Ethics of Writing Creative Non-Fiction

Note: The first four posts of this thread have been moved from https://essayforum.com/scholarship-22/something-learned-experience-6705/. Some of the posts reference the essay in the original thread. -- EF_Sean

When recreating dialogue in creative nonfiction, it's important to stay as close as possible to what was actually said. Otherwise, the piece becomes fiction and the author untrustworthy.

I'd say it depends on the purpose of the writing. Really, most people repeat themselves, speak with all sorts of hesitations, mangle their grammar, and generally refuse to converse in accordance with the dictates of good writing. And that's when you can tape record them to be sure you remembered what they actually said. Any record based purely on memory has already been cleaned up and rewritten by the brain . No conversation you remember having happened exactly that way, and a great many of the conversations you think you remember didn't happen at all. In fact, some of the studies on how people remember events have raised some very interesting issues concerning whether eyewitness testimony should ever be allowed in trials, given that even the most honest testimony is going to be largely a work of fiction. So, I see no great problem changing Joe's speech to sound more realistic and to better convey the point the essayist wishes to make, especially as the essayist admits he can't remember anything beyond the impression of the original statement anyway. Even in creative non-fiction striving for accuracy, it is the essence, the Truth of the speech, as it were, that is most important, rather than the actual wording. Plus, this isn't a work of creative non-fiction striving for accuracy. It is a creative work that will ideally be rooted in the author's actual experiences, though Joe could be entirely fictional (and I wouldn't be at all surprised to find out he was, at that, though I'll take the essayist at his word for now) and the essay would lose nothing by it.

With all due respect, Sean, this essay does fall into the genre of creative non-fiction, in that the author is presenting this as an essentially true account of a personal experience. There's a big difference between smoothing out dialogue (taking out the repetitions and fillers, etc.) and just making things up. There can be a strong temptation to make a story stronger by putting words into people's mouths. That's fine with a fictional character, but when we are writing about a real person, we have an obligation to that person (and to our readers) to do our best to make sure the dialogue we recreate is an authentic reflection of what they actually said. That homeless man was real. He said something. In order to be true to him and to the story, the writer must search his memory and then use dialogue that -- while it probably won't be the exact words that were said -- is an authentic representation of their encounter.

For discussions of the importance of authenticity in creative non-fiction, and tips for resolving the ethical questions that can arise when reconstructing stories from imprecise memories, see Bly (2001) Beyond the Writer's Workshop and Gornick (2001) The Situation and the Story.

I'd say there is also a rather large area in-between these two. More the point, I'd say that the distinction is more important in other types of writing. If he had been writing an article for a newspaper, let's say, in which he was writing an expose on homelessness in his city, then I would expect him to capture the essence of Joe's words as accurately as possible, and for Joe to be real. Mostly, that's because then he would be writing a piece in which his stated purpose would be to write a story that was true to Joe. In this case, though, his stated purpose, or rather, the one that was given to him, was


To me, that puts the essay firmly in the "creative" realm. Just think about how many Hollywood movies are "based" on true stories, yet have huge swaths of the material completely made up. All he has been asked to do is to capture a lesson that he has learned based on his personal experiences. Under such circumstances, Joe might easily be a composite of several homeless people he had met, with the incident emblematic of the larger truth he wishes to convey, rather than either Joe or the incident being "real," in the sense you seem to mean.

I'm not trying to convince you, btw, only to clarify my own stance. I suspect that this is a case where we will have to agree to disagree. That's okay, though -- it would be a dull world indeed where people were always in accord.