WRITING AND SHAPING CREATIVE

NONFICTION
UNEARTHINGYOUR MATERIAL
An Author’s Craft Lecture Series

Raymond ArdienteYbanez
NAGMAC Senior Writer
WHERE TO BEGIN?
The word is the making of the world.
—Wallace Stevens
Tell all the Truth but tell it Slant—
Success in Circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth’s superb surprise
As Lightening to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind—
—Emily Dickinson
The truth of art can be very different from the truth
of day-to-day life. Dickinson’s poems and letters,
after all, reveal her deft observation of the outer
world, but it is “slanted” through the poet’s distinctive
vision.The task of the creative nonfiction writer: to
tell the truth, yes, but to become more than a mere
transcriber of life’s factual experiences.
In nonfiction, if we place a premium on fact. But in
literature and art, we applaud style, meaning, and
effect over the bare facts.We go to literature—and
perhaps especially creative nonfiction literature—to
learn not about the author, but about ourselves; we
want to be moved in some way.That emotional
resonance happens only through skillful use of
artistic techniques.
“Literature is where I go to explore the highest and
lowest places in human society and in the human
spirit, where I hope to find not absolute truth but the
truth of the tale, of the imagination and of the
heart.”
–Salman Rushdie
“…where a fiction writer will tell you lots of stories,
but those stories could be made up or exaggerated,
but when you write creative nonfiction, you are
trying to connect with the reader –promising the
reader that you are going to entertain them
cinematically with stories—but promising the reader
at the same time that whatever you say is going to be
accurate than true.”
–Lee Gutkind
LET US BEGIN
“Remember that the writers whom we call eternal or simply
good and who intoxicate us have one common and very
important characteristic: they get somewhere, and they
summon you there, and you feel, not with your mind, but
with your whole being, that they have a certain purpose
and, like the ghost of Hamlet’s father, do not come and
excite the imagination for nothing. He who desires nothing,
hopes for nothing, and is afraid of nothing, cannot be an
artist.”
—Anton Chekhov, in a letter
to Alexei Suvorin, Nov. 25, 1892
BODY OF MEMORY
Memory begins to qualify the imagination, to give it
another formation, one that is peculiar to the self. . . .
If I were to remember other things, I should be
someone else.
—N. Scott Momaday
The Earliest Memory
What is your earliest memory? What is the memory that
always emerges from the dim reaches of your
consciousness as the first one, the beginning to this life
you call your own? Most of us can pinpoint them, these
images that assume a privileged station in our life’s
story. Some of these early memories have the vague aspect
of a dream, some the vivid clarity of a photograph. In
whatever form they take, they tend to exert on us a
mysterious fascination.
 The first memory then becomes the starting point in
our own narratives of the self.“Our first memories are like
the creation stories that humans have always told about
the origins of the earth,” Kotre writes. “In a similar way,
the individual self—knowing how the story is coming
out—selects its earliest memories to say,‘This is who I am
because this is how I began.’ ”
 Metaphorical Memory
A metaphor is a way at getting at a truth that exists
beyond the literal. By pinpointing certain images as
symbolic, writers can go deeper than surface truths and
create essays that work on many levels at once. This is what
writers are up to all the time, not only with memory but
with the material of experience and the world. We resurrect
the details to describe not only the surface appearance, but
also to make intuitive connections, to articulate some truth
that cannot be spoken of directly.
Muscle Memory
The body, memory, and mind exist in sublime
interdependence, each part wholly twined with the others.
There is a phrase used in dancing, athletics, parachuting,
and other fields that require sharp training of the body:
muscle memory. Once the body learns the repetitive
gestures of a certain movement or skill, the memory of
how to execute these movements will be encoded in the
muscles.
The Five Senses of Memory
 “At the farthest end of our sofa lay a stack of blueprints and various
other folders belonging to Tatay. Barely a step away, our ten-year-old landline
stood on a cobwebbed pile of what we considered scratch papers: documents from
Nanay’s previous researches, test papers, and several drafts of thesis papers. It was
impossible not to enter the front door and bump on the edge of a dining table
that was much too big for our small kitchen. In addition to these, a whole shelf is
filled with photo albums that document the earlier milestones of our family.The
spines were already brittle, and the covers of the wedding albums were detaching
inch by inch. Beside these, various photos celebrating our finest moments—from
my first day at preschool to Kelsey’s first swim at the pool—stood like altars to a
time we have left only to memory.”
Walls Between Us
By Maria Karlene Shawn Cabaraban
Carayan Journal of Narrative Essays, XU Press, 2017
 By paying attention to the sensory gateways of the
body, you also begin to write in a way that naturally
embodies experience, making it tactile for the reader.
Readers tend to care deeply only about those things they
feel in the body at a visceral level. And so as a writer
consider your vocation as that of a translator: one who
renders the abstract into the concrete. We experience the
world through our senses. We must translate that
experience into the language of the senses as well.
 Smell
“Smell is a potent wizard that transports us across
thousands of miles and all the years we have lived,” wrote
Helen Keller in her autobiography. “The odors of fruits
waft me to my southern home, to my childhood frolics in
the peach orchard. Other odors, instantaneous and
fleeting, cause my heart to dilate joyously or contract
with remembered grief.”
–Helen Keller
 Smell seems to travel to our brains directly, without
logical or intellectual interference. Physiologically, we do
apprehend smells more quickly than the other sensations,
and the images aroused by smell act as beacons leading
to our richest memories, our most private selves. Smell is
so intimately tied up with breath, after all, a function of
our bodies that works continually, day and night, keeping
us alive. And so smell keys us into the memories that
evoke the continual ebb and flow of experience. The
richest smells can be the most innocent.
Taste

What are the tastes that carry the most emotion for
you? The tastes that, even in memory, make you stop a
moment and run your tongue over your lips and swallow
hard?Write these down, as quickly as you can. Which
scenes, memories, associations come to the surface?
 When you sit down to unburden yourself to a
friend, you often do so over a meal prepared together in
the kitchen, the two of you chopping vegetables or sipping
wine as you articulate whatever troubles have come to
haunt you. When these predicaments grow overwhelming,
we turn to comfort food, meals that spark in us a memory
of an idealized, secure childhood.When we are falling in
love, we offer food as our first timid gesture toward
intimacy.
SIGHT
How do you see the world? How do you see yourself ? Even
linguistically, our sense of sight seems so tied up in our
perceptions, stance, opinions, personalities, and knowledge
of the world. To see something often means to finally
understand, to be enlightened, to have our vision cleared.
What we choose to see—and not to see—often says more
about us than anything else.
When we “look back” in memory, we see those memories.
Our minds have catalogued an inexhaustible storehouse of
visual images. Now the trick is for you to render those
images in writing. Pay attention to the smallest details.
What are the moments in your life that have “struck”
you? How have they been engraved in memory?
TOUCH

We are constantly aware of our bodies, of how they

feel as they move through the world. Without this sense
we become lost, disoriented in space and time. And the
people who have affected us the most are the ones who
have touched us in some way, who have reached beyond
this barrier of skin and made contact with our small,
isolated selves.
HEARING

Sounds often go unnoticed. Because we cannot

consciously cut off our hearing unless we plug our ears,
we’ve learned to filter sounds, picking and choosing the
ones that are important, becoming inured to the rest. But
these sounds often make up a subliminal backdrop to our
lives, and even the faintest echo can tug back moments from
the past in their entirety.
IS IT THE TRUTH?
Memory and Imagination
If your work is rooted in memory, you will find yourself
immediately confronted with the imagination. Memory, in
a sense, is imagination: an “imaging” of the past, re
creating the sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and touches. In
her essay “Memory and Imagination,” Patricia Hampl
writes, “I am forced to admit that memoir is not a matter
of transcription, that memory itself is not a warehouse of
finished stories, not a static gallery of framed pictures. I
must admit that I invented. But why?”
 “The feeling is getting heavier when I reached the cornfields of
Gitagum and passed through an old corn mill with a big sign nailed
on its aching front door: For Sale. There were barely houses settling in
this part of the hi-way. Whenever I am passing this stretch of Kilangit
to Tala-o, I can’t help but to be amazed by its long straight hi-way, as
if its heading upwards to the heavens. But the downside, there was no
cellphone signal, which in effect, leaving me traversing the enigmatic
hi-way, alone. With Darlene’s voice in absence, I can only tell her
personally and not on-the-spot leaving some details behind, of how the
night sky blanketed the vast illuminated yellow-green corn leaves.
From a distance, like a spilled ink dividing the sheet land, stationed a
large shadow created by the quarried mountain and constant flickering
of the stars spewing tiny flashes of lights reflecting against my black
dashboard.”
 “Take me there sometime please so that we can see it both, while
I’m feeling you.” Darlene’s voice in appeal.
It’s morning here in Gitagum, no flickering of stars, only scorching
heat of the sun drying off what’s left on the unharvest corn crops. The
quarried mountain, totally disemboweled by big tractors and bulldozers.
The corn mill is still there—stood silently unfazed—and hasn’t been sold
yet. I stayed for a while gazing at the barren field, and left. ’’

It Never Rains In Santa Felomina

By Raymond ArdienteYbanez
Finalist for Travel Essay, Cotabato Literary Journal
SouthWestern University Press, 2017
 “On the third bed, a mother quietly tended to his teenaged son,
a UP Interned student, who was stricken with dengue.Where did he
pick up the virus? A mosquito bite in the campus of UP Manila. Scary.
The patient’s blood platelet count had been dipping the past few days.
Thankfully the count didn’t fall past eighty, the mother said.That
was the critical threshold. Once you go below that, it’s fatal.The
mother was persistent. She prevailed upon the hospital to monitor her
son’s condition. After four days, a huge rash with the color and size of
a mabolo (velvet apple) broke out on the boy’s tummy.That indicated
that the body had successfully fought off dengue.”
 “Apparently the illness has no cure save for the individual’s
robust body resistance. Hats off to the mother when she said that a big
factor in the survival of any sick person is the perseverance, skill, and
love of the
caretaker. Hay, I salute my guardians, my friend Beni and her nephews,
my own nephew Nelson, and the cascade of friends who visited and
harassed me in Room 436. Because of you guys, what happened to me
felt a lot less heavier.”

To The Marrow: Hospital Diaries and other Essays

By Romulo P. Baquiran, Jr
Anvil Publishing, 2014
General Tips in Starting Your Draft
Scene Versus Exposition
Specificity and Detail
Developing Character
Dialogue
Point ofView
Image and Metaphor
Exposition:
For five years I lived in Alaska.

Scene:
For the five years I lived in Alaska. I awoke each morning to
the freezing seat of the outhouse, the sting of hot strong
coffee drunk without precious sugar or milk, the ringing
“G’day!” of my Australian neighbor.
Scene:
You leaned against the tree.

Specificity of detail:
You leaned not just against a tree but against a weeping
silver birch; the voice at the other end of the phone sounded
like the Tin Man’s in TheWizard of Oz.
“In the case of my father and myself, I had the fullness of
his face and his desire to write, which had been abandoned
when he came to America with a family to raise. . . He was
a middle-aged man who was sobbing and sweaty and his
body was heavy and so soft I imagined his ribs giving way
like a snowman’s on the first warm winter day.”

Lawrence Sutin in “Man and Boy”

The “I” and the Eye: Framing Experience
A useful way of looking at how creative nonfiction employs the “I”
is to align the genre with photography. Both photography and creative
nonfiction operate under the “sign of the real” (a phrase coined by literary
theorist Hayden White); both operate as though the medium itself were
transparent. In other words, when you look at a photograph, you are lulled
into the illusion that you see the world as it is—looking through a
window, as it were—but in reality you are being shown a highly
manipulated version of that world. The same is true with creative
nonfiction. Because it operates under the sign of the real, it can be easy to
mistake the essay as presenting life itself, without adulteration.
Image and Metaphor

Janet Burroway, in her textWriting Fiction, describes

metaphor as the foundation stone “from which literature
derives.” Image—any literary element that creates a sense
impression in the mind—and metaphor—the use of
comparison— form the heart of any literary work.
Revise
Revise
Revise
Revise
Revise pa more…
Expect to see errors
Revise pa more until it trims.