In college, I participated in a life changing study abroad program where we focused on writing personal essays. Our only assignment as we hiked across the Lake District and moors of England was to complete 200 pages of journal writing from which we would then construct a few finished essays. The group continued on into a class the next semester where we workshopped these essays and talked about writing.
And I loved it! I found that essay writing was merely a more structured version of what went on in my head constantly, making meaning out of everyday events, seeing patterns, telling stories. I was already leaning towards it in my first forays into blog writing (part of what got me into the program in the first place). I have continued to compose essays in my head and sometimes on paper through the years.
But then I noticed something: I almost never read creative non-fiction.
Sure, I enjoy an occasional biography. I love Bill Bryson’s work and I read a lot of popular science books. But memoir was never what I reached for, not usually in that backlog of titles sitting on my metaphorical Goodreads shelf. When I realized this, I started to force myself to read more books like what I thought I would write someday, but it never ceased to be a chore.
What did appear on my shelves, almost unbidden, perhaps summoned by magic, were science fiction and fantasy books. When I first started reading independently, I picked up A Wrinkle in Time, the Wizard of Oz series, and the Chronicles of Narnia. After reading The Giver in fourth grade, I reread it almost every year until I graduated from high school. I picked up Ender’s Game and Dealing with Dragons in middle school, read everything by Tamora Piece and Anne McCaffery in high school. Not even to mention Harry Potter, which goes without saying for my generation.
Since I grew up in a family of nerds, I didn’t realize that speculative fiction was not what everyone read until I started taking my English major courses in college. When I realized the academic disdain for fantasy, I was baffled. To me, it was the default genre. Why read a mystery when you could read a mystery with dragons? Why read a romance when you could read a romance with magic?
And yet, when I thought of my own writing career, I never considered writing what I really loved reading. Well, that’s untrue to say. I wrote some fan fiction in high school, as one does, but I found writing about real things so much easier. Creative non-fiction curates real events and then gives them meaning. I did this almost without thought in my daily life, so essay writing was merely pinning down my internal dialogue and subjecting it to reason.
Fiction, on the other hand, involves the creation of the events themselves, and in speculative fiction, that goes double since you must create the whole world, its history, and sometimes new laws of physics. Coming up with characters and plots has always been difficult for me. I was always shy about acting as a kid, and though I read about fantastic worlds, I never pretended they were real, never made up imaginary friends. My childhood imaginary worlds consisted mostly of making maps and currency, two aspects that seemed much safer somehow.
Part of this was the fear of looking ridiculous, of having my ideas be derivative or simple. Yet science fiction and fantasy are the community I love, the people I’d want to meet and the things I’d want to see. So off I march into the dark, leaving what I know how to do behind and trying something else.
I’m think some of the skills that creative non-fiction taught me can transfer over, like finding the internal meaning in external events. Every story is about characters’ need to grow and change.
These ones just involve dragons.