En Guard: Creative Non-Fiction versus Fiction

Taylor Rawson | 215052424 | trawson@deakin.edu.au

En Guard: Creative Non-Fiction versus Fiction

At the heart of the literary community, there has been a long-standing debate encompassing creative non-fiction and fiction, and the scope of the divide resting tumultuously between them. So, I, a bright-eyed, bushy-tailed university student—someone, please buy me coffee at the risk of never owning a house—decided to venture out into the vast literary world to see just how blurry the lines between creative non-fiction and fiction are. During my young-adult-protagonist style adventures, I stumbled across one Robert Gott, creator of the newspaper cartoon The Adventures of Naked Man and author of ridiculous amounts of books—over ninety—, including the William Power series, a trilogy of crime novels set in 1940s Australia: Good Murder, A Thing of Blood and Amongst the Dead. As an author of both crime and historical fiction, it became clear that Robert Gott would be the perfect candidate to help untangle the snarled webs of creative non-fiction and fiction.

Historical fiction and crime fiction, by the very nature of the beasts, perfectly demonstrate how the junction between creative non-fiction and fiction aren’t quite as clear cut as people initially believe; like creative non-fiction, historical and crime fiction are steeped in truth, with a certain amount of accuracy, and like fiction, they mould these truths into stories. It was with this realisation that I, a should-be-writing-more-r, raised my empty coffee cup aloft to the grey skies of Geelong and said to Robert Gott, a writer, “please, let us have an intellectual dialogue about creative non-fiction and fiction”. And so it was.

TR: Historical and crime fiction are quite possibly the perfect juncture between fiction and creative non-fiction. Ideally, both weave together historical accuracy, or at the very least, believability, with a fictional story. It bolsters the notion of truth in writing—the idea of artistic liberties and obligations to the truth. So, what do you think the relationship between truth and writing is, regardless of genre?

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Taylor Rawson | 215052424 | trawson@deakin.edu.au RG: I recall that Edward Albee famously said that the job of fiction is to take facts and turn them into truths. Now, that sounds good. It’s a bit glib. I’m deeply suspicious of this idea that fiction is a way to get to what fiction writers call a ‘deeper truth’. I’m suspicious of that idea because I’m never really sure what it means—it sounds like fiction writers apologising for not writing the truth, and so they’re bolstering the dignity of our craft by calling it a deeper truth, and I’m not convinced of it. How about you?

TR: No, not quite. I think, again, the approaches to both genres are quite different, and there are the pivotal differences of author intention and audience expectation. Truth is, above all else, subjective. I think fiction takes amalgams of truths and pieces them together to make a fabrication, whereas creative non-fiction takes truth and employs fabrication to embellish the veracity of something to make it captivating.

RG: When a reader comes to a non-fiction work, they hold a different expectation about the writer’s responsibility to the reader. It’s different from the way a reader connects to a work of fiction, and how they will approach that author’s responsibility to the reader. In fiction, the author has a responsibility to entertain or challenge, or both, but in non-fiction the author has a different responsibility, to steer toward truth. That isn’t really a shackle that a fiction writer wears. If you are reading non-fiction, you are conscious of the fact that the person who wrote it is bringing a particular point of view, and a whole shed of prejudices and biases, to that work of non-fiction, whatever it is. Nevertheless, we kind of expect that the work will tell us something that we can, to some extent, trust. I think just by that I mean we do not expect that a non-fiction writer will be lying to us. Does that sound reasonable?

TR: Non-fiction writers certainly have an obligation to the truth. I also feel we are perhaps not as suspicious of non-fiction writers as we should be.

RG: We should approach both fiction and non-fiction with equal dollops of suspicion. This notion of truth is—truth is a very slippery thing. Truth kind of implies the idea of truth is an absolute. Something we can grasp and take away, and really, you can easily challenge that just by saying my truth and your truth are very different things. It’s not an absolute that a reader will bring his or her whole world to what a fiction writer, or even a non-fiction writer, is trying to present as truth. It’s slippery.

TR: Absolutely. I think that also plays in interesting ways with death of the author. The concept changes between fiction and non-fiction, but either way, the truths the author sees in a text will vary from the truth of what a reader may see. But the concept of the death of the

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Taylor Rawson | 215052424 | trawson@deakin.edu.au author folds around creative non-fiction differently, or maybe not as much, as it does with fiction. The writer of creative non-fiction is telling their story, as they saw it, something more absolute than fiction—that possibly changes the concept to some degree, though surely people can interpret it differently. I suppose what I might be trying to say is that authors have more ground to defend themselves with how a piece of creative non-fiction is interpreted.

RG: The idea of creative non-fiction is a way of freeing, loosening some of the shackles of fiction. Do you think that creative non-fiction, which introduces elements from fiction, into non-fiction writing, compromises non-fiction as a vehicle for giving us trustworthy information?

TR: I think by its very nature that’s what it does. Memory is fallible, for example. It is not a reliable source, and like we said, truths vary. Your truth is different to mine. Even if you research, get second hand accounts, it’s going to be different from each perspective, from how it exactly was. That being said, it was always inherently different from what it was for every different person involved, because perspective plays havoc upon all of that.

RG: These things are hard to pin down. Non-fiction isn’t as a broad a category as fiction; there’s the essayist, the writer of polemic, the informative. I suppose we read non-fiction in a way that differs from the way we read pure fiction. As soon as we understand what the job of the piece of writing in front of us is, we adjust the way we read it. You would not read a restaurant review in the same way that you would read a polemical essay, would you? It engages different parts of the reader. I think different kinds of reading engages differing parts of the brain.

TR: So, where do you stand on the importance of research versus making something believable, or do you think the importance of those two things differs from fiction to nonfiction?

RG: I think research is absolutely critical. You can fill lots of gaps with the imagination, certainly, but in order to create a convincing world you have to gain some understanding of how that world works, and you can only do that through research. The thing about writing historical fiction, for example, is that the research shouldn’t really show through fabric of the writing. It should, I think, be invisible. It should be woven into where you have the story. If it shows itself then I think it’s poorly constructed historical novel, but I don’t see how you can write a good historical novel without research. For a start, you can’t fill any historical gaps without doing your research.

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Taylor Rawson | 215052424 | trawson@deakin.edu.au

TR: Absolutely. This also harkens back to the idea of how you can write a novel and include great amounts of research within a work of fiction but the reader won’t know, unless you have a reader who enjoys delving further or has prior knowledge. It’s just about making it believable on the page.

RG: Exactly. But what you don’t want in historical fiction is to put in something so blatantly a-historical that you trip over it, unless you’re writing steampunk or something, then it doesn’t really matter. But if you’re trying to write a historically accurate thing, you can’t have someone just…taking out a mobile phone. It’s just absurd. It’s a ludicrous example, there are finer examples, but you can trip up on something and say, ‘hang on, that’s the wrong word.

The word “dude” would not have been used in medieval England’. That’s just wrong. You do come across it, though, where you think ‘no, I don’t think that’s right’, and that just stops you in your tracks, it takes you out of the book completely. That’s an example where research is about the very language that people are talking; somehow, you’ve got to create that illusion that the people talking in seventeenth century is not incomprehensible but not so swingingly modern that it’s just weird.

TR: Do you think we’re more willing to forgive things like inaccurate vernacular in fiction than we are in non-fiction?

RG: Well, if you have speech in non-fiction, then you’ve entered into creative non-fiction, haven’t you? Unless you have direct quotes from someone’s letters, if you’re putting words in someone’s mouth, you must be making those words up. Fiction can get away with more, we just want to read a good story, in the end.

TR: We’re more inclined to suspend our disbelief if we’re reading a piece of fiction, whereas in a piece of creative non-fiction we may be a little less lenient.

RG: I think so, because again, what we’re bringing to creative non-fiction is, somehow, we are trusting that the writer is not lying to us, that we’re getting something out of the nonfiction that is, well, non-fiction. But I maintain; approach both with equal suspicion.

TR: How do you think the approaches to creative non-fiction and fiction differ?

RG: I guess if you’re creating non-fiction you are constrained, in some ways, by a preexisting set of circumstances and facts whereas in fiction you’re not constrained at all. Your only constraints are your imagination.

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Taylor Rawson | 215052424 | trawson@deakin.edu.au TR: It could be said that creative non-fiction writers are similar to architects. They’ve got the blueprints, they’ve got the plans— RG: —and then they can choose to embellish the facades on the structures, with creative flourishes— TR: —add in a bit of graffiti on the walls.

RG: I suppose in creative non-fiction writing that’s what they’re seeking to do. They are seeking to add decorative flourishes to the non-fiction work, maybe to make it more palatable to readers.

TR: I agree entirely. And I suppose with fiction writers they can be compared to gardeners, where they take the seed of an idea or thought and it can flourish and grow, and there’s room to prune, or add in some fertiliser.

RG: We come up with these labels and they give way very quickly, because it’s very difficult to nail something down and definitively say, ‘well, that’s fiction, and that’s non-fiction’. In a way, to some extent, as soon as you commit something to paper, whatever you think you’re doing, you’re constructing a fiction because you’re trying to wrangle the language to convey a set of ideas. No two people are going to do it in the same way, which suggests that the process itself is fictionalising, just in writing something down, you are entering into territory where something could be described as fiction. So maybe the distinction between creative non-fiction and fiction is a distinction without a difference. We notice it very strongly when someone is using decorative flourishes, like conversations that couldn’t have happened and speculations outside the normal constraints of non-fiction. Nevertheless, what do you think about that? Is all non-fiction in a sense edging towards fiction?

TR: I agree with that notion entirely. It’s so similar because, regardless of genre, we’re taking truth and fictionalising it, but I suppose in non-fiction there’s more of an obligation to ‘aim true’ as it were. I suppose fiction is merely mimetic, but creative non-fiction is supposed to be taking true life and putting it down on the page. I think, inherently, we fictionalise as soon as we verbalise or write something down.

RG: Because we are making decisions about what to include and what to leave out. It’s just not possible not to do that. As soon as you make the decision about what to leave out you are adjusting the real events in a way that makes your version of something different to somebody else’s.

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Taylor Rawson | 215052424 | trawson@deakin.edu.au TR: And I think this alludes to the idea that no matter whether you’re taking it from real life or fabricating it, you’re fictionalising it. You embellish, omit, make it more palatable and make it more entertaining, which is very fiction based, yet it is so employed by creative nonfiction. The only difference is the intent of the author and the expectation of the reader.

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