Further Notes on Writing a Nonfiction Novel

Further Notes on Writing a Nonfiction Novel: No Journey’s End: My Tragic Romance with ex-Manson Girl, Leslie Van Houten.
A True Love Story.

by Peter Chiaramonte

People are always angry about the truth, although they claim to believe in it. ––– Charles Bukowski

Dr. Algis Mickunas, one of my great old professors when I was starting out at Ohio U at the end of the sixties used to say; “Writing is harder and more impenetrable for writers than it is for other people.” I still believe this is true. It takes a lot of courage for one thing, to become a writer. And this process begins long before you’ve written a page.

There’s this wonderful little book by Peggy Simson Curry, (an adept and respected writer from the American West), who I’d like to recommend to you in the context of creative nonfiction writing. Curry drew upon firsthand experiences during the halcyon days of ranching life and also worked in the oil fields during the 1950s and 60s. The book is called Creating Fiction From Experience (1964), and I recommend it to anyone serious about writing a memoir. All stories are fiction to the extent that in order to tell a coherent, credible, and compelling story—the author must generate, select, and edit from an overabundance of facts in order to enlighten and entertain. Curry’s guidebook provides several wonderful advices for getting started and remaining on course to the end.

To begin a realistic story, you must first put aside any temporary fear of the impossible and—against all odds—begin the attempt with faith and courage in the work itself as its own reward and justification. All writing is practice writing after all.

Peggy Curry said, “Never allow yourself to be afraid no one will consider what you write worth writing.” Only you can decide what to say or not say according to what inspires you to deliberately explore your own feelings and thoughts (page 6- 7). And no one can know the worth of your story until after it is written. Don’t let the pezzonovante tell you any different. Confident in having been in no way negligent right from the beginning, be prepared to stand your ground.

What, asks Curry, is this truth the creative person must know? Her answer is: “It is all vital experience that strikes us so sharply that a part of us says, ‘this is real. It is here.’ It is when the surge of the blood, the clarity of the mind, the twist of the heart tells us life is happening” (page 13). And, if we are “creative nonfiction” writers, I should add her point about still having the obligation to gain control of what we know by way of artistic patterns.

For example, in the case of No Journey’s End I felt compelled not to put any words into my characters mouths that couldn’t be vouched for. So I needed to find creative ways to accomplish this stringent requirement. For instance, in writing about personal exchanges between Leslie Van Houten and myself—I’d start with my diaries and daily newspaper accounts, and overlap these with Leslie’s letters. Since I couldn’t make the entire book about the letters alone, I began matching the dates of our face-to-face conversations with things we were talking about at the same time in our letters. That way I didn’t stray from the language and topics we were discussing in real time, nor did I invent topics we hadn’t actually discussed. Plus, I took photographs and let Leslie know I was tape recording our phone calls. The Los Angeles County Jail and California Institution for Women inspected our mail and monitored our conversations as well.

The palest ink is stronger than the greatest memory

Where does the urge to record the impact from source impressions, reflection, or recognition from personal experience come from—if not from the actual experience itself? Writing dialogue, I found, reduces the number of words needed to convey the same thoughts. After 10,000 hours or more of writing creative nonfiction, one gets to know intuitively what words are right without knowing why. Scenes and paragraphs appear out of the ether as we scratch away draft after draft— paradoxically moving further away from our precise rough notes to an even closer refinement of the meaning of symbols we’ve written down. I liken the whole process to sculpture.

Something magical happens when you discover that you possess knowledge you didn’t know you had. It just feels right, honest, and alive. Curry calls this “a discovery of the most memorable truth.” You’ll know it when you feel it so be sure to chisel it down with the sharp end of your pencil.

“What do I know of truth?” she asks.

Ask yourself as a writer: “What has happened to me and touched me so firmly and finally that I will live with it always? I know of no satisfaction greater than that of developing the ability to express oneself fully and accurately.” There lies the source of the ultimate truth we are after.

Further Tips on Beginning & Becoming a Paperback Writer

Peggy Simson Curry reminds us: “We must always remember that to breathe the essence of life into people on paper is a subtle and elusive act of skill and imagination, of knowledge and reaching beyond knowledge, of the conscious and the subconscious made articulate.”

Begin to explore, through memory, what you have felt, what you can’t forget…Be free…You are simply expressing what is yours (page 8).

And in the end: Curry admits that perhaps she’s old-fashioned, but glad she went to school when teachers read what she wrote and took an interest in her as person. “The writer,” she says, “must express himself because he is an individual in a world where individuality is fast disappearing.” She wrote that in 1964—more than half a century ago. I had just turned a teen and grew up in that brave new world not, she was writing about.

We live in a universe where each of us must search for the meaning of himself. A world “in which man must never be so confused or so harassed that he cannot think his own thoughts and develop them into expression … is the world in which no one should be ashamed of emotion, but glad that he is capable of feeling it.” A writer’s obligation to himself and to others, Curry concludes, is to put down firmly and honestly—and beautifully—what he or she knows to be true.