I'm Politely Begging You to Write Nonfiction

Hello and welcome. Today, I’m sincerely asking you to write more nonfiction. 

Kaput: Well, someday, my tell-all will come out. So, I don’t know, maybe you should be careful what you wish for

No, I mean it. Here’s the thing: when I’ve taught introductory creative writing classes, we always cover the big three genres, the ones that you’re likely to encounter in nearly any creative writing program—fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction. And, for the most part, students react the same way to each genre. For fiction, they react with barely contained enthusiasm while they clutch their copies of Brandon Sanderson’s latest to their chests. For poetry, they react with barely contained revulsion, complaining loudly about having to write poems—until, by the end of the semester, they’ve seen the light and end up signing up for a class that only covers poetry. 

But, for nonfiction, they react with nothing at all. More than anything else, students look at my prompts for creative nonfiction assignments and ask me what I mean—like, what do you mean you want me to write about things that are real? It seems like a pretty straightforward ask to me, but it continues to be met with bewilderment. And then, when they do write their essays, they seem to think that I’ve asked them to throw all their burgeoning creativity out the window, and I usually get a dry as dust five paragraph narration of the last two years of their lives. Or, worse, an informational essay about cattle ranching or fishing or an obscure musical genre. 

Yes, those kinds of Wikipedia entries are nonfiction, but when we’re speaking of creative nonfiction, we’re talking about a kind of writing that is so full of potential—potential that the newer writers I’ve worked so often tend to miss. So I want to set the record straight about what creative nonfiction is and show you why you might want to add some nonfiction writing to your practice. 

Plus, on the topic of nonfiction, I have something share with you towards the end that may or may not be exciting, so stick around for that too

Kaput: Or get out while you can…that’s always an option…

What is nonfiction?

Nonfiction is interesting because it’s defined by what it isn’t—it isn’t fiction. And fiction, I’m sure, is something most of you are really familiar with. Fiction deals with the imaginary, the made-up, the constructed. Of course, you have your fantasy and sci-fi, which obviously take place in impossible worlds and are populated by unrealistic characters and events. But then you also have stuff like literary fiction, which feels much more like real life but still deals with people who never existed—characters and plots and settings that the writer didn’t observe or research but that they imagined. 

And nonfiction is, simply, not that. So what is it? Well, if it’s not the imagined or the fantastical, it must be the real. You’re not writing about a werewolf or a dragon or an imaginary grandmother going on a road trip with her family—you’re writing about that thing that happened when you were 17 or your uncle or moray eels. If fiction is made up, nonfiction is true—it’s writing about stuff that actually exists and actually happened. 

But, in the same way that school usually does a good job of training us to think that poetry is an impossible puzzle, school tends to train us to think that nonfiction is what we find in history textbooks’ soulless rehearsals of the events of the American Revolution or research reports about student athletes based on the five minutes you spent on Google before the deadline—or worse

Kaput: Or even on YouTube shows about writing and all their yammering on about rhetoric this and poetry that…

But, while that is nonfiction, it’s not what we’re talking about when we’re talking about creative nonfiction. Here, the word creative is doing a lot of work—like other literary genres, creative nonfiction isn’t so much about transmitting information from one brain to another, it’s much more invested in sharing some person’s perspective on being a person. Just as fiction shows us what imagined humans can do in imagined, high-stakes scenarios and poetry shows us how humans experience and feel in response to life, creative nonfiction shows us how another person encounters and processes their experience. 

Creative nonfiction is what happens when we get an essay about a father digging a hole in the backyard with his son “a year into the pandemic,” when we get a single devastating paragraph about a man taking his daughter to the pediatrician on the morning of what he calls his “last hangover,” or when we get a playful meditation on the migratory habits of the blackpoll warbler. In each case, a lived experience or phenomenon or fact gets filtered through a unique and compelling human perspective. Yes, the warblers are interesting, but the real show is looking at those warblers through Amy Leach’s eyes.

In the introduction to his anthology of the tradition of the personal essay, Phillip Lopate says that “The hallmark of the personal essay is its intimacy,” and he later goes on to say that “the personal essay represents a mode of being.” Or, in words he used elsewhere that seem, to me, to be the key distinction between creative nonfiction and the other major genres—essays show us “a mind at work.”

With a genre as broad and flexible as nonfiction, there’s so much more that we could say about it—and we may sometime in the future. This is a brief introduction rather than a comprehensive account, but, and, I hate to do the cliche thing and bring our discussion of essays back to the origin of the word itself -

Kaput: Oh, stop, you love it.

Yeah—but it goes back to the French word for attempting or trying. In the broadest strokes, where fiction tells us stories and poetry shares lyrical experiences, nonfiction puts us in contact with a human being trying to make sense of the world we’re in and the lives we live. The heart of the essay is not in the plot or the imagery but in the attempt to think through something. And that yields some spectacular literature. 

Why you might resist

But, you might be saying, I just don’t feel like it’s for me. I get it—there are some common reasons that people have for avoiding nonfiction. So let me do you the favor of dismissing your reservations with some reassurance. 

Number one: Real life is boring. I want to escape into fiction and write something fun. 

Have you lived real life? That’s hardly boring—and I just got done talking about one of my favorite essays that’s literally just about digging a hole. You can write about boring things in engaging ways and end up with a compelling piece. Sure, there are no dragons or enchanted swords—but there are real human beings grappling with real human experiences. We tend to underestimate how interesting we are, but I’ve heard it said before that nothing is more interesting to people than other people. Spend some time with nonfiction, and you’ll find that it’s hardly boring even when it’s mundane. And you don’t have to escape into imagination to escape—escape into the life of someone who’s nothing like you and then come away affirmed by the fact that, in spite of your apparent differences, you’re both deeply and wonderfully human.

Number two: I’m not comfortable writing about myself. 

I have two things to say about that one. First, I can understand that reservation—what might others think of you? If you actually shared something about yourself, what would that mean? For most readers, it would mean only that they found a new connection to their fellow humans. It might seem strange to share your personal experiences with readers, but, for experienced readers, it’s not strange at all. 

In my line of work, I’ve learned all kinds of personal things about student writers that they would probably never share with other teachers. And it’s not really the case that they’re sharing those things with me in a personal way—they’re expressing themselves, and it’s my job to help them express themselves more effectively. So, to a new writer of nonfiction, it might feel like you’re exposing yourself in unusually intimate ways, but your readers aren’t experiencing it that way. They’re not, for the most part, forming judgments about you so much as they are about the writing before them. 

And that’s because, to my second point, there is always and unavoidably a separation between the flesh-and-blood human who is you and the constructed persona who represents you on the page. The essayist is not imagining characters in the same way that a fiction writer is—instead, the essayist is making a character of themself. 

In Lopate’s words: In order to turn ourselves into characters, we need to dramatize ourselves. I don’t mean inventing or adding colorful traits that aren’t truly ours; I mean positioning those that are already in us under the most clearly focused, sharply defined light. It’s a subtractive process: you need to cut away the inessentials and highlight just those features in your personality that most quickly characterize you, preferably those that lead to the most intense contradictions and ambivalences. 

So it’s not even really you that a reader is interacting with—it’s a dramatized persona that represents a version of you. And, honestly, I couldn’t write otherwise: nothing makes me squirm quite like being asked in friendly conversation to share anything about myself. But, when I’m writing nonfiction or sitting in front of a camera or even teaching a class, it becomes possible because I know I’m just shaving off and displaying a version of myself that is safely and factually separate from the rest of me. 

This is why, when we’re reading nonfiction or poetry—even when it’s obviously autobiographical—we say things like, “I really like the part where the speaker said this about their grandfather” instead of “I really like what you said about your grandfather.” You and the version of you that is on the page are separate things, and it’s irresponsible to treat them like they’re one and the same. Plus, it gives you some comfortable plausible deniability—wow, you sure do seem grouchy or airheaded or whatever in that essay. Why, yes, thank you—that’s the character I was trying to create for the speaker in that piece—but it would be unfair to actually attribute any of those to me. 

Oh, and also, writing nonfiction doesn’t even mean you have to write about yourself. I went to a reading once where an essayist shared an entertaining and memorable essay about a famous spokesperson for an insurance company. If you really can’t stomach sharing your own stories, at least don’t deny us the chance to see your unique mind at work on something more removed from your first-person perspective. 

And, number three: I don’t understand. Like you want me to write a research paper?

No, I absolutely do not—why would somebody ask you to  write a research report in a creative writing class? I’m asking you to do creative things with a foundation in reality. Tell us the story of the first Thanksgiving you remember but weave in reflections on how miserable you were in that town downwind of the turkey farm. Use the mannerly format of an academic article to write a wild and undisciplined meditation on the nature of your favorite chain restaurant, complete with absurd footnotes and ridiculous citations. Rant about hangnails for seven pages. 

You might resist writing nonfiction because it sounds like the kind of thing that only shows up in boring books without pictures, but that’s not what nonfiction has to be. Spend some time with the work that today’s essayists are putting out, and you’ll soon realize that, while nonfiction has different constraints from fiction, it can still be just as free and imaginative. 

The benefits of writing nonfiction

You don’t have any reason not to write nonfiction—so let me round it out with a few more reasons why you should. 

One—remember how we just talked about creating a dramatized character version of yourself when you write nonfiction? 

Kaput: No, and it’s weird that you’d think anyone’s listening.

Well I remember, and not only is that a great way to take the edge off of writing about yourself, but it’s a great way to practice developing your voice. I think a lot of writers feel dissatisfied or feel like they still need to “find their voice.” And, on one hand, I don’t really understand that because, you are you—you have a voice, unavoidably. But, on the other, I think, “Well no wonder you don’t have a voice: you spend all your time writing from the perspective from an omniscient, third person narrator with no personal investment in the story.” For a lot of fiction in the last hundred years or so, writers are celebrated for having minimally invasive narration—readers want the story, not the author’s personality. But, when it comes to nonfiction, personality and voice are exactly what readers are looking for. 

So writing nonfiction gives you a great way to practice expressing your thoughts in your own words. It’s not a question of how your protagonist would respond to a made-up situation—it’s a question of how you would respond to a real scenario. Even poetry, where it often comes from the poet’s own life, puts much more emphasis on the sensory experience than on the mind behind the poem. A story with an almost invisible narrator will still work, and a poem with a mostly effaced speaker can still be successful. An essay with an absent speaker is likely to break—your voice is the hook. Otherwise, we could all just read encyclopedias and peer-reviewed articles. 

Two, in addition to your voice, nonfiction can be a fantastic way to practice developing your style. Again, this is related to what readers are expecting: readers of fiction are there to read a great story—get too elaborate with your style, and they’re likely to call it a distraction or even disparage your prose for turning purple. Style and language are essential to poetry, but the pressures of precision and compression push poets in particular directions. With creative nonfiction or the essay, you have pages and pages of meandering thoughts to play with. Nonfiction is often characterized as being talky, chatty in a way that other genres aren’t—so there’s room for stylistic experimentation with nonfiction that there sometimes isn’t with other genres. 

I took classes on writing style at two different schools, and, in both, the professors kept holding up sentences by nonfiction writers as examples of great sentences. One couldn’t get enough of Wendell Berry; another kept sharing E.B. White and William Hazlitt among others. Occasionally, they’d share a great sentence from fiction, but between those classes I took and, even more so, in the piles of books on style I read during my own research, style commentators keep leaning on works of nonfiction to illustrate the best that English prose has to offer. 

And it makes sense, where the selling point of an essay is the character of the speaker, a style with a strong and compelling personality is essential, and the nature of the genre lends itself really well to letting your sentences live a little.

And form—essays are great ways to shake up your notions of form and structure. Spend much time in fiction world, and you’ll be hounded by all kinds of schemes for how stories should be structured. Of course, poets have to deal with a long history of set poetic forms and traditional rules. And, yeah, you can find wildly inventive and experimental approaches to storytelling or poetry, but essays have always been more freeform, more determined by the needs of the piece than the received tradition. Write a braided essay, a hermit crab essay, a meandering diatribe, a one paragraph microessay. If you have a hard time thinking past the rules for writing stories or poems, spending some time with nonfiction could be a great way to help you think of form and structure in a new, more flexible way. Here, the only constraint is that the piece follow the contours of your thoughts in a productive way. How, exactly, is up to you. 

I could keep going: once students get over the hump of their initial bewilderment, they find that nonfiction pays off in all kinds of other ways. It gives them a chance to process their own experiences, to find meaning where they thought there wasn’t any, to reckon with family histories, to articulate parts of themselves that have gone previously unexpressed, or even just to play with ideas and learn how to think through things in meaningful ways. 

Conclusion

While my primary creative specialty is poetry, I took courses in nonfiction whenever I could, and, if I’m being honest, a lot of what I think of when I think about my identity as a writer comes from my experience writing nonfiction. And, if we’re being really honest, nonfiction—creative and otherwise—is what I read the most of. 

And I’ve been writing some more nonfiction lately, too. For a while, people have been asking where they can find my writing, and, I’ve shared before that I don’t find the institution of publishing very interesting, but I do think it’s important for writers to share their work. 

Plus, YouTube, let’s say, strongly encouraged me to create channel memberships, and I cannot overstate how grateful I am to those who have been supporting the show. Earlier this year, though, I couldn’t shake the feeling that the highest tier wasn’t really offering much meaningful value, so I retired it. 

And, third, wow, I’m doing a lot of numbered lists today—anyway, I’ve been thinking a lot about the role that algorithms play in our lives, and, while I don’t think it’s all bad, I do think there’s room to separate ourselves from their influence a little.

Which is why, after that massive windup, I’m excited to announce that I’m on Substack now. There, you won’t find Writing with Andrew but Written by Andrew, which helps me to address the three problems that I just outlined. 

First, there’s a free, twice-monthly newsletter that mostly announces highlights from my various projects across the web. If you want to stay updated on the latest from Writing with Andrew without being at the mercy of a capricious algorithm, you can sign up and receive updates to your email inbox twice a month. Plus, you know, the occasional writing prompt or nugget of writerly wisdom or whatever else strikes my fancy. 

And, second, sort of as a replacement for the since-retired membership tier, paid subscribers will have access to more stuff. So far, I’ve posted poetry, a couple of essays—including one about Hostess Fruit Pies—a week’s worth of writing prompts, and, most recently, a deep-dive analysis of one of my favorite poems. Really, it’s a place to put stuff that doesn’t really fit on the channel or anywhere else—and that, hopefully, provides more meaningful value than the earlier membership tier ever did. 

Of course, whether you sign up for the newsletter, subscribe to the rest of the Substack, or continue to provide the immeasurable support of showing up to watch the show each week, I cannot overstate how much I appreciate it. Doing this stuff is a blast—and a large part of that is thanks to the great audience you all have been. So keep on being great—the link to the Substack, and to a few of my favorite pieces of creative nonfiction are in the description. 

Now I don’t know what you’re doing still listening to me—you’ve got some spectacular nonfiction to write! Get to it, and you can tell me all about it when we meet again next week. Thanks again for watching, and we’ll see you then.