Lee Martin
HERE'S SOMETHING I CAN'T GET OUT OF MY MIND THESE days, which seems as good a place as any for me to begin to see what I have to tell you about writing creative nonfiction.
So much of the genre centers on exactly what the writer doesn't know. It's that curiosity and uncertainty that requires the essay, which is ideally an attempt on the writer's part to discover what he or she really thinks and feels about a particular topic. A good essay is an act of exploration, an examination of character and situation, but also an examination of the writer's own intellectual and emotional responses to something that simply won't let him or her go.
What do you have right now that you can't stop thinking about? Something from the present? The past? The future? Something you lived through or, as in what I'm about to tell you, something you heard told or something you read about in print?
I come from a rural part of southeastern Illinois, and from 1969 through 1975, I lived in the small town of Sumner, population in the neighborhood of one thousand at the time. Just prior to my birth, in 1955, the town celebrated its centennial. My parents purchased one of the books, Trails of Yesterday, printed to commemorate the occasion, and that book has survived these last fifty-one years, somewhere along the line coming to rest on my shelves. On the first page, there's a message addressed to the future, specifically to those who will be around to plan the second centennial celebration, in 2054. “We have faith in the future,” the 1954 townspeople write, “and we anticipate a continuously steady development of our community.” No hope could have ended up more unfulfilled, for what happened, boiled down to its simplest elements and directly stated, is this: the economy went sour, and folks, looking for a little extra kick, figured out how to make methampheta-mine. Now the place is filthy with it, but there happens to be a police officer who's determined to do everything he can to reduce the problem. He finds the meth labs, makes the arrests, and turns the violators over for prosecution.
Then he comes home one evening—here's the hard part to say, the thing that won't let me go—and finds his bird dog in his backyard beat so near to death the only thing to do is have the vet put him down.
The report in the paper quotes the county sheriff, who says that of course it had to be retaliation for all those meth arrests. It had to have been a lowlife like that.
And maybe it was. Wicked people do wicked things all the time. We know that. But the path they travel—this path from innocence to corruption (innocence because aren't we all innocent before life gets a good hold on us and shows us exactly what we're capable of?)—is often much more complicated than the final result would indicate. It's so easy to rush to judgment when we forget that fact, when we only hold the despicable event in our hearts and minds. Hold it there, we should, of course, but to hold only that is to simplify our common lot in a way that goes against the grain of what we know about human beings. We know that all of us are made up of contradictions. The most loathsome among us can at times be charming; the most saintly can have their moments of ill-advised behavior. These contradictions are what make us noteworthy— interesting because we can't, at any given moment, be fully defined and known.
So this person who beat the police officer's dog? I don't mean to condone that action, only to point out the difference between news and story. The former relies on facts but in a superficial way. Yes, this is what happened. Yes, someone beat that dog. We read that item in the newspaper, and we get angry, sad, vengeful. We shake our heads. “What kind of a person?” we mutter, and suddenly we're in the land of story, that land that exists just beneath the facts, and this is the place where essays begin, at this point of unknowing, this point of sensing there's more to the event and the people involved than a newspaper report can hold.
When I wrote my first memoir, From Our House, I wanted to take a hard look at my father, who lost his hands in a farming accident when I was barely a year old and became an angry man. I knew him as a father who was quick-tempered and inclined to reach for a belt, a yardstick, or a persimmon switch with which to punish me. I knew the clench of his jaw muscles, the sign that his temper was about to boil over, and I knew the welts he often left on my skin, but those memories alone weren't enough to require the writing. You see, I also recalled perfectly pleasant moments in my father's company—listening to baseball games on the radio, replaying my basketball games when I was older, accompanying him as he did good turns for neighbors down on their luck—and the intersection of those moments of temper and those moments of pleasure made it difficult, as it had all my life, to know what I really thought about him and the life we had as father and son.
This way of looking at characters from more than one angle, thereby seeing more and more aspects of the personality, is common to the fiction writer. When I wrote my most recent novel, The Bright Forever, for example, I wanted to explore characters—each of them affected in some way by the central event of the book, the kidnapping of a nine-year-old girl—who weren't wholly good or evil. I had to find moments of shortcoming for the “good” characters and moments of innocence for the “bad” characters. Sometimes I see nonfiction writers who are just beginning to attempt the genre—particularly writers of memoirs that feature childhood experiences with people bent on causing harm to them—determine early on exactly who their characters are. A person who hurt them is cast as a villain in the early pages, and, because the writer can see that person only in a narrowly defined way, the character never has the chance to demonstrate any other facets of his or her nature. It's important, then, to remind the nonfiction writer that, like the fiction writer, who deals with invented characters, his or her obligation to the real people and places that make up the stuff of the nonfiction is to see them as fully and with as much generosity as possible.
Fleshing out people in a piece of nonfiction and making them multidimensional is often a matter of paying attention to research. Yes, you can find the facts attached to a specific event and the people involved, but what's the story beneath those facts? Here, like a good archaeologist, the nonfiction writer often unearths artifacts and then uses them to come to conclusions about the people who once possessed them. After my father's death, for example, I found a Farm Bureau pamphlet upon which he had written his name again and again in a beautiful, flowing script. I knew from the date of the pamphlet and the grace of the penmanship that he'd written his name there when he was still an unmarried man, past the age of thirty-five, living alone on the farm with his aged, nearly blind mother. When I looked at his name, written over and over with such insistence, it seemed to me that he was expressing a desire to escape his bachelorhood—which he soon would, marrying my mother when he was thirty-eight. When I looked at that hand-writing, he became someone much different than the angry father I'd always known. Likewise, when I found a school photograph of him at the end of a line of classmates—I estimate that he was in the seventh or eighth grade at the time—I took note of the way he stood slightly apart from the next person in line and the way he just barely tipped his face up to meet the camera and the hesitant look on his face, and I imagined him as a shy, gentle boy who had no idea what life would do to him and how it would remake him into a person he didn't know he was going to become.
Artifacts such as the pamphlet and the photograph brought me closer to my father and also took me farther away from him because they made him more difficult to classify. In a sense, they made him into something new, and they took me deeper into my unknowing. How was I to respond to him? Was he the angry father I so often knew, or was he the shy boy who was hesitant in the world, or was he the hopeful bachelor desperate to escape his loneliness? He was all of those people, of course. The artifacts suggested as much as they took me deeper into his character and then, by extension, led me more completely into our relationship, which was the thing I'd come to explore. There's always more to something than meets the eye—more to people, particularly—and the good nonfiction writer uses the artifacts at hand, as the following writing activity asks, to cast off across an uncharted river of unknowing, eager to see what waits on the other side.
Write down everything you think you know about a person, a place, or an event. “This is the sort of person who would …” “This is a place where …” “This event occurred because …” Act as if you know everything there is to know.
Then do some research with the challenge of finding out something you didn't know. Read newspaper reports, conduct interviews, look at photographs, poke around in the county courthouse records, visit a local or state historical society. Find something that makes you look at the person, place, or event from a different angle. Find something that opens the material up in a way you couldn't have predicted.
Create a passage that contains a moment of surprise, a moment where for the first time you knew something in a way you never knew it previously. If writing about a person, you might begin with the prompt “Usually my father [or whomever you're exploring] …” The idea here is to establish a baseline for the person by offering up what may be the prevalent aspect of his or her character as you recall it. You're looking for habitual action. “Usually my father checked the locks each night at bedtime and then tromped up the stairs, pausing at the top to tell my brother and me to pipe down and go to sleep.” Then continue by veering off from that baseline with the prompt “Then one night [or day] …” You might say, for example, “Then one night, we didn't hear him coming up the stairs. We waited and waited, but all we heard was the ticking of the grandfather clock on the landing. Finally, we crept out of our bedroom, looked through the stairway railing, and saw our father kneeling on the floor below us, his hands clasped together in prayer.” You can do the same, of course, by using not memory but something discovered in research, as I did with the Farm Bureau pamphlet and the photograph. You can also do the same for a place or an event. All you have to do is write about what you knew and then show us the information or artifact that turned your certainty on its ear.
FOR FURTHER CONSIDERATION: It's important that nonfiction writers know enough to get a piece of writing under way. They know what it was like to be a part of their family, for instance, or they know what it's like to live in a particular town, or they know the facts of a specific event. It's equally important for these writers to admit to themselves and to us that they don't know everything, that there's still much to be learned. Their research, then, as long as they're open to such learning, can take them to interesting places that will complicate what they think and feel. If indeed the essay is a conversation between the various parts of the writer's self as he or she attempts to come to some sort of meaning, then it's absolutely crucial that the writer open him- or herself to the various contradictions within that self as well as within others, and the places that they occupy. Research isn't just gathering facts; it's also a chance to discover something new and unanticipated in our responses to the world at large.