This past week, I attended the Creative Nonfiction Collective (CNFC) online festival and found each of the presentations interesting in different ways. The insights of the presenters are helping me get a clearer sense of where I might belong in the creative nonfiction space.
One talk, in particular, stayed with me. Danny Ramadan, author of Crooked Teeth: A Queer Syrian Refugee Memoir (now on my reading list), spoke about the challenges he faced in writing memoir as someone who usually works in fiction. He shared how the concept of the “three-body problem” in physics became the key that unlocked his writing. It offered him a way to understand himself through three lenses, or selves. That metaphor resonated deeply.
What I took from his talk, my own interpretation, even if it diverges from his intention, is that we all write memoir from three selves.
The first self is who you were when the events happened. Writing from that space requires remembering not just the facts, but how you felt, thought, and made sense of the world at that time. You have to channel that earlier version of yourself, even if it’s uncomfortable.
The second self is who you are now. This present self brings hindsight, context, and reflection. You know how the story ends, or at least how it unfolds, and that changes what you see as important. This self gives shape to the story, tracing the arc that your past self couldn’t yet see.
The third self is the creative writer. This is where craft comes in: voice, structure, pacing, character, scene. For Danny, his fiction background gave him access to tools like building tension and character development, and those same tools strengthened his memoir. For me, this was a moment of realization: I’ve spent years honing technical writing skills, creating manuals, documenting systems, but the craft of creative writing is something I’ve never formally studied. I’m seeing where I need to focus my learning.
If I want to write well in this space, I need to learn how to write more evocatively, with more emotion. Technical accuracy is not enough. Memoir asks for something more. It asks me to craft meaning, to shape memory into narrative, to find meaning in the messiness of real life.
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