“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.
