Creative Nonfiction: Memoir & Personal Essays

The one aspect of creative nonfiction that most writers agree upon is that it is personal. Creative nonfiction, whether it is a memoir, a personal essay, or new journalism, is told from the first person point of view. Traditional fiction writing techniques that emphasize voice, character, scene, dialogue, and narration are used in creative nonfiction.

Voice, or style, which also portrays the writer's character through the use of diction, colloquials, accent, punctuation, is of paramount importance. It is what makes the story unique enough that only the author could have written it. So yes, it helps to have had an extraordinary life, but the quality of any story really resides in the telling of it. If you’re a good storyteller and writer, you've done enough living to tell an engaging story.

Memoir varies from autobiography in one respect: It is not a chronological rendition of your life. Memoirs are theme-based, often relying on such topics as death and dying, birth, divorce, illness, and romantic relationships as their major organizing themes.

Like personal essay writers, memoirists do not attempt to hide the fact that they are indeed presenting their story. “It” didn’t just passively happen. They made it happen, watched it happen, or were there to help pick up the pieces after it happened. They were somehow involved. New journalists do not just record what happens; they tell us their reactions to the events.

To the best of their ability, creative nonfiction writers (usually) tell the truth in terms of events and emotions, and the gist of conversations. Therefore, we can often tell people that we are being as truthful as we possibly can.

Some of us may put dialogue in quotation marks, others may forego the marks, because rarely can anyone reconstruct the exact dialogue of events/scenes that took place ten, twenty, or thirty years or more ago. Whether to use the marks is a literary choice. Readers often get disoriented if their normal cues are traded, so some of us use quotation marks when we have only nailed the gist of an old discussion.

And no, creative nonfiction writers are not obligated to tell all. If we feel that the privacy of living persons will be compromised or we are just too uncomfortable with relating various aspects of our personal knowledge, we may work around those limitations, if at all possible.

What I really enjoy about the genre of creative nonfiction is that it is liberating, and it gives us average joes and janes a voice.