What Is Experimental Nonfiction?
I’ve been submitting projects to an experimental literature journal for about a year now. And I thought I understood what experimental literature was. My first few projects have always been hard to categorize. In my work, I’d combine images and text to build a narrative. And in the beginning, I was never sure if what I was making was text-heavy graphic designs, some sort of mixed media, or something else.
I’d start by removing parts of the photo to create negative space (like removing a background). Then making the images black and white to create a mood. Then I’d distort (transforming the image into thin lines) in an attempt to alter the image so that its interpretation wasn’t perfect, like a memory, not perfect. Finally, the graphic design comes in by adding the dates, time, and creative writing. Ultimately, I would call these projects my visual-literary projects. However, the correct term is “iconotext.”
Usually, I’d pair poetry or non-fiction to relevant images. Like my personal essay, “Motherland,” combining a distorted house to a personal essay about my mother’s home in Mexico. The digits indicating when the photo was taken. The essay sitting on the left-hand side.
As I mentioned, because I was mixing mediums—text with images, photography with graphic design—I never knew how to classify my work. One part art, one part literature. As you can imagine, when it came to submitting my work, it was rather difficult and often led to rejections. It wasn’t typical art that literary journals can use as a magazine cover as the included text could distract from the title of the journal. On the other hand, it wasn’t just text either, some stand-alone personal essay. Of course, this didn’t stop me from submitting the creative writing by itself to publications. While the image may compliment the work, it wasn’t necessary. Other times, I’d post the image by itself, without the creative writing element, to a site like Instagram.
Art comes in all shapes and forms. Still, I eventually found a journal which I thought might be a good fit, and so I submitted. A few weeks later, it was accepted. At the time, I didn’t completely understand what I was submitting or who I was submitting to. I just knew that I’d pair interesting images with creative writing. As you might have guessed by the title, the journal specialized in experimental literature.
So what exactly made my work fit in with the journal? Experimental literature are texts that are unconventional in form, regardless of the content. You could write about something taboo, for example, but that doesn’t make it experimental. It’s the form in which it’s told and how it’s told that makes it experimental. My iconotext wasn’t something that was being done often. Not all iconotext is experimental though. Comics count as iconotext, but because it’s a recognizable and understood medium, it is not necessarily experimental.
The form in which I was submitting was visual and literary. It was unconventional. Creative writing wrapping around an edited image. Breaking away from standard writing formats. It wasn’t on a letter-size document or double-spaced.
Still, there’s much more to experimental literature that I’ve yet to cover. The explanation I’ve given thus far is rather simple: the form in which it’s told and how it’s told that makes it experimental. The key element being that the work is “unconventional.” In the beginning, free verse poetry defied traditional poetry in that it broke structure, meters, rhymes, and so on. Free verse differed from sonnets, haikus, or cinquains. Free verse was new at a certain point in time and poets played with line breaks and even the location of the text.
Still, free form poetry lost its experimental nature overtime. As it became ubiquitous, it became conventional. Now, every poet can create line breaks wherever they chose and even move text around as they see fit. Still, this doesn’t mean all poetry is conventional. Ocean Vuong, in his poetry collection, Night Sky with Exit Wounds, wrote “Seventh Circle of Earth.” It defied form in that the poetry was written as footnotes with forward slashes indicating line breaks for clarity. As he explained in an interview, this poem was formatted this way to convey its content. Without this form, the poem wouldn’t exist: the poem had digits on a mostly blank page and the footnotes were at the bottom; Vuong did this intentionally to convey that even in the aftermath of a brutal fire that killed two lovers, and consequently, their story, something remains. Not as a typical and recognizable piece of literature, but as a sort of ‘utterance.’
And if poetry can be experimental, what does this mean for fiction and nonfiction alike?
Well, according to YouTuber Shaelin Bishop, experimental fiction does in fact exist. The criteria for experimental fiction is the same: the form in which it’s told and how it’s told that makes it experimental. While Bishop touches on various aspects of experimental fiction, the two primary elements here are form and point of view (POV). Bishop references a fiction project by fiction writer Kelsey Robbins Lauder. In her project, “Insta,” Lauder captures the failing relationship between a protagonist and her mother through Instagram posts. The story is told in two alternating parts. One part being a description of the Instagram image (e.g. “You’re in a purple velvet dress, sheer black tights running up your thighs”). The second part being the actual description (sort of like a commentary by the protagonist; e.g. “Can you believe that all these guys are even more gorgeous in person? I’ve fallen in love a half-dozen times already”). For every ‘image,’ there were these two parts. And through the form, which is unconventional as fiction isn’t typically written in this way, a story is being told. Likewise, the second-person POV is being used too, straying away from the common first-person and third-person POV found in fiction.
So now that we’ve established that there exists experimental poetry and fiction, what about nonfiction? This is where things get very complicated.
Firstly, by nonfiction, I’m actually referring to personal essays as those are one of the most common forms of creative nonfiction. One may argue that creative nonfiction is inherently experimental because of the fact that it is creative. Most nonfiction, like empirical research papers, instructional manuals, and textbooks, are not known for their creative nature. Yet, many people have written creative nonfiction. In many ways, creative nonfiction is descriptive language coupled with the need to tell a sort of truth and events.
So how do we break from traditional creative nonfiction? How do we make it experimental? I can say that experimental nonfiction has to do with the form in which it’s told again, but that might not be enough context as nonfiction, like biographies (which themselves, are a culmination of various different sources: photographs, letters, interview dialogues, etc.) can often be recognizable. We would have to be extraordinarily creative for it to be experimental. However, according to the blog, Sunbreak Press, “we have fallen into thinking of essays in traditional ways (first person, chronological, memory-based reality).” And so to break conventionality and become experimental, these things have to be broken.
Often times, personal essays, the equivalent of short memoirs, are told in first-person POV; using the “I” in statements. “I live in California,” for example. We typically tell our life in first person. In fiction, the narrator may use first person. In poetry, there is the poetic voice who may also use first person. While fiction and poetry can also be told in third-person, it is uncommon (and awkward) in nonfiction. Still, third-person POV in nonfiction is used in short autobiographies that we often write ourselves: “Scotty is a writer based in California.”
What about second person? While second person can be used in poetry, this might be where the rule is broken depending on its use. While I may use second person in a nonfiction piece: “You are reading about my memoir,” that simply isn’t enough to incorporate a different POV. Rather, if we start adding qualities to the “you,” then it breaks convention. “You were born in the U.S.” This is because the “you,” be it yourself or someone else, is being incorporated into my essay as an important element. In my personal essay, titled “Flee,” I experimented with POV:
And you, who have fled your country, meet me for coffee in the time we call yesterdays. You, who made a new life here, let me take up some of your precious time, something that cannot be replaced. You, who speaks broken English, and I, who has mastered two languages by choice; a privilege.
While at the time, I didn’t register this personal essay as experimental, (I never submitted this piece to an experimental journal), it could arguably break convention. We wouldn’t do this in a personal essay regularly, maybe a letter to a friend (“how are you?”), but not a personal essay.
The two remaining criteria, chronological and memory-based reality, could also be used to create experimental nonfiction. If I were to write a story about how I became a caretaker, I would start from the beginning. However, by using flashbacks and flashforwards (granted, flashforwards would be difficult to use since we can’t predict the future), I break chronological order. While we might make a reference to a past event, it’s in the amount of detail that matters. I can talk about being a caretaker, but if I begin writing about the past for an extended amount of time, the reader may forget about where the story actually is. Admittedly, fiction often breaks chronological order, such as Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, where the story begins in the present then takes a dive into the past, where the majority of the story is told. Likewise, one flashback wouldn’t make the personal essay unconventional, but if it starts switching between future, present, and past too often to the point that it is difficult to follow, then the essay would become unconventional.
Lastly, we have memory. If we start experimenting enough with both the concept and reality of memory, then we break convention. Are you as a writer accurate and truthful? If our memories are always decaying and changing, then doesn’t the past become half fiction? If we are deceitful to our readers, that breaks convention as readers expect their authors to be truthful. And even when we are not trying to be deceitful, we have biases that are nearly impossible to eliminate. For example, we can describe ourselves as good people, but what exactly makes a good person? Is calling ourselves good enough to be a good person? At this point, we go beyond memory and begin experimenting with what is true and what is not, and consequently break convention if we are found out to be distrustful. And in a world where the past is vulnerable to misremembering and where the truth can always be debated, does all nonfiction still qualify as conventional when we half remember and half tell the truth?
In the coming days, I will have a publication on experimental nonfiction. I tell my ‘story’ as a recent caretaker where I switch between first-person and second-person POV to communicate information and create a more intimate bond between myself and the reader. I do not know yet if my work is treading new ground or if it’s a failed attempt at a non-existent genre. Only time will tell if experimental nonfiction exists.
