The Evolving Art of Truth: Exploring the Boundaries and Freedom of Creative Nonfiction

On its very baseline, creative nonfiction is a literary genre. Some people call it the fourth genre, along with poetry, fiction and drama. Memoir, for example, personal essay, biography, narrative history and long form narrative reportage may all fit under the creative nonfiction umbrella. Recently, as the genre has evolved, there have been offshoots to the genre like speculative nonfiction, auto(biographical) fiction, lyric essays, and the visual essay, to name only a few.

Voice, viewpoint, and aim vary greatly among authors of creative nonfiction. But they all share the fact that they are, in one way or another, producing factual stories that enlighten readers on a range of topics while also including intimate details about life and the society we live in. And it is precisely because of this breadth and variety that creative nonfiction is so important and now so widely read.

I like to use the words "freedom" and "flexibility" when describing creative nonfiction because the genre encourages writers to push boundaries and break down barriers. It also gives them the chance to use all of the techniques used by fiction writers (or poets) to create fiction, such as dialogue, setting, description, and inner vantage point (seeing the world from the perspective of the subject they are writing about).

There aren't many guidelines for those who write creative nonfiction. As long as you don't betray the reader's confidence and undermine your own credibility in the process, you are free to make predictions about the future, make guesses about the past, or envision what may have happened or what someone might have been thinking. However, there are restrictions to the openness and adaptability that make creative nonfiction so alluring and compelling—legal, ethical, and moral considerations that are difficult and, in many respects, impossible to precisely articulate. Responsibility, not only to individuals we write about but also to those who read and publish our work, governs our freedom, flexibility, and courage.

The addition of the word "creative" to nonfiction was initially contentious, but it gradually dispelled the notion that nonfiction was itself inferior to poetry and fiction. It freed all writers, especially journalists, from long-standing rules and limitations that had been so stringent and constraining.

The literary, journalistic, and scholarly neighborhoods, rooted in tradition and long immune to new ideas, found it difficult to adapt. Indeed, opposition in some quarters far outweighed the magnitude of the change itself. The change was hardly drastic, and when one considers the history of nonfiction, it was hardly a significant one.

Journalists, then, earned and currently enjoy the freedom to inform and raise discourses in different issues for the masses through creative nonfiction. It expands journalists’ arena to write in different ways — still true to their principles and responsibilities to the masses.

The scope of nonfiction today, most especially what we call creative nonfiction, continues to evolve, informing and inspiring readers with stories that are true, compelling, revealing and always surprising.