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7 Techniques That Will Bring Your Creative Nonfiction to Life by Cecilia Shutter

Posted by Guest Post | Mar 2, 2021 | Blog , WRITING - MEMBERS ONLY , Writing Nonfiction | 0

The artfulness of creative nonfiction (also referred to as literary or narrative nonfiction), lies in the use of literary techniques, typically associated with novels, plays, and poetry, to bring a true story to life — so that it can be enjoyed for the finesse of the language and the craft of storytelling as well as what they stand to learn. Whether you’re writing a memoir, a lyric essay, or a piece of literary journalism, here are seven techniques that you can use to lift your creative nonfiction right up off the page.

“Show don’t tell”

When writing nonfiction , it can be tempting to state things plainly so that your reader can follow the facts, but this may fall flat for someone who’s hoping to get lost in what they’re reading. One way to avoid this is to heed the adage usually applied to writing fiction: ‘Show don’t tell”.

Rather than telling the reader that things are a certain way, try to convey setting and story through vivid sensory details and descriptions of actions or reactions. This is also an effective tool for characterization in that you can build a strong impression of a character by describing their thoughts and actions. Readers enjoy interpreting and so allowing them to do a little bit of the work will make your writing much more compelling and enjoyable than just having everything spelled out for them.

There’s probably a particular theme or significant idea that’s central to your work. While this can present itself literally at various points in the action or description, you may wish to allude to it in a more symbolic way by employing a recurring motif. This could be a particular image, word, or turn of phrase. Whether the representation is literal or highly abstract or literal, it’s imperative that it occurs repeatedly and will be picked up by the reader. A motif can add an overall depth and cohesion to your work, and give your reader something to look out for that’s extremely satisfying to spot.

In Media Res

As a writer , it’s up to you to decide how exactly you’re going to structure your narrative. The way in which events unfold can affect your reader’s interest, the flow of the story, and the atmosphere of the work. One way of doing things is to begin in media res — which is fancy-talk for ‘right in the middle of the action’. Starting your piece of creative nonfiction in media res immediately hooks the reader’s attention; then, you can take your time building up the backstory and gradually reveal the lead up to that climactic moment where you kicked things off.

Choosing the right moment at which to begin hinges entirely on which scene is most relevant to the conflict at the heart of the book. An in media res structure does not give you free reign to start from any dramatic point in your story, but rather to craft an interesting starting point that enhances the subsequent exposition, perhaps making it more tense and urgent.

This figurative device is perhaps one of the hallmarks of creative writing and images of Juliet as the sun might spring to mind when you hear the word metaphor. Much like the explanatory power of an analogy, which can be found in both fiction and nonfiction, the likening of two things through metaphor helps to highlight certain qualities or details that are particularly important in that moment. Metaphors can be broader than just one isolated comparison between two things in a specific line or paragraph; you might like to make use of an extended metaphor, which runs throughout a piece of work, to bring further understanding and tangibility to a complex idea.

Polyvocality

Polyvocality is a technique in which more than one ‘voice’ is used in a single work. This usually takes the form of a story told from the viewpoints of several different people — broadening interest for your reader and allowing you to approach the same idea in multiple ways — but this is not the only approach.

Polyvocality also allows an author to make use of distinctly different dialects or registers of the language; for example, switching between colloquial American English and academic English. This is known as code-switching. Code-switching does not necessitate that the various ‘voices’ be of different people, but rather that they differ in linguistic quality. This might convey a transition from the public to the private sphere for one single character, or may highlight the relevant sociopolitical considerations surrounding this speaker’s linguistic choices.

Rather than merely stating and accepting a fact or decision, you might want to draw out the consideration of other options, or big questions, by rhetorically expressing doubt as to what the right answer may be. The use of aporia, whether on behalf of a character or in the form of authorial musings, enables you to emphasize the intricacy of a question or problem and elicit thought from your reader. By stirring up the questions that surround your chosen topic, you are inviting the reader to play a more active role in engaging with the subject matter at hand. In the case of a memoir, or any work of nonfiction with a key character, aporia can also be effective in drawing readers into the dilemma or turmoil that this character is experiencing, eliciting a sympathetic response.

Adnomination

Sounds are an incredibly effective way in which to draw your reader’s focus to a particular phrase, thereby emphasizing its meaning. By employing adnomination, the repetition of words that come from the same root, you can create such a powerful sound effect. While this is one that should certainly be used sparingly, it can be extremely evocative and add rhythm and musicality to your writing.

From a marketing perspective as well, phrases that make use of adnomination, and clear sound effects in general, tend to be quite memorable, so they often work well as taglines or quotables — perfect for spreading the word about your work, or simply earning your piece of creative nonfiction a place in your reader’s memory.

And that’s it! Once you’ve nailed down the research for your work of creative nonfiction, armed with these tips, you’ll be ready to start writing a masterpiece!

Author Bio:

Cecilia is a writer with Reedsy , a marketplace that connects self-publishing authors with the world’s best editors, designers, and marketers.

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Frelection: The Transformative Power of Reflection in Nonfiction

Late one September afternoon I was sitting with my friends’ three-year-old daughter at the edge of a lake in Central Park. “Look!” she said. “At the frelection of the clouds. In the water.” Yes, I thought. Frelection. The perfect word to suggest what we were witnessing. Frelection, the word itself turning backwards, suggesting the nature of the reflective process—the action of energy bending, turning, curving reality back to us.

In discussions about writing, we usually speak of reflection in rhetorical terms, as a mode of thought or a tone of voice that we employ when we ruminate, meditate, contemplate, explain, survey—in brief, when we provide what Philip Gerard, in his book CREATIVE NONFICTION , calls “finished thought.” But what interests me more is the notion of reflection as a turning, convoluting, sometimes distorting but always transforming power. In this spirit, I will briefly list four qualities of reflection and suggest ways to encourage artistic transformations in our writing.

1) First, reflection is a process of change. In the language of physics, reflection is the phenomenon in which energy is returned after impinging upon a surface. Once our experience of “real life” encounters a different medium—our memories, for instance, or the writing process itself—that real life experience is changed. The clouds my friend’s daughter saw that day were not in the water. What we see, in reflection, is never the thing itself, but a reconfigured version. When we reflect, we in effect break an experience into pieces then reassemble the pieces into a new form. Even the word remember suggests that a breaking has occured. When we re-member, we put the broken pieces back, the broken members. This dis-membering and resultant re-membering occurs despite our bravest attempts at accuracy, and it begins long before we put pen to paper.

So one of the most helpful things we can do as writers is to relinquish early on the notion that we can capture reality. The words themselves—for once we put pen to paper, we are in cahoots with the words—reassemble the memory in new and surprising ways. One word calls to another, and the essay is off on its own journey. When a student comes to me, as students often do, complaining that she has failed to “capture” her mother on paper, I tell her that of course she hasn’t. Capturing is impossible. Your mother, I explain, is made of blood and flesh and hair; your writing is made of words. I mean this to be comforting, and I explain why. Once we release the notion that we can capture our mother on paper, we are free to do what we can do: describe the strapless gown she wore that summer night, narrate the tale of her birth, circle round and round the questions our mind is asking.

2) Reflections require a reflective surface, some other medium to bounce off of. And that surface affects the image that is formed. The clouds “frelected” in the Central Park lake create very different images depending on whether the lake is still, softly rippling, or turbulently roiling. As writers, our reflective surfaces are our words. But what kind of surface will we use? Lyric? Dramatic? Narrative? Segmented? Will we try to depict reality as smoothly and realistically as possible? Or will we consciously break up the reality, rough up the surface so that the reflection becomes distorted or diffuse?

3) Reflections begin at what physicists call the point of incidence, the place where the thing itself encounters the reflective surface. In literary circles, this point of incidence is sometimes called the “occasion of the telling” or simply the “entry point.” John Dewey, in ART AS EXPERIENCE , suggests that the occasion that induces reflection is almost always discord, and I tend to agree with him. I think of the point of incidence as the sand in the oyster, the rock in the shoe, the place where something rubs against something else, the point of tension. So a helpful question to ask while reflecting upon an experience is not only Why am I writing this, but also Why am I writing this at this particular time? What is the occasion of the telling? Why now? Why here? What is the point of incidence?

4) Finally, reflections require a viewer, a perceiver. The reflection is influenced by the positioning of this viewer in time and in space and also by the internal landscape of the viewer. Here are a few suggestions for encouraging fresh reflections in your viewfinder:

* Frame the experience differently. Cut the story into three sections, for instance, and frame it as a triptych. Crop the scene at a different place. Leave something out that you thought was essential. *Try a different lens. If you’ve written all close-up scenes, snap on a wide-angle lens and pull back for the big view. If you’ve written all distanced summary, apply the close-up lens of scenic detail. * Change the way you use time. Squeeze a lifetime into 60 seconds, or stretch 60 seconds into a day. Start your autobiography a year before you were born, or 2000 years before. But remember, reflection doesn’t always mean looking BACK. Try driving the time engine in a different direction. As the Queen in ALICE IN WONDERLAND said, “It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backwards.” Employ flashforward as well as flashback. * Change the distance at which you are standing, in actual or psychic space. If enough time has not yet elapsed to give you distance on your subject, take the winemaker’s advice and serve no story before its time. But if you’ve waited too long, if the experience has cooled so much that it no longer matters to you, find a way to bring it emotionally closer. * Apply a different light, especially if you are a character in your own story. It’s hard to see all sides of yourself when looking in a mirror—and thank God for small favors. But try shining the same light on yourself as you have on the other characters. On the other hand, if you’ve been too hard on yourself, lighten up. We’re all just characters in this drama, this photograph, this memory. The one reflected on the water. The one that, try as we might, we can never recapture but we can nevertheless transform.

Rebecca McClanahan is the author of eight books, most recently The Riddle Song and Other Rememberings . Her work has appeared in The Best American Essays, The Best American Poetry, and in numerous journals and anthologies. Her newest work appears in Ms. Magazine, The Gettysburg Review, The Southern Review , and Short Takes: Brief Encounters in With Contemporary Nonfiction . McClanahan’s craft text, Word Painting: A Guide to Writing More Descriptively , has just gone into its fourth printing. She can be reached at www.mcclanmuse.com .

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Creative Nonfiction: An Overview

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The Creative Nonfiction (CNF) genre can be rather elusive. It is focused on story, meaning it has a narrative plot with an inciting moment, rising action, climax and denoument, just like fiction. However, nonfiction only works if the story is based in truth, an accurate retelling of the author’s life experiences. The pieces can vary greatly in length, just as fiction can; anything from a book-length autobiography to a 500-word food blog post can fall within the genre.

Additionally, the genre borrows some aspects, in terms of voice, from poetry; poets generally look for truth and write about the realities they see. While there are many exceptions to this, such as the persona poem, the nonfiction genre depends on the writer’s ability to render their voice in a realistic fashion, just as poetry so often does. Writer Richard Terrill, in comparing the two forms, writes that the voice in creative nonfiction aims “to engage the empathy” of the reader; that, much like a poet, the writer uses “personal candor” to draw the reader in.

Creative Nonfiction encompasses many different forms of prose. As an emerging form, CNF is closely entwined with fiction. Many fiction writers make the cross-over to nonfiction occasionally, if only to write essays on the craft of fiction. This can be done fairly easily, since the ability to write good prose—beautiful description, realistic characters, musical sentences—is required in both genres.

So what, then, makes the literary nonfiction genre unique?

The first key element of nonfiction—perhaps the most crucial thing— is that the genre relies on the author’s ability to retell events that actually happened. The talented CNF writer will certainly use imagination and craft to relay what has happened and tell a story, but the story must be true. You may have heard the idiom that “truth is stranger than fiction;” this is an essential part of the genre. Events—coincidences, love stories, stories of loss—that may be expected or feel clichéd in fiction can be respected when they occur in real life .

A writer of Creative Nonfiction should always be on the lookout for material that can yield an essay; the world at-large is their subject matter. Additionally, because Creative Nonfiction is focused on reality, it relies on research to render events as accurately as possible. While it’s certainly true that fiction writers also research their subjects (especially in the case of historical fiction), CNF writers must be scrupulous in their attention to detail. Their work is somewhat akin to that of a journalist, and in fact, some journalism can fall under the umbrella of CNF as well. Writer Christopher Cokinos claims, “done correctly, lived well, delivered elegantly, such research uncovers not only facts of the world, but reveals and shapes the world of the writer” (93). In addition to traditional research methods, such as interviewing subjects or conducting database searches, he relays Kate Bernheimer’s claim that “A lifetime of reading is research:” any lived experience, even one that is read, can become material for the writer.

The other key element, the thing present in all successful nonfiction, is reflection. A person could have lived the most interesting life and had experiences completely unique to them, but without context—without reflection on how this life of experiences affected the writer—the reader is left with the feeling that the writer hasn’t learned anything, that the writer hasn’t grown. We need to see how the writer has grown because a large part of nonfiction’s appeal is the lessons it offers us, the models for ways of living: that the writer can survive a difficult or strange experience and learn from it. Sean Ironman writes that while “[r]eflection, or the second ‘I,’ is taught in every nonfiction course” (43), writers often find it incredibly hard to actually include reflection in their work. He expresses his frustration that “Students are stuck on the idea—an idea that’s not entirely wrong—that readers need to think” (43), that reflecting in their work would over-explain the ideas to the reader. Not so. Instead, reflection offers “the crucial scene of the writer writing the memoir” (44), of the present-day writer who is looking back on and retelling the past. In a moment of reflection, the author steps out of the story to show a different kind of scene, in which they are sitting at their computer or with their notebook in some quiet place, looking at where they are now, versus where they were then; thinking critically about what they’ve learned. This should ideally happen in small moments, maybe single sentences, interspersed throughout the piece. Without reflection, you have a collection of scenes open for interpretation—though they might add up to nothing.

Writing Memoir and Writing for Therapy

An inquiry on the functions of reflection.

A year and a half into my undergraduate studies, my boyfriend Matthew committed suicide, which threw a wrench into the straight line I’d envisioned my college life would follow. I transferred schools before dropping out and then floated around for a while. His was the first death I’d experienced, and it changed me irrevocably. Amid my grief, I puzzled over how removed Americans are from death and loss.

Eventually I resumed my studies, at the University of Minnesota, and enrolled in “Cinematics of Loss,” a film class offered by the English department. The professor had recently written a book about how she’d never properly grieved her father’s death—he had drowned when she was nine—until as an adult, she found herself sobbing at every film she attended. We watched Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Blue , Peter Weir’s Fearless , and Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Maborosi . I wrote a paper analyzing the ways in which Todd Field’s beautiful film In the Bedroom , based on Andre Dubus’s short story “Killings,” captures the differences between masculine and feminine grief.

One day, I approached the professor and said something clumsy like, “This is what I want to do with my life.” I didn’t know quite what this was, but I knew I wanted to be engaged with the human questions of loss and grief, to acknowledge them as an essential part of being. I wanted to write and think and talk about them. I thought, first, about psychotherapy and then, briefly, considered becoming a funeral director. (With the Baby Boomers rounding that metaphorical bend, there’d be no shortage of work.) “Have you considered creative nonfiction?” my professor asked. I had never heard of creative nonfiction as a literary form, though like many, I’d certainly read it and even written a bit.

On the first day of “Introduction to Literary Nonfiction,” the instructor, a graduate student, introduced herself and made an announcement: “This class is not therapy.” Afterward, I went to her office hours in a panic. “But I find writing very therapeutic,” I said. “Am I doing something wrong?”

She backtracked. “I do, too,” she said. “It’s just that last semester, I had students turning in diary entries about what jerks their boyfriends were.”

In making her announcement, my instructor was wrestling to separate reflection, that fundamental element of creative nonfiction, from the task of general psychological introspection. But I wondered: Is there a difference?

In her classic essay “Memory and Imagination,” Patricia Hampl writes:

Our capacity to move forward as developing beings rests on a healthy relationship with the past. Psychotherapy, that widespread method for promoting mental health, relies heavily on memory and on the ability to retrieve and organize images and events from the personal past. . . . If we learn not only to tell our stories but to listen to what our stories tell us—to write the first draft and then return for the second draft—we are doing the work of memory.

Hampl describes how psychotherapy mimics the writing process, but I wondered whether the reverse was also true: Could writing about pain and loss do the work of psychotherapy? And if so, could this writing be “literary,” or did it become something else, something lesser?

While there are clear parallels between reflecting in creative nonfiction and reflecting in our private lives, academia—like the larger culture—remains anxious about crossing into the land of therapy. Do writing teachers fear tissues littered across the floor, strangers breaking down? Or are we afraid of opening our own wounds? We’re trained to compartmentalize relationships and responsibilities, to be professionals. Writing is about writing. Want to be safe? Stick to nature, or call it fiction.

At other times, writing teachers struggle to draw the line between instruction and counseling. In another creative writing class I took, a classmate wrote about the death of her friend’s son, and the professor responded by recommending she read books about grief. The student became frustrated that she was focusing on the subject matter instead of the writing. But in that same class, another student seemed to want more than a literary critique. He wrote about contemplating a jump from the bridge connecting the east and west banks of our campus. He was fixated on John Berryman, the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet who’d taught at Minnesota and committed suicide off that very bridge, which led us to spend valuable workshop time talking around our concerns for his well-being.

These delicate moments do come up, and when they do, sensitive and caring individuals will look to offer comfort; triage requires that we first attend to bleeding wounds. Yet should these situations (which any writing teacher will attest are unavoidable) discourage writers from sharing emotionally charged and personal material? And how can writing teachers acknowledge the complicated relationship between writing and real life without asking students to sanitize the works they present to class?

This tension bears out in Ann Patchett’s afterword to Lucy Grealy’s memoir Autobiography of a Face , which chronicles Grealy’s story of disfiguring jaw cancer. Patchett, who attended the Iowa Writers’ Workshop with Grealy, describes one of Grealy’s readings:

As the crowd in Rizzoli’s wept over the passage she read about being tortured by schoolboys in stairwells, my brave and heroic Lucy made it clear to the audience that she had no interest in being anybody’s inspiration. She was not there as a role model for overcoming obstacles. She was a serious writer, and she wanted her book to be judged for its literary merit and not its heartbreaking content. When people raised their hand to ask a question, more often than not that question turned out to be a statement of what they themselves had endured. Lucy refused to let the evening divulge into a litany of battle stories. . . . [S]he made her point: she was making art, not documenting an event. That she chose to tell her own extraordinary story was of secondary importance. Her cancer and subsequent suffering had not made this book. She had made it. Her intellect and ability were in every sense larger than the disease.

Grealy’s bristling at her readers is typical of the academic response to the emotional content of a memoir: We must not acknowledge the relationship between the content and the writer, lest the writer look like a flawed person and not a literary genius. Yet Patchett commits this very act when she calls Grealy “my brave and heroic Lucy.” Lucy Grealy was a very talented writer, but she was also a girl and a woman who endured the emotional and physical pain of a devastating disease. While it’s true that “her cancer and subsequent suffering had not made this book,” it’s also true that without cancer, there’d have been no book. Most readers don’t pick up a memoir because they imagine it will be literary masterpiece; they’re looking first and foremost for a compelling story. It’s unrealistic of writers to expect readers of memoir—a genre that by its very definition reveals the consciousness of the writer—not to connect with them, just as it’s unrealistic of writing teachers to surgically excise the emotional lives of writers from the material being written.

In 1997, Kathryn Rhett compiled a collection entitled Survival Stories: Memoirs of Crisis , which the New York Times book critic Michiko Kakutani critiqued as “conflat[ing] literature and therapy.” Kakutani took the book’s publication as an opportunity to decry everything wrong with the genre of memoir: “The current memoir craze has fostered the belief that confession is therapeutic, that therapy is redemptive and that redemption equals art, and it has encouraged the delusion that candor, daring and shamelessness are substitutes for craft, that the exposed life is the same thing as an examined one.” I’ve read that sentence many times, looking to find the lapse in logic. I certainly don’t argue with the first two assumptions: 1) “that confession is therapeutic” and 2) “that therapy is redemptive.” At the very least, confession has the potential to be therapeutic, just as therapy can be redemptive. It’s what follows—“that redemption equals art”—that causes the problem.

Kakutani takes issue with this idea. I agree that confession and redemption alone are no formula for good writing or art of any description, but that doesn’t mean that they can’t co-occur. And doesn’t a life have to be exposed—at least in part—before the writer can examine it? Why can’t a memoir speak about trauma or reveal family secrets and still be literary?

In fact, countless books do this well. They typically begin with the writer’s emotional turmoil simply because it’s an easy way to introduce conflict. Losing the Garden: The Story of a Marriage by Laura Waterman begins with the author’s husband leaving their secluded home in the mountains of Vermont to commit suicide. He has planned it out—if suicide can ever be considered a rational decision, a question the book seeks to resolve—and she has allowed him to leave. This memoir explores an act that’s strange and unthinkable. Likewise, Kathryn Harrison, in The Kiss , writes about her adult incestuous relationship with her estranged father. Some readers were put off by what was deemed the taboo nature of her subject (indeed, this may have dominated the conversation about the book), but I’d argue that the desire to read about these very private moments in the lives of others is not simply voyeuristic. It isn’t simply gawking. It’s a human instinct to witness another’s pain, to attempt to understand it, and, ultimately, to learn from it. We want to better know the human experience, the human condition; readers and writers of memoir are both in pursuit of thoughtful reflection.

Other books explore a more prosaic but no less harrowing type of family conflict. In his essay “Shame and Forgetting in the Information Age,” Charles Baxter considers this: “It is natural that a writer would want to write about parents, but recent memoirs seem to have reserved a special place for missing or empty or vacated or just bad fathers. Something has gone wrong with fathers; there is something either shameful or absent about them.” He goes on to name several books I’ve read and loved: Paul Auster’s The Invention of Solitude , Harrison’s The Kiss , Mary Karr’s The Liars’ Club . To his list I would quickly add Rick Bragg’s All Over But the Shoutin’ , J. R. Moehringer’s The Tender Bar , and Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes . Readers want these stories not because they wish to eavesdrop on another’s misfortune, but because fathers are imperfect, because the parent–child relationship is a complex and messy one, because the universal can be understood through the specific.

The repetitions of subject matter, as well as the commercial and literary successes of these titles, suggest that memoir reaches the reader’s psyche in an important way and also that such stories can be thoughtfully crafted. So my struggle with Kakutani’s critique and professors’ disclaimers is that they tell novice writers of creative nonfiction to stay far away from sensitive subject material, from anything that might make the classroom uncomfortably resemble a therapist’s office. It was this dissonance that, for a long time, kept me from understanding that it was okay to write creative nonfiction, to create art in the form of text, and, concurrently, to find therapeutic value in the work.

From my experience in an MFA program, the academy doesn’t like to talk about the fact that writing emotionally driven memoir is, in fact, cathartic, at least initially. That’s the drafting stage—getting it out of one’s head and on to the paper—and sometimes the draft comes out sounding like, “My boyfriend—boy, was he a jerk.” If the writer doesn’t know what to do with the material, if she can’t see anything bigger than “this happened,” there are three choices.

First, toss it. Perhaps it was just a vent. No harm, no foul.

But I favor the other options. One of them: put it away for a while. When you return to revisit the work, you can try to make some sense of the raw material. This requires a critical examination of what’s on the page; it requires making choices about what belongs in the narrative and what must be cut. As William Faulkner famously said, “Kill your darlings.” To revise raw material, to bring a piece of writing to a satisfying conclusion, requires a resolution. I have written on a subject that felt important, but wasn’t able to conclude the piece, perhaps because the story was not yet resolved in my own life. That’s okay. I’ve generated raw material that can wait patiently for me to return someday.

The final option is to show the draft to others to see if they can spot a narrative thread worth developing. But this option is tricky, because it requires the writer to expose herself to others, to present her as-yet-unresolved problem—I’m depressed/I hate my mother/my boyfriend left me and I feel sad—and to ask her fellow writers if there’s anything worth developing. This is where writing teachers get uncomfortable because workshops sometimes sound like group therapy sessions. To help create distance between what’s on the page and the living, breathing writer in the room, writing programs encourage the use of language like “the character” or “the narrator.” But it’s inevitable that a story thread must be exposed before it can be examined.

Research has confirmed that writing about emotionally charged memories is good for the health of the writer—and not just her psyche. In April 1999, the Journal of the American Medical Association published a study that linked writing about stressful life experiences to improved health. But as reported in the Chicago Tribune , Joshua M. Smyth, the study’s co-author, cautioned, “It actually has little to do with raw catharsis, which, I think, is what people assume.” Smyth explains that the health benefits were a result of cognitive restructuring—learning to think about problems in a new way—along with changing levels of stress and anxiety. So while the initial writing—the first draft—may provide a cathartic effect, the lasting benefit comes from seeing the problem in a new light—the organizing, editing, and structuring of a piece of writing.

But what of the cathartic effect? Should we be so quick to dismiss it? I imagine catharsis as an evolutionary adaptation, nature’s mechanism of positive reinforcement. Catharsis feels good, so writers seek to recreate the experience, in this case by continuing to write about troubling experiences. This initial purge can lead to mulling over, which results in new ways of seeing old problems and an evolution of thought.

Writers, no matter their genre, find inspiration to write from the same source: something they hear or see or otherwise experience stays with them. They can’t stop musing; they must investigate. Writing is just another form of problem solving. Like psychology or medicine, it’s a drive to understand the human condition experientially, one that’s led by emotion and instinct. The success of a piece of writing is proven by readers connecting with the writer’s words, knowing on some basic level that what the writer has composed touches on a truth of human experience. For this reason, I’ve always encouraged my students to write on sensitive topics but with the understanding that the purpose of our class is to examine the narrative and aesthetic merits of what’s on the page, including—and especially—whether the emotion rings true. Finding a subject is an important part of developing as a writer. And if the writer receives any psychological benefit from constructing the narrative—and she very well may—that’s wonderful. On the other hand, if the material is especially raw and difficult to process, the writing process may lead to clarity, but working with a therapist can also help the writer order the emotion. It should come as no surprise that this may also help the writing.

Of course, not all generating leads to thoughtful examination, and not all drafts can be crafted into finished products. The point is, that isn’t the fault of the subject. Poorly run group therapy, where members do nothing more than complain about the same problems over and over again, doesn’t make people better, either; in fact, it can make them much worse, by reinforcing negative thought patterns. But both writers of memoir and those in therapy must reflect thoughtfully on their stories . . . which leads me to recalculate my reasoning from the start of this essay. When my instructor declared that writing creative nonfiction is distinct from therapy, she wasn’t actually seeking to “separate reflection, that fundamental element of creative nonfiction, from the task of general psychological introspection.” Reflection, quite simply, is psychological introspection. One is written while the other is oral, but both good writing and good therapy require a narrative to be ordered and assembled. Patricia Hampl’s words confirm this: “If we learn not only to tell our stories but to listen to what our stories tell us—to write the first draft and then return for the second draft—we are doing the work of memory.” What my instructor really meant to say is that it’s important to revise.

I began writing creative nonfiction because I felt an urgency to share my stories. Writing also provided an escape from my grief and a small way to raise the dead. But as Annie Dillard warns in her essay “To Fashion a Text,” “You can’t put together a memoir without cannibalizing your own life for parts. The work battens on your memories. And it replaces them.” As happens often enough, science has caught up with art to confirm this notion. Neuroscientists now tell us that the simple act of recalling and restoring changes the brain’s organic structure. The natural condition, it seems, is for stories and memories to change over time.

Dillard’s words proved true in my case. The struggle to go on living when someone I loved could not see value in his own life, the pain and the anger and the deep, pooling sadness—all these emotions began to fade after I saw the ink on the page. The writing process brought those feelings from inside me out into the sunlight. It said, “This happened. Your pain is real.” Catharsis was my initial motivator, but that alone didn’t sustain me. Generating, which sometimes comes easily, other times painfully, is only the first step in the writing process. The real work is in workshop, revision, and polishing the completed work.

I’ve come to love wrestling out an argument and polishing rhythmical prose. Perhaps the only recompense for tragedy—for death and loss of innocence—is the chance to create some measure of beauty. The marvel of a well-crafted sentence—finding just the right diction and syntax—is a small triumph over pain, a way to create order in the world. That world, at times, may be nothing more than a writer and her pen. Writers find pleasure in moments of flow, a loss of consciousness, but as any practitioner of meditation will tell, this is simply preparation to engage in the world and to develop a more refined consciousness. After all, what is the human experience if not an attempt to order pain and chaos?

Ms. DaPra, Ms. DaPra,

This piece has helped me “get it” when it comes to writing my memoir. Thanks.

Thank you, Tara Dapra, from a writer’s whose bio states, “I write because it’s cheaper than therapy.”

Thankyou for these insights Tara. As one embarking on my memoirs I find them invaluable.