Franklin thinks that “creativity” is a concept invented in Cold War America-that is, in the twenty or so years after 1945. Franklin’s provocative new book, “ The Cult of Creativity” (Chicago). By “creative,” then, he didn’t mean “made up” or “imaginary.” He meant something like “fully human.” Where did that come from? Maybe he wanted people to understand that writing traditionally classified as nonfiction is, or can be, as “creative” as poems and stories. Maybe he was giving a new name to an old kind of writing. Maybe Gutkind wasn’t naming a new kind of writing, though. Apart from “just the facts” newspaper journalism, where an authorial point of view is deliberately suppressed, any writing that has life has “unique and subjective focus, concept, context and point of view.” This has little to do with whether the work is classified as fiction or nonfiction. It’s part of the author function: we attribute what we read not to some impersonal and omniscient agent but to the individual named on the title page or in the byline. The word “creative,” he explained, refers to “the unique and subjective focus, concept, context and point of view in which the information is presented and defined, which may be partially obtained through the writer’s own voice, as in a personal essay.”īut, again, this seems to cover most writing, or at least most writing that holds our interest. He seems to have first used “creative nonfiction,” in print, anyway, thirty years ago, though he thought that the term originated in the fellowship application form used by the National Endowment for the Arts. The man credited with it is the writer Lee Gutkind. The term “creative nonfiction” is actually a fairly recent coinage, postdating the advent of the New Journalism by about twenty years. You can use dialogue and a first-person voice and description and even speculation in a nonfiction work, and, as long as it’s all fact-based and not make-believe, it’s nonfiction. One definition of “creative nonfiction,” often used to define the New Journalism of the nineteen-sixties and seventies, is “journalism that uses the techniques of fiction.” But the techniques of fiction are just the techniques of writing. Read our reviews of notable new fiction and nonfiction, updated every Wednesday. Is being “creative” simply a license to embellish? Is there a point beyond which inference becomes fantasy? It isn’t until the third paragraph that we learn that one of the horsemen is none other than John Adams! It’s all perfectly plausible, but much of it is imagined. There is also the novelistic device of delaying the identification of the characters. The rest-the light, the exact depth of frozen ground, the packed ice, the ruts, the riders’ mindfulness, the walking horses-seems to have been extrapolated in order to unfold a dramatic scene, evoke a mental picture. Is it nonfiction? The only source the author cites for this paragraph verifies the statement “weeks of severe cold.” Presumably, the “Christmas storm” has a source, too, perhaps in newspapers of the time (1776). Packed ice in the road, ruts as hard as iron, made the going hazardous, and the riders, mindful of the horses, kept at a walk. Beneath the snow, after weeks of severe cold, the ground was frozen solid to a depth of two feet. A foot or more of snow covered the landscape, the remnants of a Christmas storm that had blanketed Massachusetts from one end of the province to the other. In the cold, nearly colorless light of a New England winter, two men on horseback traveled the coast road below Boston, heading north.
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