Have I been a low-key CNF guy all along?

Despair has its advantages. I know I've said a dozen times in the last ten years that I was giving up writing fiction, but this current funk feels more permanent, in proportion to the acuteness of the despair. At the very least, I needed a break, so for the time being, I've moved on from reading contemporary literary fiction. Not knowing what to read instead, I've been kind of choosing things at random. One recent book I read was the 2023 Best American Essays collection, edited by Vivian Gornick. It says "essays," but I think the book is filled with what might be more accurately called "creative non-fiction." Some of the entries are essays, in the sense that they're sustained discourse or argument about a subject or theme. But many are more short memoir.

Whether they were essay or memoir, I found myself much more engaged and interested in the anthology than I have been in perhaps any volume of Best American Short Stories. I only found myself not generally enthralled with two of the entries. Maybe this is simply because it's new to me. People who spend a lot of time with one type of literature--like, say, the short stories that show up in literary magazines--tend to get a little fastidious. When "Cat Person" became a big sensation, the strongest backlash against it was from the literary fiction community, for whom it was just one story among many, and not the best example. Ordinary readers seemed to love it, or at least hate it in a way where they were interested in it. So maybe I just don't know enough about what contemporary CNF looks like to find the faults in this collection. 

I've had some exposure to CNF, of course, but never read one essay after another the way I did for the book. It's strange to say, but I found reading non-fiction, which you'd think of as dryer and more like work than reading stories, to be far less taxing than reading fiction. Reading it was closer to pleasure than I've felt in a long time. More than this being a result of my lack of exposure to CNF, I think I might have been discovering, this late in the game, that I've really got more of a CNF mind than a fictional one. 

I don't mind the occasional slant-wise telling of the truth, but maybe at heart, I'm kind of a pragmatic guy who wants you to just give it to me plain. Even in reading fiction all these years, I think the greatest pleasure I've gotten in it has been when I've felt I was able to take a work of fiction and then re-cast it into an essay analyzing the fiction in plain language. I've valued the slant truth in no small part for the opportunity it's given me to try to straighten it back out. 

Even when writing my own fiction, I think I've tended to try to write the kinds of stories that lend themselves to the very kind of analysis I like to do. That contrasts with how a lot of fiction writers say they write. They tend to be more like method actors, who try to treat their characters like real people and then become them. I always found this way of talking about one's characters, like what they did "surprised" you, to be a little annoying and artificial. There was an episode of "Only Murders in the Building" this most recent season in which Matthew Broderick plays himself, only the version of himself is so obsessed with getting to the core of his character, it eventually drives his director, Oliver, to fire him. That's what a lot of fiction writers sound like to me. 

I've toyed with trying CNF over the years, but one major hurdle has stopped me. I still don't really understand the line between CNF and, say, a very good editorial. Google's first offered answer to the question seems to me more or less in the right ballpark. It suggests that compared to traditional essays, CNF is more likely to emphasize scene, character development, narrative, and subjectivity. Concerning subjectivity, it suggests that: "In traditional nonfiction, the writer keeps a distance from the subject. But in creative nonfiction, the writer’s perspective, emotions, and insights can be part of the story. This is particularly true of personal essays, which are often written from a first-person point of view."

Okay, so that would explain why sometimes, I've read CNF and not realized it wasn't a short story until the end. To judge by the 2023 anthology, some CNF is nothing but a personal story without any real reflection on how it might fit into a larger theme in the world. "Any Kind of Leaving" by Jillian Barnett would be one example. Some begin as memoir but then transition into thoughts on how the personal fits into the political. For example, "Care Credit" by Angelique Stevens begins with the author's own struggles with poverty, with her poor dental health as the leading symbol of that poverty, then occasionally moves into thoughts about American health care in general. Still other entries were very like traditional essay, with only small amounts of narrative or personal experience thrown in. "Gender: A Melee" by Laura Kipnis could have appeared in Mother Jones or, if it was feeling particularly frisky that day, The Atlantic, and not seemed out of place. "Life and Story" by Sigrid Nunez is more "essay about the literature on why writers write with occasional personal information" than it is grounded in the personal with occasional references to the world. "An Archaeological Inquest" by Phillip Lopate begins with a story of someone giving him an old literary review, but the essay is entirely an analysis of the old review and an assessment of how literary culture has since changed. 

Other than the literary analysis I do on this blog, I think a lot of what I write on here could be considered CNF. But if so, it leans toward the kind of CNF where it's "essay with occasional personal bits" rather than the other kind, and I think the other kind is a lot more prevalent and likely to be published among journals that publish CNF. I think editors are unlikely to want much of what I write. One of the essays in the anthology this year was "Dreamers Awaken" by Scott Spencer, a memoir-short about a baby boomer who was once asked to play John Henry in blackface for a school concert. It's a great read, but at the end, it kind of intentionally avoids drawing conclusions about its meaning in the larger context of society. He is standing with a black school official he tried to apologize to, with her seeming to refuse to understand the meaning of his apology. "We were in our own little impromptu pageant, folktales from the future, and we were waiting for the invisible proctor to tell us in a whisper, or perhaps with some urgency, what to say next." It's perfect for the story, but I tend to write stuff that's more like "Here's how to solve racism" and then I use a few personal experiences to make my point. That seems likely to get the editor's "not for us" generic rejection letter. 

I started this blog as a way to work through the frustrations of trying to figure out writing, but also, since I was sure I would figure them out, to be a record in the future of how I had done so. It would be there to encourage others struggling along the same path. See how much trouble Jake had? But he got through it, and so will you. Now that I've despaired of ever really succeeding, I've often thought of just making this blog my whole writing project. 

Of course, that presents me with a problem of presentation. It seems like a successful blog (if such things still exist in a world with TikTok) would need to have content more or less centered on a coherent, central theme. Writing about literary fiction in some sense gave me such a theme. Readers might tolerate an occasional digression into "Here's how to solve racism," but only if I'm normally sticking to one kind of topic. "Jake's brilliant thoughts on sundry things" can't be the main draw of the blog. Not if I want people to read it, which I do.

I guess I could change this to a blog that writes about CNF. I could write a lot of analysis of CNF, the same as I've done for fiction, and then occasionally mix it up with my own CNF. But CNF, I think, doesn't really lend itself to the kind of analysis I've been doing for fiction. Fiction isn't making an argument in a straightforward way. It needs analysis in order for ordinary human brains to see more in them than the surface story. But CNF is sort of already analyzed. Especially in the more essay-like forms of CNF, what it has to say, it has already said in more or less plain terms. I could write personal responses to CNF pieces, but for the most part, there wouldn't be a lot to break down. 

Ceasing to write altogether isn't an option for me. Responding to the world with words is like breathing. Despair will stop me from submitting stories to the journals who've rejected me a million times, but it won't keep me from writing. Not for good. As many doubts as I have about being as good as I wish I were, I also feel pretty certain I'm a better writer than many people who make a living doing it, so I feel like I deserve some sort of platform. Or if not deserve, at least it's not an abomination. 

Whatever form my writing takes from here, I'm glad I chose to spend some time with CNF, however I've felt in the past about the uncertainty of what it is. I felt things reading I haven't felt in a long time, and in the end, I realized I still have a lot more I want to say myself.