The Art of Fact
By Kate Smith
Gay Talese
As a journalist I have always been interested in creative non-fiction. I greatly admire Kate Summerscale’s The Suspicions of Mr Whicher and Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel. Rather than only reporting the facts, creative, or narrative non-fiction uses fictional devices such as dialogue and characterisation to narrate those facts. So good creative non-fiction, the ‘fourth genre‘ reads like fiction but is factually accurate. There may be minor amalgam characters and fictional elements but the main characters are based on proven facts.
The benefits to the reader are that it provides an immediacy of view into historical characters and times. It lets the reader see, hear, smell and feel the past. That these events did unfold in this way, adds a lot of engagement and interest with the story for me as a reader. As a writer, I know that good creative non-fiction is crafted from extensive interrogative research and writing the action scene-by-scene rather than straight fiction. I read over the creative non-fiction I write to make sure my work ‘shows but doesn’t tell’. History books are so often ‘tellers’ and the narrative to bring it all alive needs to show, to be compelling.
One of the other challenges is not to use the passive voice or the past tense. Hilary Mantel frequently writes in the present active tense, which keeps it dynamic and fresh: “He speaks of the death of kings”. Another way to bring history alive is by using point of view. Then there is the task of using imagination to bring to life the (often female) family members about whom very little is known. But how far do you go in imagining?
The line where the truth should lie is something we often discuss in class with students taking my ‘Journalism and Literature’ module. The student consensus often seems to be that Truman Capote strayed too far from the line of truth when he wrote ‘In Cold Blood’ his credibility suffering as a result.
Truman Capote
The students do acknowledge that Capote is a ‘legend ‘ for innovating with genre by removing the first person and blending fiction and non-fiction. We often discuss if, in contrast to Capote, Gay Talese and Tom Wolfe, two other New Journalists, got it right because their work adhered much more closely to fact?
When I finish writing this piece I will be completing chapter two of my creative non-fiction. The last 4 pages currently tell and don’t show so I need to revise those into one scene of active present tense, told from the protagonist’s point of view. Scenes make up the preceding pages in the chapter but since it is written up from notes taken from memoirs, documents and biographies I write a chronological draft first, then structure it into scenes.
I also fact check everything; the weather over one month in 1696, what people ate, thought and talked like. What was the current scandal? What were the coins in the currency called? The quote that writing is a combination of ambition and anxiety was never truer than for creative non-fiction. The fear of being factually inaccurate and tripping over that line of truth sees me ordering sets of books from amazon on random topics like ’17th Century pubs in London’ or ‘The architecture of the Palace of Versailles’. The ambition is to give these characters life and in doing so, create a ripping yarn.
