Aspen'd Publishing

Gay Talese

A couple of days ago, I was into my last bedtime chore of brushing my teeth when I stepped out of the bathroom to see what my wife was watching on TV.  A trim, thin faced, good-looking gentleman was talking about how long it takes to research and write good creative nonfiction.  Ah yes, a kindred soul talking about my favorite subject.  Turned out it was an interview with one of the best creative nonfiction writers of our time, Gay Talese, on public television.  I was sorely tempted to stay with it, but since I had just put in a 12 hour day on an air-seeder and a field cultivator (I spend about three weeks each spring helping my brother plant his grain crop) I returned to the bathroom and finished getting ready for bed.

The next day as I sat on a green giant of a tractor combating the boredom of seducing yet another field, my mind went back to a single comment that Gay Talese made before my mind shut down the previous evening.  It was that the writing of a really good creative nonfiction book may take six to eight years.  I thought of my own experience while writing The Soul of the Land and felt better.  I've often asked myself what I could have done to shorten the six years I spent researching and writing the book.  In some ways I might have more efficiently researched the book, but in others I probably would have taken even more time going through old newspapers and journals.  Maybe I could have cut down on some of the time it took to write, revise and proof the manuscript, but then again maybe not.

My conclusion to all of this is that we writers of creative nonfiction family histories must truly love what we do or we wouldn't do it.  But, doing it well, is the difference between writing a story that others want to read as opposed to a story that few members of the family bother to read.  Thank you Gay Talese!

Ageless nonfiction books

creative nonfiction

While we at Aspen'd Publishing are concentrating on family history, I am posting some comments from this mornings edition of Shelf Awareness that are of interest.  They note that "Despite the James Frey debacle--or perhaps in part because of the continuing sales of A Million Easy Pieces--memoirs remain a hot commodity, according to a long nonfiction story on the subject in today's Wall Street Journal."

They also go on to note that, publishers "plan to put out twice as many [memoirs] as last year," and agents and editors are receiving more memoir submissions than ever. Lee Gutkind, founder of Creative Nonfiction, told the Journal that while in the past writers would begin with autobiographical fiction and then branch out into other fiction, now "the novel's not hot anymore, and the autobiographical novel has been replaced by the memoir."

While all of this may be true, there is something else that we should keep in mind.  Fiction tends to ebb and flow with the events of the day.  The writing of nonfiction really is the factual reporting of events.  Given enough time they become historical in nature.  And, we can't (well.., some do) change history.  The story in a good creative nonfiction book is just as relevant today as it will be years into the future.  In the jargon, of the publishing business, "they have a long tail life."  That's good news for we writers of family history.  They take a long time to write.