Fiction: stories, imagination, freedom, possibilities.
"Nonfiction… I don’t know, encyclopedias?"
That’s what I used to say. Fiction has been my gig for a long time. My niche. I read it, write it, absorb it through movies and comics and any other medium I can find. Fiction is the gateway to living a thousand other lives, and no other human art performs quite the same magic. It’s boundless, and I found my love for it early on in life. Nonfiction, on the other hand, has its own stereotypes. I used to readily spout about how strict, limited and boring it is. A person can only find so much interest in historical texts and biographies. All fact, all research, with no room for creativity and absolutely no room for imagination. I set myself hard against it because no way was a fantasy and sci-fi writer going to mess with that heap of headaches.
Then I enrolled in a ‘Creative Nonfiction’ writing class. The objective: write nonfiction. Only nonfiction. And what was more, it was the only writing class available this semester I hadn’t already taken. Since I’m graduating in December, I approached the whole shebang with doom and gloom. Moving away from all fiction in the last leg of school was the last thing I wanted to do. I write at least three novels a year through NaNoWriMo, and I’ve spent the last three years here at school getting a Writing Communications degree so I can be a better novelist. Closing out with nonfiction was not ideal.
There is, however, a twist. It’s six weeks into classes, and I’m in love. I’ve written a memoir piece and eight to ten smaller prompt pieces, and I have readily tackled future assignments with gusto. I can’t seem to write enough new ideas for nonfiction pieces in my notebook. Even my weekly articles here have seen a shift. So what happened?
It’s not as sudden as it seems. In my Creative Writing class freshman year, there was a unit devoted to nonfiction, particularly memoirs. There, I had my first taste of what it means to articulate real life through writing. Until then, I had only processed what inspired me through a fiction-writer lens. It’s a great lens, but it’s actually limiting in its own way. Without taking time to analyze situations in their full reality, I was missing a lot of their impact. I could draw details from anything you showed me—but relating it to the bigger picture was another thing. My professor made me translate inspiration to concrete images everyone could relate to—not just space adventures and sword fights. It was small, but it was a start.
Then, in my new Creative Nonfiction class, I began to truly break down the logistics. Creative Nonfiction is really literary nonfiction, meaning people write about real-life events utilizing the methods of fiction writing. They craft scenes and dialogue, construct a plot arc, use literary devices and employ characterization. Already being well-versed in the ways of fiction, I was curious to superimpose them onto things I had actually lived through. My first real memoir piece I actually shared here, as my article titled Café Crème and Terrorism. It was one of my pioneers into the realm of realism, and by treating it like fiction, I found a medium.
My next assignment is a biographical portrait of a historical character. If you’d asked me in high school to write a biography, I would have rolled my eyes and maybe thrown a pencil at you. Now, I am ready to research my tail off and weave it together like a medieval tapestry. It took until college, but I have a newfound interest for writing about real life. It may never match my passion for crafting new and impossible worlds out of nothing, but every word I write helps me become better. The world is the most imaginative place of all. Everyone would do well to write about it.
