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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
the permanent importance … lies in its being the meeting point of an impersonal art and a very personal life story … Obviously Nabokov's method would lose all sense unless the material were as true an account of personal experience as memory could possibly make it. The selective apparatus pertains to art; but the parts selected belong to unadulterated life.
vladimir nabokov, Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited (2000: 239)A story grows from real and imagined experience. Creative nonfiction usually takes reality as its origin, but that does not mean we dispense with the mind's natural skill for story. Creative nonfiction deals with realities truthfully – experiences, events, facts – yet the drive of the writing is the author's involvement in the story, and writers use every literary device in the book to tell that story well. Carol Bly offers a precis in Beyond the Writers' Workshop: ‘All you have to do is be truthful, tell things in your personal voice, and have your modus operandi be revealing your own life circumstances through anecdote or narrative and revealing the meanings you attach to those circumstances, rather than arguing the point’ (2001: xvii). Readers are drawn in by this personal engagement, the author's literary style and passion for the telling. This chapter introduces some of the introductory elements of creative nonfiction, and some basic literary tools.
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