CREATIVE NON-FICTION
Questions of narrative
Keen to try writing non-fiction from a personal perspective? James McCreet describes fusing fictional and factual writing techniques when he made the switch from novels to history.
James McCreet
I’ve accidentally written a history book. It started out as a memoir with some historical research because I didn’t feel qualified to write history. I didn’t study the subject and I know that it is quite rigorous in terms of citing sources and creating an expansive bibliography. In short, I was afraid. My writing experience is limited to novels and some literary criticism so I set out to write something that was broadly novelistic.
Long story short: a memoir was never going to be commercially viable. Nobody is interested in my life. I’m a nobody. But the place I wanted to write about is fascinating to potentially thousands of people – which brought me back to history. I know from my previous novels that the problem with genuine history is the lack of narrative and plot, which are usually imposed in retrospect. In lieu of these, it simply has chronology, which can make for quite a dull reading experience.
History is one thing happening after another. There’s no suspense or expectation because we already know what happened. Often, what happens in history is unexpected or coincidental or just plain incredible. The challenge is to give it the elements of a story – anarrative – even though it was originally a sequence of events. I saw that I had to write a history using novelistic skills.