Introduction

• 12, 18, 2021
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In recent years the writing world has developed a category called “creative non-fiction.”  Problem is, best I can tell, there is no agreement on a definition.  I think Lytton Strachey may have originated the approach in his 1918 historical account, “Eminent Victorians.”  In that breakthrough history (or “history” as his critics would prefer) he often wrote down precise details of conversations that he could not have known about. The principals were often dead by the time he wrote but, nevertheless he recounted in elaborate detail word-for-word conversations that no one but the deceased could have known about.  He was heavily criticized, in part, because he skewered the pretenses of the eminent Victorians in question, but also because he made up stuff. It may be the case that Strachey actually invented creative non-fiction.  If he did, Hunter Thompson was a quick adapter.  In his “gonzo journalism” the reader never knows whether he’s reading fact or fiction.  This is especially true in his writings about Richard Nixon.  I find this kind of faux journalism very frustrating. Tim O’Brien, who wrote the fine and enormously successful book about Vietnam, The Things They Carried, would never say what was fact and what was not.  Some of his stories are purely factual; others are, it seems, purely fictional.  He gives himself and his compadres fictitious names at times; at times he uses real names.  The part about him hiding out in Canada and consulting a wizened wise man, have been shown to be pure fiction, as I understand it.  At the other end of this spectrum are the stories—often called romans a clef— offered as fiction that borrow obviously from real events in the author’s life.

Back to the question of what creative non-fiction is. Some take the view that if you add or change anything, anything at all, that you are not able to document or recall specifically, you are over the line into fiction.  Another view is that, if you make the conversations or weather or costumes consistent with the real facts and with the character of the subject, you are not in fiction but creative non-fiction.  And finally, there is the view—perhaps the result of our post-factual political world—that anything spun off of a factual basis is still creative non-fiction.

Well, who cares?  Publishers do.  Reviewers do.  But I’m not sure anyone else is much interested.

Many of the stories that follow are all based, to one degree or another, on my own real-world experiences. In some instances, I’ve embellished the original facts or used composites of people I’ve known.  I’ve supplied dialogue and scene details that now lost in the mists of time. I’ve changed some time sequences. The childhood years in this mix are purely factual—call them memoirs–as best I can make them.  The later stories are served by more embellishment.  As it is in total fictions, some supporting characters are composites.

I offer my take on the usual disclaimer:  The characters in these stories are purely creations of the writer’s imagination, except when they’re not.  Names and places have been changed to protect the innocent and, sometimes, to protect the guilty.

The greatest example of pure fiction, in my mind, is the usual author’s disclaimer that any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental.  The disclaimer is usually a fiction itself, a flimsy bulwark against libel lawsuits.

These efforts borrow a bit from recollections contained in Tom, Bess and Fate, published earlier.