how creative nonfiction changed my life
I feel like, for a writer, I don't write enough. This has been true for a long while now. I struggle to get words on the page. It is a feat if I can manage 200 or so a day.
Then I saw a video that talked about creative nonfiction. I didn't even finish the video.
The man in the video said something about how his students struggled to conceptualize an essay that wasn't stiff, dry, and boring. They seemed to forget everything about storytelling as soon as the word nonfiction was mentioned. And this, to me, was so eye-opening that I can't even explain it to you.
You see, I like creative nonfiction and have for a while. In fact, I find such essays very inspiring. And I also write it. All the time. And never once had I realized it.
I keep a journal. I have kept a journal since I was nine years old. When I was younger, I didn't write in it much. But now? As an adult? I write in it a lot. Usually weekly, sometimes more or less often depending on how busy my life gets, but I write thousands of words in it easily without even thinking about it.
For years, I had taken to writing long, ranting essays that I immediately abandoned to never be seen again in my Google Docs. I wrote what amounted to poems in my journal that I never considered lyricizing. I wrote very short stories about my sparse dreams and the characters featured in them without ever thinking on expanding on them. And this realization floored me.
You don't understand what this did to me. It changed my entire world. Because writing all this was easy for me. I did it often and in great amount while the drafts for my novel languished on my computer. And suddenly, I now had to ask myself why?
What was so different about this type of writing and my fiction writing?
I conducted an experiment. I told myself to write a short creative nonfiction essay as if I were planning to publish it like a chapter of my novel. So I sat down and did it. In that one sitting, I wrote over 6500 words. I don't think I've ever done that in my life. And it was simple. Easy. I didn't have to stop to think about what I wanted to write next almost at all. It was amazing.
Now, what did I learn from this experiment? One, that I find it easier to write in the first person. I think this is for a variety of reasons. When I write in the first person, my mind is more centered on the lived experience when imagining scenes. It becomes easy for me to focus on concrete details to paint the abstract pictures I'm trying to convey. When I write in third person, I have to do this much more consciously and my writing suffers for it.
Two, that I very much already have a writing style. I just struggle to apply it to the third person for reasons already stated. I had known that my writing could be very recognizable because my friends have told me such, but I never understood why it only happened some of the time.
Three, that the ease with which I write relies a lot on knowing both the character I am writing for and the scene/point I want to make. This one took some thinking to figure out. When I'm writing nonfiction, I'm often writing about myself or from my perspective and, as such, I already know what I want to express about myself or about something I experienced. I hadn't even realized this was the case, but once I compared my mindset writing nonfiction to my mindset when successfully writing fiction, the pattern started to stick out. When I had a very specific goal in mind for a scene, writing was easier for me and I did more of it. But if I didn't have a good handle on the character, whatever I wrote would feel choppy and awkward. The same is true vice-versa, if I had a good handle on the character but lacked vision for the scene.
So then what is the solution? How do I write more of what I want to write and not just creative nonfiction? I've been sitting on this question for a while because it's not just one problem I'm trying to solve; it's two.
The first one is fairly simple: I need to have a better idea of who I'm writing for and what I want scenes to be when I start writing. This alone, would make the tedium of writing much less for me. But the other problem....
What do I do if my writing is better in first person, but I don't want to write all my fiction in first person? I could write the draft in first person and change it later, but that's tedious and I'm trying to make writing less of that. So then what?
I'm afraid the answer is I don't know. I can certainly try to make an effort to make my writing feel more lived-in and concrete, but that alone wouldn't make my writing come through naturally. And the problem to begin with was that I was thinking too consciously when writing in third person.
That's how it goes, I guess. You learn something new, you end up with more questions than answers about it.