Timothy Kreider

Writers don’t discriminate between forms or genres as much as critics or academics do. Writers read fiction and nonfiction alike—novels and memoirs, stories and essays—scavenging ideas and techniques omnivorously. This will be a creative nonfiction class; but we’ll primarily be reading fiction, as well as books on the fuzzy boundary between fiction and non-, scrutinizing them for anything that we can steal and put to our own purposes. Can’t nonfiction prose be as opulently gorgeous as lyric novels? Is there a place in nonfiction for genre conventions like melodrama or suspense—for surprise twists or strategically withholding information? Does your story need to be in boring, old, chronological order? Do you have to be a reliable narrator? How much does your persona and voice overlap with the real you? We’ll also, unavoidably, stumble into the icky ethical mire of exactly how true things need to be for the purposes of nonfiction—and who gets hurt or implicated by the truth—and slog on through. We’ll just hash it all out, is what we’ll do. Students will write some exercises to explore these questions and incorporate the techniques that we study into their own works-in-progress.

Nonfiction has to be based on real life but is also supposed to make sense and mean something—two things that real life consistently fails to do. The fact that “it really happened” may make a story interesting in bars but not necessarily on paper. How do you reconcile the messy raw material of reality with the requirements of art? How do you turn the pointless meandering up and down of life into something shaped like a story? How do you render your own personal experience into something significant and universal, something worth reading? How do you make it all seem to mean something? How do you make your life matter?

We’ll hash these questions over in class as thoughtfully as we can. We’ll read beautiful, hilarious, and moving essays, memoirs, and journalism to see how writers who are smarter and more talented than we have managed to pull it off. We’ll labor to find strange new ways of saying the same old obvious truths. We’ll talk euphony and rhetoric, memorize snatches of great literature, and write letters to loved ones. And we will do the least fun thing anyone can voluntarily do—write essays ourselves.

By the end of this course, students will understand life.

Nonfiction has to be based on real life, but it’s also supposed to make sense and mean something—two things that real life consistently fails to do. The fact that something really happened does not, in itself, make it interesting. How to reconcile the messy raw material of reality with the necessities of art? How to lop off little segments of time that are shaped like stories? How to render your mundane and idiosyncratic personal stories into something significant and universal—something worth reading? How to make your life matter? Another touchy issue is that of literal veracity vs. artistic truth: When does artistry become falsification? How to write honestly and bravely without forfeiting all privacy? Also, hey, won’t everyone you know get mad at you if you write about them? No one’s pretending there are clear or easy answers to these questions. What we’ll do is hash them over in class as truthfully and thoughtfully as we can. We’ll read beautiful, hilarious, and moving essays and memoirs and journalism to see how writers smarter and more talented than we, from Montaigne to Michael Herr, have managed it. We’ll labor to find strange new ways of saying the same old truths. We’ll talk euphony and rhetoric, memorize snatches of great literature, and write letters to loved ones. And we will do the very least fun thing anyone can voluntarily do—write essays ourselves. By the end of this course, students will understand life.