Discovery, Despair, Dead, Done.

“Good morning,” my husband said.

“Creative Nonfiction has to be true,” I replied.

He put down his reader and looked at me in that patient-I’m-gonna-point-out-the-painfully-obvious way he has and he said, “That’s why they call it nonfiction.”

Epiphanies before coffee are not pleasant.

Let me explain. My daughter Grace, who is a talented writer, is taking a creative writing course at a local college. She writes “literary.” She’s good at it. She wants to be awarded a Pulitzer one day. And to be honest, there’s a good chance she will be.

Ah, to be “honest.” There’s the rub.

I’ve been telling stories my whole life. Some of them, I’ve been telling so long I think they’re true.

I have only ever considered writing nonfiction during moments of greed. Nonfiction sells better. Or during the rare psychotic break, when delusions of grandeur tell me I can write the definitive biography of Dr. Angie Debo.

Grace believes I can write anything she wants me to and right now she is studying creative nonfiction and is enthralled with it. She’s grown up with my stories and loves them. (She’s a good daughter.)

Last Friday I wrote a favorite story from my childhood. It was good. It was better than good, it was grand! It would be accepted on the first submission. Readers would await my next nonfiction story with bated breath. There would be a book, a collection of my recollections.

Then serious questions arose. Should I use real names? If I do, will I be accosted at the local Walmart by an angry relative? Or sued by an angry relative of someone in the story?

I ordered books. They came yesterday, only a week after I wrote the story. Lee Gutkind’s You Can't Make This Stuff Up has an index of words so I cut right to the chase, page 37. “If a person is identifiable . . . you are not shielded from litigation.” Even if you change the name.

Then comes a section he heads “Libel, Defamation, and Writing About the Dead.” I’m saved. I’m the only one in the story still alive.

But – there’s always a but isn’t there – he goes on to say “be honest, accurate, and ever so careful.” He uses words like “fact check” and “ethical” and “legal” and “moral.” He tells frightening stories about journalists and novelists, and biographers who were “caught.”

Okay. My dad’s still alive and he knew all these people in my creative nonfiction. So I asked him, “Do you remember So-and-so?”

He did.

“Was he the local Such-and-so?”

Daddy laughed. “No. He was the depot agent for the railroad.”

Discovery. Despair. That piece of creative nonfiction is Dead. And I’m Done.

But wait. It’s a good story. It’s just not true. I can Deal with that.