Meaning It As Fiction: Creative Non Fiction and Dirty Realism
We know that bad things can happen when you call fiction non-fiction. The other way around seems more a matter of preference. Privy happened, but I mean the piece as fiction. It’s not interesting to me at all as a creative non-fiction because the point isn’t that it happened, it’s that sometime after I remember it a certain way and the narrative voice, my own view of it, is fictive. The details are all true, but who cares? I mean it as fiction because of what fiction is and what fiction does.
Hemingway said “All good books have one thing in common - they are truer than if they had really happened,” and that’s only partly true. Lots of his best work was cribbed directly from his life. On the other hand, if by good book we mean something with a classic plot structure and balance and foreshadowing and parallelism, he’s exactly right. That’s also why, for many, there will be a colossal so-what factor working against something like Privy or against what in fiction we’ve come to call dirty realism.
So, can a true, boring story be fiction? Anyone that knows the story will only ever see the writer in it and not the fictive, creative impulse that made him write it in the first place. But it’s fiction if he means it to be. Otherwise its journalism. As flash fiction, Privy works. As a news story it’s pointless.
Tags: Creative Non Fiction, dirty realism, Flash fiction, Literature, writing
April 21, 2008 at 5:31 pm
I think nearly all good fiction is grounded heavily in the author’s experiences, not always in the events of the plot, but perhaps, for example, in the personalities of the characters.
Can a true, boring story be fiction? Absolutely. Privy is apparently true and the plot, which can be boiled down to essentially “guy visits college and sees an attractive girl while his friend loses a button”, is hardly riveting. I am not sure that plot even matters in this style of writing; it is the narrator’s perspective on those events that is interesting.
I will not deign to guess at Hemingway’s intent, but I would say that all good literature contains Truth with a capital ‘T’ — illumination of the human condition — that is far more important than the mundane facts on which it may or may not have been based. A cursory reading of Privy, for example, reveals two Truths to me: that it is the most trivial of details that form our memories and shape our psyches, and that even in what is called “young adulthood” each year rushes past more quickly than the last, leaving only memories and a longing to return to earlier times. I never visited NYU or had any of these other specific experiences, but the heart of the story is my truth as much as it is yours.
April 23, 2008 at 3:11 pm
great insights on this Chad. I think you’re right: it’s not so much what happened but that the author found something worth relating in what happened (or even better, maybe, what didn’t happen), and hopefully the reader does too. I’m very pleased that you did.
May 7, 2008 at 7:12 pm
[...] Is Personal We talked a few weeks ago about the degree to which we can legitimately frame creative non-fiction as fiction. It’s worth mentioning that even when you’re self-consciously writing fiction [...]