Wow, this is amazing. Just got the book jacket illustration today. Makes it seem somehow real!

From The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million

“I told her that I, too, was interested in facts, of course, that we had started out on this long series of journeys because we wanted to find the facts. But I said that because of what we’d heard on our trips, I’d also become extremely interested in stories, in the way that the stories multiplied and gave birth to other stories, and that even if these stories weren’t true, they were interesting because of what they revealed about the people who told them. What they revealed about the people who told them, I said, was also part of the facts, the historical record.” (p. 411)

“I did and do believe that if you project  yourself into the mass of things, if you look for things, if you search, you will, by the very act of searching, make something happen that would not otherwise have happened, you will find <span style=”font-style:italic;”>something</span>, even something small, something that will certainly be more than if you hadn’t gone looking in the first place, if you hadn’t asked your grandfather anything at all. I had finally learned the lesson taught me, years after they’d died, by Minnie Spieler and Herman the Barber. There are no miracles, no magical coincidences. There is only looking, and finally seeing, what was always there.” (p. 486)

The book is incredible. Read it.

“I began to read the greats in essay writing–and it wasn’t their confessing voices I was responding to, it was their truth-speaking personae. By which I mean that organic wholeness of being in a narrator that the reader experiences as reliable; the one we can trust will take us on a journey, make the piece arrive, bring us out into a clearing where the sense of things is larger than it was before.” (p.24)

“These writers might not ‘know’ themselves–that is, have no more self-knowledge than the rest of us–but in each case–and this is crucial–they know who they are<span style=”font-style:italic;”> at the moment of writing</span>.” (p. 30)

“Above all, it is the narrator who must complicate in order that the subject be given life. In fiction, a cast of characters is put to work that will cover all the bases….In nonfiction, the writer has only the singular self to work with. So it is the other in oneself that the writer must seek and find to create movement, achieve a dynamic. Inevitably, the piece builds only when the narrator is involved not in confession but in this kind of self-investigation, the kind that means to provide motion, purpose, and dramatic tension. Here, it is self-implication that is required. To see one’s own part in the situation–that is, one’s own frightened or cowardly or self-deceived part–is to create the dynamic.” (p. 35-36)

From Ann Patchett’s afterward to Lucy Grealy’s Autobiography of a Face (Houghton Mifflin, 1994), 231-2:
“It’s amazing how you remember everything so clearly,” a woman said, her head wrapped in a bright scarf. “All those conversations, details. Were you ever worried that you might get something wrong?”
“I didn’t remember it,” Lucy said pointedly. “I wrote it. I’m a writer.”
…By telling us that the sentences spoken in the book were not necessarily verbatim, Lucy claimed complete ownership of her history. It was her world and she would present it the way she wanted to. Her memory and desire were indeed the facts. She taught me something while I sat in the audience that night about the nature of writing and the nature of truth. In the right hands, a memoir is the flecks of gold panned out of a great, muddy river. A memoir is those flecks melted down into a shapeable liquid that can then be molded and hammered into a single bright band to be worn on a finger, something you could point to and say, “This? Oh, this is my life.” Everyone has a muddy river, but very few have the vision, patience, and talent to turn it into something so beautiful. This is why the writer matters, so that we can not only learn from her experience but find a way to shape our own. I’m not talking about shaping every life into a work of art, I’m talking about making our life into something we can understand, a portable object that contains the weight and power of an entire terrain.”

One of my students, Brett Dickerson, has an eloquent answer to this question:
“It’s the same type of storytelling we use everyday. When my wife asks how my day was, when Dad tells me about the livestock sale, or when my brother tells me whey he drank so much last weekend, it’s all creative nonfiction.”

“Faction” is Wole Soyinka’s word. It’s also been described as literary journalism, personal essay, impersonal essay, reportage, autobiography, memoir, lyric essay, meditation… <a href= “http://www.billroorbach.com”>Bill Roorbach</a> (in the wonderful Writing Life Stories) describes all these terms and others as fitting under the umbrella of the term “creative nonfiction,” which I also like.