"Taking Yourself Out of the Story: Narrative Stance and the Upright Pronoun"

"But too often these days, I'm afraid we writers of nonfiction fall into the opposite fallacy: We enter the story whether it needs us or not." --Philip Gerard, page 50 of Writing Creative Nonfiction

Creative nonfiction is one of my favorite genres right now, and part of that is the challenge involved in writing the truth. It's so much harder to write the truth artfully than it is to write fiction--in fiction, you determine everything that happens, how it happens, etc. You have total freedom to do whatever you want (which can be a challenge too). The limitations set up by having to tell a real event and keep it real make telling the story more interesting, and force you to get more creative. Keeping myself at the right distance from whatever I'm writing is one of the hardest obstacles in CNF. You have to remember that not every story focuses on you, even if you are an important part of it.