Issue 29 / 2006
29 / A Million Little Choices: The ABCs of CNF
A How-To Guide
This issue contains a glossary of concise entries that define and explain the anchoring elements of the genre, from scene and dialogue to acknowledging your sources. It’s everything you need to know to avoid the James Frey jinx. This special issue also contains an introductory essay by editor Lee Gutkind, explaining the evolution of the creative nonfiction genre, and a behind-the-scenes snapshot of Frey, the subject of recent uproar about the issue of truth in creative nonfiction.
Note: This issue is out of stock, but has been republished and expanded as Keep It Real: Everything You Need to Know About Researching and Writing Creative Nonfiction. This book includes all the entries from Issue 29, plus several additional mini-essays.
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A Million Little Choices
This issue of Creative Nonfiction was inspired by the controversy generated by the revelation that James Frey had exaggerated or made up a good deal of the content of his best-selling memoir, “A Million Little Pieces.”Creative Nonfiction: A Movement, Not a Moment
This may come as a surprise, but I don’t know who actually coined the term creative nonfiction. As far as I know, nobody knows. I have been using it for a long time, though, as have others, and although the term came into vogue relatively recently (about the time I started this journal, 13 years ago), the kind of writing it describes has a long history.Notes on Frey
How does one begin to defend James Frey, the infamous lying memoirist? By asking readers to imagine a future in which memoirists write and sign affidavits when they hand in their manuscripts?For Further Reading
We’re sorry; we’re currently unable to make this work available online.Acknowledgement of Sources
In April 2004, Bryony Lavery’s play “Frozen” debuted on Broadway. It received rave reviews, garnering Tony nominations for the play, its two stars and the director. Lavery basked in the success—at least, until psychiatrist Dorothy Lewis read the play’s script and hired a lawyer.Backdoor Access
Gay Talese is a master at getting interviews—or making do without them, in dire circumstances. He details a case in point in his recent memoir, “A Writer’s Life.” Talese had flown from the U.S.Composite Characters
For some writers, a composite character—that is, the melding of two or more real people into one—crosses the line into fiction. Those coming from a journalist tradition in particular find the blurring of characters for whatever reason a violation of the factual base of nonfiction.Compression
Imagine a writer working on a complicated profile for a magazine, a story about a man with radical, unsettling ideas. If his theories prove to be correct, this man could dramatically change the entire field of psychoanalysis.The Creative Nonfiction Writer as Tour Guide
In Charleston, there is a tour guide who can show visitors stand-alone garages on back alleys that once served as slave quarters, point out street corners that figure prominently in Gershwin’s opera “Porgy and Bess,” and sing—in a clear tenor voice— the calls of the street vendors in the opera.ADefamation and Libel
Here are two important tenets of libel law every writer should know: (1) no matter how scurrilous, if what you say is true, it cannot be libel; and (2) generally speaking, you can’t libel a dead person.The Evolution of Creative Nonfiction
We have several ways to tell this story. A popular place to begin is in the 1960s when a group of hard-working reporters and magazine writers began to chafe under the normal restrictions of journalistic writing.Fact-Checking
The James Frey scandal may have made the largest headlines this year, but Frey is far from the only writer who has duped the public. Take the case of Nasdijj, a prize-winning Navajo author who was unveiled by L.A.Facts
Facts such as statistics, numbers and demographic data—the kind of information derived from mundane legwork, research and scholarship—are the roots of creative nonfiction; they comprise the important teaching element, the informational content introduced throughout the story that leads to the reader’s sense of discovery.Frame
The plot of a story—the documented change in people, places or objects in nonfiction as well as fiction—poses questions: What is happening? What has caused this to happen? And, most importantly, how will it end?Gunkholing
Gunkholing is an old sailors’ pastime; if the fish aren’t biting, sailors sometimes pull their boats into secluded coves to cast and lower their nets in order to find what muck and materials lie on the ocean’s floor.The History of Memoir
A 16-year-old boy, lousy with lust and a certain lassitude, falls in with a fast crowd and, one evening, purloins the pears from a tree near his family’s vineyard. He and his gang aren’t particularly hungry; they sample a few and throw the rest to the hogs.The “I”
Ursula K. Le Guin may have coined the most succinct description of the character called I that’s constructed on the page: “I am an artist… and therefore a liar. Distrust everything I say.Immersion
The dark bar smells of decades of cigarette smoke. The Mexicans gathered at the table are desperate, poor and about to risk all they have to cross the border into the United States.Influencing Readers
Great creative nonfiction does not shirk from controversial topics—or, sometimes, from passing judgment on them. After all, writers become fully engaged in their subjects and inevitably come to conclusions about them, and often they will want readers to share these conclusions.Legal Responsibilities of Publishers
One of the hardest things for people to understand about libel law is that publishers are legally as liable as writers are. Even if the publishing company clearly states, in a disclaimer at the front of a memoir or a newspaper editorial, that someone else is the author of the statement and the publisher is not endorsing the statement as true, the publisher has an obligation to print only the truth.Metaphor
Metaphor, as everyone learns in elementary school, is the comparison of two unlike things, usually for the purpose of providing a new way to look at one, or maybe even both, of the things.Narrative History
Historians have always crafted narratives. War. Peace. Political battles. Feuds in the hollers. Floods on the Mississippi. Hurricanes. Strikes. Assassinations. Voyages to known and unknown places. Trials of the century. Personal quests.The Narrative Impulse
It’s been 10 years since James Atlas declared ours “the age of the literary memoir” in The New York Times, and the public’s appetite for true tales of the self, imaginatively told, seems boundless.Navel-Gazing
Danny Bonaduce, poster boy for former child-stars gone wild, stares straight into the camera. “My life is a train wreck,” he says. “You’re welcome to watch.” This was the promo for “Breaking Bonaduce,” last year’s controversial reality series starring the steroid-pumped but still freckly Bonaduce; his sighing wife, Gretchen; and their VH1-appointed therapist, Dr.Point of View
In creative nonfiction, especially in personal narratives, we can easily begin to feel imprisoned by the bars of “I, I, I” that tend to pepper our prose.Reconstruction of Scene and Dialogue
Our memories function as though we have an internal, private documentary film about our entire lives—only it’s been formatted to the wrong video-software, and it scrambles across different files on several bad disks.Subjectivity
In traditional journalism, reporters are supposed to be objective, to maintain the style of an omniscient, invisible presence. This objectivity is an essential component of journalistic integrity. But writers like Tom Wolfe or Joan Didion, proponents of New Journalism, rejected this notion; instead, they and other writers accepted as necessary the presence, personality and perceptions of the author.Tape Recording
The tape recorder would seem to be God’s gift to writers, allowing them to access complete conversations long after the fact and quote dialogue with confidence. During the writing process, having tape recordings or transcripts at hand can be invaluable.Truth
As philosophers have told us for centuries, passing the truth of immediate experience into some form that can be handed on to others is difficult. Troubled with levels and degrees, mixed with fact, memory and interpretation, truth in storytelling is rarely black and white.Use of Family Members as Characters
In his popular memoir, “Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim,” David Sedaris analogizes his work as a memoirist to that of a garbage man discarding the family trash. The job stinks.The Vagaries of Memory
from The Vagaries of Memory.Human recollection is, to a large extent, a mystery. Combing through the shifting layers of time, we discover half ideas, fragmented scenes and incomplete sentences. Details from significant life events are lost, while a kindergarten teacher’s name is inscribed permanently in the mind.Whose Story to Tell
In “Nonfiction in First Person, without Apology,” Natalia Rachel Singer describes one of her first forays into nonfiction writing. Singer was sent by her journalism professor to follow the trail of the madam of a local brothel.Writers’ Responsibilities to Subjects
In “The Journalist and the Murderer,” Janet Malcolm focuses on a libel suit between Jeffrey MacDonald, a convicted murderer, and the celebrity biographer he hired to write his story, as a way of examining the relationship between writer and subject.