The Draft
How to Tell the Truth
In creative nonfiction, how much of your life can you embellish?
Welcome to The Draft, an advice column about writing and life from Eileen Pollack, former director of the University of Michigan MFA Program. We’re here to answer your questions about storycraft, writing, and telling the truth in words.
Have a question? Share it with us.
Dear Draft,
What is the “creative” part of creative nonfiction? Are you allowed to make stuff up? When a memoirist describes what they said or did when they were seven years old, am I supposed to believe they remember those exact details and lines of dialogue? Don’t a lot of contemporary writers blur the lines between genres?
Signed,
Not Sure What to Believe
Dear Not Sure,
When I write nonfiction, I never make anything up. In fact, most of the writers I know are outraged when other writers lie. The reason we label our work “nonfiction” is we want readers to know this shit actually happened; this is the truth about what people do to each other; this is what rarely gets said; this is what it means to be a human being. If not for the Ripley’s Believe-It-Or-Not factor, we would have turned the same material into fiction, which would have…
