Stranger than Fiction
Grad Faculty Member Patty McNair Waxes Nonfiction
Interview by Ilana Shabanov
IS: How does your approach differ between writing fiction and creative nonfiction?
PM: In so many ways the process is the same for me. I need to create fully realized scenes; I need to keep the story going (what happens next?); I need to hear my storyteller’s voice on the page. What differs for me is the place I start from. When I begin a piece, I want to know if I’m going to try and tell what really happened, or if I am going to just see what happens. I use fictional techniques in creative nonfiction, and tell actual events in fiction, but to me, the way a piece unfolds will depend on which type of piece I am writing.
That strong sense of audience that we work on developing in the Fiction Writing Department is important to my writing, and I think that some nonfiction readers look so deeply inside that they forget that they are not (should not be) talking to themselves. So this, too, is similar whether I’m writing fiction or nonfiction. I know some writers—perhaps especially student writers, but maybe others as well—who just start writing without knowing if what they are writing is going to be autobiographical fiction or memoir, whether they are writing a story or an essay. I can’t blur the lines like that.
Fiction is harder than nonfiction for me. Why is that? Probably because good fiction comes to a logical stopping point, an inevitable last line. Even if the ending is not neatly tied in a bow (it probably shouldn’t be) a reader should feel as though this is where this piece, written by this author at this time, has to end. And a really good story can—in a way—be read backward from that last line and it should still seem as though the path from beginning to end, from end to beginning is marked throughout the story.
Creative nonfiction? Not so much. Life—the material creative nonfiction uses—is never very neat; its paths twist and turn and come out of doors that have been bricked over and then disappear in the gray mist only to start again a couple of miles further on. And creative nonfiction, memoir especially but not exclusively, has wiggle room because of this. Something doesn’t add up, doesn’t make sense? The creative nonfiction writer can simply say that: “I don’t know why my father woke up crying in the middle of the night so often. He just did.” And then the creative nonfiction writer can throw out some maybe’s: “Perhaps it had to do with his own father’s suicide. Perhaps it was because he never got over leaving his first family behind all of those years ago. Perhaps he was just sad.” You do too much of this sort of thing in fiction, and the fiction police start to blow their whistles and yell out, “Show, don’t tell!” (A simplistic, wrong-headed rule in any case, but you get what I mean).
Good creative nonfiction to me offers up as many questions as it does anything else. It opens outward, instead of moving to an inevitable closure. Epiphanies should be small and shifting, and discoveries should be made throughout, and the reader should feel as though there are more to be made after the piece is put down. Fiction creates its own world (real or not) and creative nonfiction exposes an existing one as seen through the teller’s eyes and experience, independent of the piece. And if I don’t know whether I’m writing creative nonfiction (much more, by the way, than just a “true story”, but that’s another question altogether) or fiction, I can’t begin to know what world my work will inhabit.
IS: Is there a certain kind of character that interests you or that you enjoy exploring?
PM: A writer friend of mine once suggested that most of us have a defining moment or event in our lives that we keep returning to in some way. For him it was having been imprisoned after having dodged the draft in the sixties. Even when he wasn’t writing about that specifically, he found that his work always had certain connections to the material: characters drawn from people he met during that time, the politics of his actions, feelings of being trapped, etc.
While I think that my life has passed through a few defining moments (I’m fifty now after all, I hope there has been more than one moment) I know that my father dying when I was fifteen years old—unexpectedly of a heart attack—was one of the key ones. So I often find myself writing about young women of about that age. It’s such an interesting age to me—the thin pink line between girlhood and womanhood. Teenagers are so much more highly charged emotionally than adults; they feel things in such unguarded, raw ways. But they are also vulnerable and curious and perhaps sort of fearless. They are not entirely cynical or jaded yet; they haven’t learned those skills. All of the things that we adults start to take for granted—or worse, begin to resent—like responsibility, various freedoms, accountability, sex, and so on, are going to be new to a fifteen-year-old girl. And it all feels so cool and confusing and totally important—you know, like life and death—that their response to it all can be quite interesting and fresh. So even when I write about adults with adult relationships and concerns, I often will refer to a point in their development, give a little supporting story material that might come from something important that happened to them when they were about fifteen or so. And many of my characters have lost or been abandoned by a parent, too.
IS: At what point in creating a character do you know they are complete and fully realized?
PM: I don’t have a strategy for recognizing when a character is fully realized. I believe that the best characters should make a reader feel as though he’s been hanging out with that character—whether he wanted to or not. Like when you finish Catcher in the Rye after having been reading it for a few days and you wake up in the morning and wonder what Holden’s up to that day, if maybe you should give him a call. And then you remember he isn’t a guy you know, but a character whose story you’ve read.
Many times I don’t know for certain a character is done until I get to read some of their story out loud and hear reaction from the audience. The question that we writers know not to ask can be the most flattering one when you think about it: “Did that really happen to you?” I take that to mean that I have created a character that is effective enough to seem real.
And sometimes I fail. An editor of a journal to which I’d submitted a story wrote me one of those “good” rejections—you know how we all look for those, right? The ones with the personal note, the hand-written thank you, the lines of encouragement. It was something like “we liked the situation of the story, but in the end we didn’t think it was believable for this boy to have the same experience as his uncle did.” There was no boy in the story. It was a girl. I knew that, but when I read the story again, I realized that there was no real evidence either way.
IS: In writing creative nonfiction, how do you deal with the dilemma of staying true to the story but also doing what serves it best?
PM: To me, what is true in creative nonfiction is not necessarily what happened, but is something other than that. I’m not even sure that we know what is true when we write creative nonfiction until we live with the piece for a while, write more than we need, weed it and fertilize it, see what grows tallest from the patch and needs the most attention. (It’s summer now, and I am looking out toward my overgrown yard. Sorry.)
Not everyone agrees with this, but I think that good creative nonfiction always has to be about something, and the writer has to try to understand what that something is. It has to be more than just a recounting of something that happened, more than an anecdote. In our Prose Forms class we do those instance collections, and I think that this exercise is remarkable for its potential. The instances on their own can be simple retellings of moments, anecdotal, recreations, whatever. But when you put a few of them together, they become something else. The “aboutness” (I like this better than the word “theme”) begins to emerge from the patterns. Good instances will be written with some accuracy—as accurate as memory or research allows—and so the “true” story is there. But once you start to see what it is that the gathering of this information is really about, you can edit, cut, heighten, massage, suppose, create. The events might no longer be entirely accurate, but the piece has begun to expose its real truth.
Finally, if your piece starts to become more fictional during this process, if you find yourself making up more and remembering or retelling less, don’t pretend that it is nonfiction. Buck up and do the extra work you need to in order to write fiction.
IS: Do you have any go-to writers for inspiration or who you feel have informed your writing during your career?
PM: I find my writing informed by whatever I’m reading at the time, so I do have to be careful to not choose the wrong thing at the wrong time. I’ll often pick up Hubert Selby or Virginia Woolf or John Edgar Wideman and just read some pages I already know pretty well out loud just to hear the rhythms they use. The phrases inside of phrases inside of phrases. I love that. John Steinbeck’s use of recognizable, effective story structures; the way Katherine Ann Porter creates the passage of time; Katherine Mansfield’s willingness to sort of talk out information in a story, these are all useful to me.
I read a lot of contemporary fiction just to make sure I have a sense of what is out there now, but I will not stay with something very long if I can’t trust it—if it’s too gimmicky, too clever, too self-absorbed, too trite, too narrow. I can be pretty judgmental. Some contemporary writers I can find useful are my colleagues (obviously), and Jonathon Lethem, TC Boyle, Jhumpa Lahiri, Brett Lott, Jack Driscoll, Dorothy Allison. I love the New Yorker’s nonfiction: Roger Angell—how beautiful his work is—Franzen, McPhee. Pico Iyer’s writing about travel and place. Anne-Marie Oomen’s memoirs. There really is so much to admire when you are willing to look around a bit and read things you wouldn’t necessarily think you’d like, but you might have to kiss a lot of frogs first.
IS: Who is your first reader and does that person (or persons) differ depending on the work?
PM: My poor husband. First, second, third, and last reader. That’s Philip—Philip Hartigan. Philip is a visual artist, and he also is a writer. He won’t admit this now, denies it even as he’s had some very good things published. He was a literature major at Cambridge (did I mention that he’s brilliant and talented?) during his undergrad years, and when he finished that he wrote two novels, one of which was picked up by an agent and shopped around with lots of interest but no real success. His masters is in fine art; that’s his true calling. But his background in literature and writing make him a very fine reader. I’m sort of fragile when I give my work to someone, so he has learned to phrase things in such a way that I actually hear them. He won’t make suggestions, but he will ask questions, and he will eventually tell me when he thinks something is either not working or not done. And, damn him, he is usually right. He will listen to numerous drafts being read out loud while we have coffee in bed (too much information?), and he comes to almost all of my readings.
He is a true fan, but also a sincere critic. He has actually cried over some of my work—you know, in a good way. And, poor guy, he read the first draft of this novel beast I am working on now, and then another draft (complete with changes he helped me figure out), and I keep warning him that he will have to read the next one when it is finished as well. And he has to suffer through all of that writer dinner-table talk: bits of the story out of context, my character this, my character that. He’s very good at nodding and smiling, knowing that I don’t expect any real response. I’m just blowing off steam after a writing day.
Interview by Ilana Shabanov
IS: How does your approach differ between writing fiction and creative nonfiction?
PM: In so many ways the process is the same for me. I need to create fully realized scenes; I need to keep the story going (what happens next?); I need to hear my storyteller’s voice on the page. What differs for me is the place I start from. When I begin a piece, I want to know if I’m going to try and tell what really happened, or if I am going to just see what happens. I use fictional techniques in creative nonfiction, and tell actual events in fiction, but to me, the way a piece unfolds will depend on which type of piece I am writing.
That strong sense of audience that we work on developing in the Fiction Writing Department is important to my writing, and I think that some nonfiction readers look so deeply inside that they forget that they are not (should not be) talking to themselves. So this, too, is similar whether I’m writing fiction or nonfiction. I know some writers—perhaps especially student writers, but maybe others as well—who just start writing without knowing if what they are writing is going to be autobiographical fiction or memoir, whether they are writing a story or an essay. I can’t blur the lines like that.
Fiction is harder than nonfiction for me. Why is that? Probably because good fiction comes to a logical stopping point, an inevitable last line. Even if the ending is not neatly tied in a bow (it probably shouldn’t be) a reader should feel as though this is where this piece, written by this author at this time, has to end. And a really good story can—in a way—be read backward from that last line and it should still seem as though the path from beginning to end, from end to beginning is marked throughout the story.
Creative nonfiction? Not so much. Life—the material creative nonfiction uses—is never very neat; its paths twist and turn and come out of doors that have been bricked over and then disappear in the gray mist only to start again a couple of miles further on. And creative nonfiction, memoir especially but not exclusively, has wiggle room because of this. Something doesn’t add up, doesn’t make sense? The creative nonfiction writer can simply say that: “I don’t know why my father woke up crying in the middle of the night so often. He just did.” And then the creative nonfiction writer can throw out some maybe’s: “Perhaps it had to do with his own father’s suicide. Perhaps it was because he never got over leaving his first family behind all of those years ago. Perhaps he was just sad.” You do too much of this sort of thing in fiction, and the fiction police start to blow their whistles and yell out, “Show, don’t tell!” (A simplistic, wrong-headed rule in any case, but you get what I mean).
Good creative nonfiction to me offers up as many questions as it does anything else. It opens outward, instead of moving to an inevitable closure. Epiphanies should be small and shifting, and discoveries should be made throughout, and the reader should feel as though there are more to be made after the piece is put down. Fiction creates its own world (real or not) and creative nonfiction exposes an existing one as seen through the teller’s eyes and experience, independent of the piece. And if I don’t know whether I’m writing creative nonfiction (much more, by the way, than just a “true story”, but that’s another question altogether) or fiction, I can’t begin to know what world my work will inhabit.
IS: Is there a certain kind of character that interests you or that you enjoy exploring?
PM: A writer friend of mine once suggested that most of us have a defining moment or event in our lives that we keep returning to in some way. For him it was having been imprisoned after having dodged the draft in the sixties. Even when he wasn’t writing about that specifically, he found that his work always had certain connections to the material: characters drawn from people he met during that time, the politics of his actions, feelings of being trapped, etc.
While I think that my life has passed through a few defining moments (I’m fifty now after all, I hope there has been more than one moment) I know that my father dying when I was fifteen years old—unexpectedly of a heart attack—was one of the key ones. So I often find myself writing about young women of about that age. It’s such an interesting age to me—the thin pink line between girlhood and womanhood. Teenagers are so much more highly charged emotionally than adults; they feel things in such unguarded, raw ways. But they are also vulnerable and curious and perhaps sort of fearless. They are not entirely cynical or jaded yet; they haven’t learned those skills. All of the things that we adults start to take for granted—or worse, begin to resent—like responsibility, various freedoms, accountability, sex, and so on, are going to be new to a fifteen-year-old girl. And it all feels so cool and confusing and totally important—you know, like life and death—that their response to it all can be quite interesting and fresh. So even when I write about adults with adult relationships and concerns, I often will refer to a point in their development, give a little supporting story material that might come from something important that happened to them when they were about fifteen or so. And many of my characters have lost or been abandoned by a parent, too.
IS: At what point in creating a character do you know they are complete and fully realized?
PM: I don’t have a strategy for recognizing when a character is fully realized. I believe that the best characters should make a reader feel as though he’s been hanging out with that character—whether he wanted to or not. Like when you finish Catcher in the Rye after having been reading it for a few days and you wake up in the morning and wonder what Holden’s up to that day, if maybe you should give him a call. And then you remember he isn’t a guy you know, but a character whose story you’ve read.
Many times I don’t know for certain a character is done until I get to read some of their story out loud and hear reaction from the audience. The question that we writers know not to ask can be the most flattering one when you think about it: “Did that really happen to you?” I take that to mean that I have created a character that is effective enough to seem real.
And sometimes I fail. An editor of a journal to which I’d submitted a story wrote me one of those “good” rejections—you know how we all look for those, right? The ones with the personal note, the hand-written thank you, the lines of encouragement. It was something like “we liked the situation of the story, but in the end we didn’t think it was believable for this boy to have the same experience as his uncle did.” There was no boy in the story. It was a girl. I knew that, but when I read the story again, I realized that there was no real evidence either way.
IS: In writing creative nonfiction, how do you deal with the dilemma of staying true to the story but also doing what serves it best?
PM: To me, what is true in creative nonfiction is not necessarily what happened, but is something other than that. I’m not even sure that we know what is true when we write creative nonfiction until we live with the piece for a while, write more than we need, weed it and fertilize it, see what grows tallest from the patch and needs the most attention. (It’s summer now, and I am looking out toward my overgrown yard. Sorry.)
Not everyone agrees with this, but I think that good creative nonfiction always has to be about something, and the writer has to try to understand what that something is. It has to be more than just a recounting of something that happened, more than an anecdote. In our Prose Forms class we do those instance collections, and I think that this exercise is remarkable for its potential. The instances on their own can be simple retellings of moments, anecdotal, recreations, whatever. But when you put a few of them together, they become something else. The “aboutness” (I like this better than the word “theme”) begins to emerge from the patterns. Good instances will be written with some accuracy—as accurate as memory or research allows—and so the “true” story is there. But once you start to see what it is that the gathering of this information is really about, you can edit, cut, heighten, massage, suppose, create. The events might no longer be entirely accurate, but the piece has begun to expose its real truth.
Finally, if your piece starts to become more fictional during this process, if you find yourself making up more and remembering or retelling less, don’t pretend that it is nonfiction. Buck up and do the extra work you need to in order to write fiction.
IS: Do you have any go-to writers for inspiration or who you feel have informed your writing during your career?
PM: I find my writing informed by whatever I’m reading at the time, so I do have to be careful to not choose the wrong thing at the wrong time. I’ll often pick up Hubert Selby or Virginia Woolf or John Edgar Wideman and just read some pages I already know pretty well out loud just to hear the rhythms they use. The phrases inside of phrases inside of phrases. I love that. John Steinbeck’s use of recognizable, effective story structures; the way Katherine Ann Porter creates the passage of time; Katherine Mansfield’s willingness to sort of talk out information in a story, these are all useful to me.
I read a lot of contemporary fiction just to make sure I have a sense of what is out there now, but I will not stay with something very long if I can’t trust it—if it’s too gimmicky, too clever, too self-absorbed, too trite, too narrow. I can be pretty judgmental. Some contemporary writers I can find useful are my colleagues (obviously), and Jonathon Lethem, TC Boyle, Jhumpa Lahiri, Brett Lott, Jack Driscoll, Dorothy Allison. I love the New Yorker’s nonfiction: Roger Angell—how beautiful his work is—Franzen, McPhee. Pico Iyer’s writing about travel and place. Anne-Marie Oomen’s memoirs. There really is so much to admire when you are willing to look around a bit and read things you wouldn’t necessarily think you’d like, but you might have to kiss a lot of frogs first.
IS: Who is your first reader and does that person (or persons) differ depending on the work?
PM: My poor husband. First, second, third, and last reader. That’s Philip—Philip Hartigan. Philip is a visual artist, and he also is a writer. He won’t admit this now, denies it even as he’s had some very good things published. He was a literature major at Cambridge (did I mention that he’s brilliant and talented?) during his undergrad years, and when he finished that he wrote two novels, one of which was picked up by an agent and shopped around with lots of interest but no real success. His masters is in fine art; that’s his true calling. But his background in literature and writing make him a very fine reader. I’m sort of fragile when I give my work to someone, so he has learned to phrase things in such a way that I actually hear them. He won’t make suggestions, but he will ask questions, and he will eventually tell me when he thinks something is either not working or not done. And, damn him, he is usually right. He will listen to numerous drafts being read out loud while we have coffee in bed (too much information?), and he comes to almost all of my readings.
He is a true fan, but also a sincere critic. He has actually cried over some of my work—you know, in a good way. And, poor guy, he read the first draft of this novel beast I am working on now, and then another draft (complete with changes he helped me figure out), and I keep warning him that he will have to read the next one when it is finished as well. And he has to suffer through all of that writer dinner-table talk: bits of the story out of context, my character this, my character that. He’s very good at nodding and smiling, knowing that I don’t expect any real response. I’m just blowing off steam after a writing day.
Photo by Philip Hartigan.
