Edited by
Michael Steinberg and David Cooper
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Why I Chose the Creative Nonfiction Way of Life Lee Gutkind Deciding to dedicate myself to writing creative nonfiction, and delaying a dream of writing fiction, was a conscious and carefully considered decision. At the time, I was in my middle twenties, and I realized that I didn't know enough about the world to write with the insight and experience necessary to make my novels and short stories culturally and morally significant. To be a better writer (and to be a better and a more well-rounded person) I realized the importance of learning to relate to others and understand the struggles and challenges of people from different walks of life. If the characters I created in my fiction were to be compelling and true, then, I concluded, I had to learn about other lifestyles, other professions and the patchwork of prejudices and kindnesses that make some people different from others. I did not want to become a writer who wrote about the same family, the same high school, the same moral dilemma, nor a writer who wrote about other writers, or other English Departments, exclusively. So I decided to write creative nonfiction, and in that way become more mature by broadening my scope of experiences. At some point, I would gradually return to my literary roots - fiction - and make my impact on the world, I assumed. Perhaps you will think me naive, but I really thought that writers with something to say could affect the world. I still do - and I am still trying. At that time, in the early 1970s, daring nonfiction writers were rare. By "daring" I mean people who would venture into and experience other lifestyles and then write about it in a literary way. And by "literary," I mean using scenes, dialogue, description, first-person points of view - all the tools available to the fiction writer, while consistently attempting to be truthful and factual. Most people regarded nonfiction as academic (as informal essays about literature, politics, law, etc.) or journalistic (as in news and feature stories and op-ed briefs). A minority of writers, calling themselves "new journalists" were making a statement and causing controversy by writing nonfiction in this dramatic and literary way, however. Some of these writers are still active today, like Norman Mailer, whose coverage of the 1968 and 1972 political conventions in the books Armies of the Night and Miami and the Siege of Chicago, were powerful statements of personal journalism and political and moral activism. Tom Wolfe's out-print-anthology, published in 1973, The New Journalism, features Mailer, Rex Reed, Terry Southern, Hunter S.Thompson, etc. as well as a fifty-five-page manifesto boldly defining the roots of this daring new journalism. Lillian Ross, who continues to write for The New Yorker, had paved the way for this experimentation in voice and style with her in-depth profiles in which she skillfully recreated vivid and remarkable scenes that captured the charismatic and eccentric personalities of such figures as the film director and actor John Huston, and Ernest Hemingway, respectively. The descriptions of Hemingway in his hotel room at the Sherry Nethlerand in Manhattan, drinking champagne with his wife (Miss Mary) and entertaining visitors in his bathrobe, and subsequently on a shopping outing at Abercrombie and Fitch, illustrated the way in which a writer might discover and reveal character and personality through observation and involvement . . . I have yet to mention Gay Talese . . . In a series of profiles of famous people written in the 1960s for various magazines, and collected under the title Fame and Obscurity, Talese demonstrated how extensively a writer could stretch the traditional boundaries of the form by capturing people in scenes and situations that were not only compelling in content and dramatic effect, but at the same time reflected who they were - a magic moment of action or nugget of personality that captured an essence of their personal or professional life. Wolfe referred to this essence as the "larger truth." . . . Talese was a terrific writer, but the root of his skill began with his ability to listen to others and encourage their confidence, and he possessed an abundance of patience and creative confidence. If he could not get behind the scenes of a story in one way, he always found an alternative avenue and angle. Once, when told that he would not be permitted to spend time with Frank Sinatra for a profile for Esquire Magazine because Sinatra had a cold, Talese decided to follow Sinatra at a distance, talk to every member of his considerable entourage and profile the great man at this time (sick with a cold) when he was most stressed. "Sinatra with a cold is like Picasso without paint, Ferrari without fuel - only worse. For the common cold robs Sinatra of that uninsurable jewel, his voice, cutting into the core of his confidence, and it affects not only his own psyche, but also seems to cause a kind of psychosomatic nasal drip within dozens of people who work for him, drink with him, love him, depend on him for their own welfare and stability. A Sinatra with a cold can, in a small way, send vibrations through the entertainment industry and beyond, as surely as a president of the United States, suddenly sick, can shake the national economy." Those sentences to me were nothing less than beautiful music. Here was a man - a mere journalist (he worked as a reporter for the New York Times) who could transform concrete material that was not only inherently true, but powerfully poetic. I read the melody of these sentences and others that Talese wrote, and committed them to memory and for years recited excerpts of his prose to myself before I started a new nonfiction writing project, as a reminder of the potential and the freedom of this new nonfiction field . . . These days, the term most often being used is creative nonfiction, which is accurate and means what it says: Essentially nonfiction writers are encouraged to be artful rather than objective or formulaic. Instead of reporting the news, they capture and/or recreate what is behind the news or the forces that generate the news. I define the word news in its broadest context: Something that is happening or has happened, somewhere and somehow and sometime to someone. News includes the death of Princess Di in Paris and the death of someone's Uncle Angus in Peoria. Although some critics like William Zinsser find the term creative nonfiction annoying, most of the best and most popular nonfiction writers like Tracy Kidder, John McPhee and Gay Talese have accepted it as the best way to describe what they and others have attempted to achieve . . . Before I decided to be a writer, I thought a lot about what I wanted to accomplish in my life. I admit that I didn't know exactly what that was, but I knew two things: First, I wanted to be understood. That is, I wanted people to be interested in my ideas and feelings generally - and what I knew, specifically. Secondly, I wanted my ideas and experiences to make an impact on other people - to change or influence a small part of the world, in one way or another. In order to achieve those goals, I had to more thoroughly understand myself. And I had to learn a great deal about how other people lived. Of course, I had a passion for writing, and I had been significantly affected by the writers I had been reading . . . I'm not exactly certain if I have successfully achieved even an iota of the goals I have described, but I covet the memories and experience of the journeys I have been taking, and although I dreamed of being a novelist, I have never looked back or stopped to rethink my decision or direction. I continue my total involvement in the creative nonfiction experience - an odyssey that has consumed me and monumentally enriched my life. | |
