Writing personal nonfiction—memoir or the personal essay—generally requires us to approach our subjects from a first-person point of view. Since we are telling our own stories, we naturally refer to ourselves as “I” and speak as ourselves. We write as factual human beings about our actual lived experiences.
By writing in first-person, though, we limit ourselves to our own perspectives only. Unlike fiction writers, who can exercise omniscience by delving into the thoughts and feelings of multiple characters in their stories, personal nonfiction writers can express only our own thoughts and feelings. When writing about personal experiences, perhaps involving conflicts with others, we cannot report what others think, feel, desire, or intend because, of course, we do not have access to that information. We cannot read their minds. We can only describe their overt behaviors—what they said, what they did.
Given this limitation, how can we provide readers with a compelling portrait of the others who inhabit our memoirs or personal essays? How can we write about the things that we cannot know about them?
We can do this through speculative writing. We can practice what author Lisa Knopp calls “perhapsing.” In an article written for Brevity Magazine, “‘Perhapsing’: The Use of Speculation in Creative Nonfiction,” Knopp provides us with an example of this technique of addressing the unknown through speculation. She offers as an example an excerpt from Maxine Hong Kingston’s Woman Warrior, in which Kingston writes about her aunt, a woman she has never known, who became pregnant in China while her husband was away for years in the U.S. When the aunt gives birth, villagers raid the family’s household, destroying their belongings and killing their livestock. Through the use of perhapsing in the lines below, Kingston speculates about how the aunt became pregnant.
Perhaps she had encountered him in the fields or on the mountain where the daughters-in-law collected fuel. Or perhaps he first noticed her in the marketplace. He was not a stranger because the village housed no strangers. She had to have dealings with him other than sex. Perhaps he worked in an adjoining field, or he sold her the cloth for the dress she sewed and wore. His demand must have surprised, then terrified her. She obeyed him; she always did as she was told.
While Kingston’s readers understand that the above thoughts are hypothetical, they are led to consider, along with Kingston, what may have happened to the aunt and what might have motivated her. Perhapsing allows personal nonfiction writers to explore the characters in their narratives without claiming to know what they think and feel or what drives them to behave the way they do.
Speculative writing can also be used when we discover gaps in our memories of events or when we lack information that is significant to our stories. At those points, we can imagine events and details—we can fictionalize our nonfiction—using verbal cues to signal to the reader that what we have written is speculation. Knopp suggests using words such as “maybe, suppose, if, might have, could have, possibly, imagine, wonder, and perchance” to clarify to our readers that we are imagining details.
Since most personal nonfiction writers adhere to their understood obligation to tell the truth and provide a factual account of our experiences, we can engage in speculative writing to help us flesh out the others in our stories, interpret their actions, and explore the possible why’s and how’s of their behaviors.
If we don’t know, we are free to speculate.
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