about a common theme (e.g. serial killers, Renaissance artists, etc.) would also tend to be a series of facts.

Non-fiction can also include “how-to” books (including cookbooks), self-help books (though they do tend towards the opinion side of things), and collections of photographs. Plus probably other works I am forgetting.

The problem is, unless some-one is really interested in a topic, much non-fiction can be dry. There is no doubting the amount of research that goes into these works, and the passion involved in creating them, but as far as something to read, they are not the most exciting. I know this from personal experience – the non-fiction work I have been ploughing through for 15 years is very dry for those not interested.

This brings us to creative non-fiction. This is writing a non-fiction book as if it was a novel or an essay as if a short story. You use the same narrative structure, focus on characters, have adjectives, etc. It was started with biographies decades ago (autobiographies are a different kettle of fish, and many of them should not even be classified “non-fiction”) and sports writing in the UK in the post-War period, but has now become used in other forms of non-fiction.

It appears to be the basis of movies “based on” true events. The problem is, you will not find a movie “based on” true events that actually shows the events properly. Even classics like Silkwood, Erin Brockovich, et al. are not accurate. It is even sillier in biopics (Bohemian Rhapsody is particularly egregious in this, despite being supervised by two surviving members of Queen!) when facts are fiddled with. There is a reason these are classified movies, and not documentaries.

And even documentaries have become subject to questions. Again, a lot of opinion masquerading as set fact, and then you have the History Channel and Animal Planet releasing false documentaries for views! Documentaries might as well be another form of fiction a lot of the time (Ken Burns is an awesome and excellent exception to this viewpoint).

However, for a book to be non-fiction, it must pass more stringent tests than films and documentaries. It used to be that the research had to be included, as a list of references, citations or even having records of interviews available. This is not so much the case nowadays, but the facts need to be verifiable. So even creative non-fiction has to have that aspect available. I will look at research in the next blog post.

Now that I’ve ragged on non-fiction for a while, let’s look at creative non-fiction separately.

The facts are there, and the author uses knowledge of the time, knowledge of the people involved, knowledge of language, knowledge of landscape, etc. (all researched) to fill in gaps. In historical works, you do not know exactly what they say all the time, so you need to be careful about putting words in people’s mouths, but, apart from that, the main thing is that a writer of creative non-fiction needs to do is not invent incidents or facts. They are still writing a work of non-fiction, and so it is perfectly valid to mention that the passage about to be read is a guess, or that no-one knows what happened next. It is not a novel; you are allowed to have breaks in narrative.

Writing a piece if non-fiction as a work that reads like a work of fiction is a skill that is very difficult. You have to curtail your inclination to add flourish. You need to stick with the facts and only the facts, but present them in a manner that engages a reader.

The books of Peter Fitzsimons are great for a look at this done in an Australian setting; he has written many, and his story of the Batavia, his exploration of Gallipoli, and his work looking at the Eureka Stockade are all magnificently done. He spends years researching and he goes through a very thorough vetting and editing process to come up with history books that are readable and enjoyable.

And that is creative non-fiction, the newer kid on the non-fiction block and the way non-fiction seems to be headed.