Creative nonfiction tells a true story in an interesting way. It's not a boring newspaper article or a slow-moving, dryly written biography. Creative nonfiction allows the writer to tell a story in a way that is funny, or endearing, or in some way evokes emotion from the reader. The writer makes this work by writing the facts in their own voice and integrating humor and emotion into the story. Rather than just saying what happened, the write may include an anecdotal background story about the subject, or even about themselves. By relating to the subject, the author is able to write a nonfiction narrative that is interesting to read. Creative nonfiction is used for biographies and essays that intend to give the reader information without putting them to sleep.
We have analyzed both "Eye" and "I" essays. The difference is that in "Eye" essays, the story looks at someone else's experiences through the author's view, while in "I" essays, the writers are talking about themselves. Grealy's essay, "Mirrorings", is an "I" essay. She speaks very personally and candidly about her struggle, but wraps her story up in her emotions. She doesn't just tell you that she had cancer; she tells you that she had cancer and it made helped her to discover her self-identity, and how she learned to cope with the inadequacy that she felt because of her appearance. Her reflection is quite touching, and this made her essay very appealing to the reader.
In Lowry's essay, she writes with her "eye". She tells the reader about Karla's life from her perspective. Since Karla was eventually sentenced to death years after the essay was written, we know that the prison and/or society could not forgive her for her crimes nor accept that she had grown or changed as a person. However, Lowry's essay is able to evoke sympathy for a murderer because of the way she describes their friendship and Karla's point of view. This is the purpose of the "eye" essay in creative writing - to look into someone elses' life but write it from ones' own point of view. Lowry does not speak much about how she was trying to come to terms with her son's death, but it becomes evident to the reader that her relationship with Karla may have helped her understand her loss somewhat. Ultimately, the loss of her son was Lowry's reason for meeting Karla and writing about it, but it became a larger story when a new relationship was developed.
Tracy Kidder said that "in fiction, believability may have nothing to do with reality or even plausibility. In nonfiction, it has everything to do with these things.I think that the nonfiction writer's fundamental job is to make what is true believable." I think that that's an excellent starting point for writing nonfiction creatively, but one that Lowry was unable to achieve. It is hard to believe that someone would just go into a prison to talk to a killer so that they could understand their son's death, and it's possible that Lowry could have written a different essay, an "I" essay, to explain her actions in a more believable way. On the other hand, Grealy did an amazing job telling her own story in a believable way with the approach that she chose. I think that a big part of creative non-fiction is how the writer chooses to write it, from what point of view and for what reason. I also think that it's important to have some kind of emotional attachment to the facts in the story so that it sounds sincere and the reader does not doubt the authenticity of the writing.
Lott seems to have a great idea of a definition for creative nonfiction: "[It] can take any form, from the letter to the list, from the biography to the memoir, from the journal to the obituary. When I say we are trying to find order in what has happened, I do not mean creative nonfiction is simply writing about what happened to me. Rather, it is writing about oneself in relation to the subject at hand."
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