RE: Getting Started in Creative Non-Fiction
I really enjoy color and foreshadowing.
Color for me is a rather important element it paints a clear image in the reader's mind of something. It can help set the mood or hint at the condition of something. I also feel it points out important of an object. If everything else is not described to have a color and yet this one objects is. This object must either have great important or it’s a red herring trying to throw the reader off as it might have as well in your own research of an event.
With source documents, you can have a rather clear picture of how events end up going. That can be a rather fun thing to foreshadow rather early on and keep building up to that moment for the reader.
When it comes to creative nonfiction how important is the accuracy of what you are telling? Do you have an imaginary line that you try and balance the story on? One where it lets you have some creative fun but that helps fill holes or do you see facts are the facts and you want to try and portray them in a correction as possible fashion?
I’m more of a science fiction enjoyer and writing when it comes to storytelling. I don’t often find myself in the moral dilemma of accuracy that I can see creative nonfiction creates.
There are endless debates within CNF about the boundary zone between fact and fiction -- but for me, I am fine with a writer using imagination so long as they cue the reader that they are using imagination (i.e. "I imagine that my mother said such and such to my father, but perhaps there was nothing but silence..." (a garbage line, but you know what I mean...).
I think a creative non-fiction writer can use all of the tools available to a fiction writer, so long as they let their reader know (that's what I mean about "maintain the contract with the reader to tell the truth). And, if they don't, they are probably just writing straight non-fiction (think traditional journalism).
So, the 'creative' aspect of creative non-fiction is really just in the method used to tell the story (for instance, maybe a collage style written in snippets or maybe incorporating allusion and metaphor) but it does not mean being "creative" with the truth (i.e. making things up for the sake of making things up).
There should not be a dilemma about accuracy -- if the writer finds themselves there, they are likely writing fiction based on fact, and not telling a true story and they need to package it as such.