The Best of Both Worlds
In fiction, the writer wants to entertain, and informing the reader is a byproduct. In nonfiction, the chief goals are to inform and persuade with entertainment as a by-product. But in creative nonfiction, you need not favor one over the other; you can pursue informing and entertaining at the same time. This is what makes writing creative nonfiction so rewarding and exciting while also challenging. Consider how successfully this is accomplished in the excerpts that follow.
The Setting
The opening of Truman Capote's In Cold Blood places the reader in a setting as effectively as any novel could ever achieve. Through the use of details, description, and appealing to the senses, the first paragraph of the book exemplifies how successful showing can be while not disregarding the need to convey information by telling.
“The village of Holcomb stands on the high wheat plains of western Kansas, a lonesome area that other Kansans call ‘out there.’ Some seventy miles east of the Colorado border, the countryside, with its hard blue skies and desert-clear air, has an atmosphere that is rather more Far West than Middle West. The local accent is barbed with a prairie twang, a ranch-hand nasalness, and the men, many of them, wear narrow frontier trousers, Stetsons, and high-heeled boots with pointed toes. The land is flat, and the views are awesomely extensive; horses, herds of cattle, a white cluster of grain elevators rising as gracefully as Greek temples are visible long before a traveler reaches them.”
Author as Protagonist
The Armies of the Night is subtitled History as a Novel, the Novel as History. Mailer recognized that he was onto a relatively new way to write a factual account and this is clear in the following passage. But what makes Mailer's book even more extraordinary is that while he was a participant at the war protest, which is the book's subject, he writes from the distance of an eyewitness. Writing in the third person, Mailer portrays himself as the story's protagonist and as a character the reader can care about — a necessary ingredient in fiction and creative nonfiction.
“On a day somewhat early in September, the year of the first March on the Pentagon, 1967, the phone rang one morning and Norman Mailer, operating on his own principle of war games and random play, picked it up. That was not characteristic of Mailer. Like most people whose nerves are sufficiently sensitive to keep them well-covered with flesh, he detested the phone….
“Still, Mailer had a complex mind of sorts. Like a later generation which was to burn holes in their brain on Speed, he had given his own head the texture of a fine Swiss cheese … by consuming modestly promiscuous amounts of whiskey, marijuana, seconal, and benzedrine. It had given him the illusion he was a genius.”
Not Only Humans
Fiction is either plot driven or character driven. To some degree, the same holds true for creative nonfiction except that the plot and characters are real. For example, In Cold Blood is filled with suspense as the execution of a multiple homicide is carried out in excruciating detail. Nor are you likely to find fictional characters more intriguing than Norman Mailer in The Armies of the Night. So you would think a book about a horse must be plot driven, because how many people would ever care enough about a horse that they would read a book about the animal. And yet, while there is an exciting storyline, the compelling feature of Seabiscuit by Laura Hillenbrand is indeed its central character — a racehorse.
In creative nonfiction you need not be concerned whether your book is plot or character driven as is the case for fiction, where this can determine the genre in which the book belongs. However, in creative nonfiction, there must be some tension and anticipation as well as fully formed characters the reader will care about.
Consider how the opening paragraph hooks the reader as effectively as any work of fiction could aspire. Also note how succinctly the setting and time period is presented and how the reader is primed to turn the pages.
“In 1938, near the end of a decade of monumental turmoil, the year's number-one newsmaker was not Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Hitler, or Mussolini. It wasn't Pope Pius XI, nor was it Lou Gehrig, Howard Hughes, or Clark Gable. The subject of the most newspaper column inches in 1938 wasn't even a person. It was an undersized, crooked-legged racehorse named Seabiscuit….
“For the Seabiscuit crew and for America, it was the beginning of five uproarious years of anguish and exultation….
“Along the way, the little horse and the men who rehabilitated him captured the American imagination. It wasn't just greatness that drew the people to them. It was their story.
“It began with a young man on a train, pushing west.”
