I Don't Know Who Came Up with the Toolbelt Idea, but...

...he was basically a genius.

Upon further review, I'm loving the metaphor. I'd like to tweak it a little, though:

Still three belts but I'm changing the names. Journalistic. Narrative. Lyrical.

All adjectives and, therefore, fruitfully more vague.

I also think Narrative works better because it isn't so fraught with connotation as the term Fiction. It's more a mode of organization with less potential for moralistic implications. It's not about Truth and Lies. It's about stories and how you tell them.

The Narrative Tool Belt is the most general one. You can use it to go in either direction--to present objective facts and/or to fashion subjective art. You can use it in nonfiction. You can use it in poems. (And, obviously, it applies to the F-word too: Fiction.) In short, this is where you find the Phillips-head and other oft-used tools like it. When I think of the "tools" of narrative, I think of the list I'm wont to slap up on a whiteboard near you. Click here for a quick rundown/refresher.

The farther you go to either end of my (admittedly artificial) continuum, the more specific your tools need to be. You could write a lyric poem with the Narrative Tool Belt, but it would be like pruning your bushes with a chainsaw. I mean, it kinda-sorta works, but...

That's where you move to one end of the continuum and grab your Lyrical Tool Belt, in which you'll find a heightened attention to language, rhythm, form, image. Narrative and logic gives way to intuitive leaps, resonant juxtapositions of words and images.

And then, on the other end of the continuum, there's the tool belt that we don't don as much as we should. The Journalistic Tool Belt. These tools help you get things down as you see them with at least some semblance of objectivity. There's a feeling that events as they happen resonate by themselves and a subjective interpretation would just get in the way. The specific tools--oft underutilized in the "literary" world--are those of reporting: interviews, research, seeking out interesting or unusual experiences with the express intention of writing about them. Narrative and language take a backseat to an accurate accounting of (so-called) real life.

If you're writing a straight news article for the front page of the New York Times, you'll make a mess for yourself if you use anything but the Journalistic Tool Belt.

Likewise, if you're writing a pure lyric poem, all the interviews in the world won't do you much good. (Neither will an exquisite insight into character, for that matter.)

So here's the takeaway:

In creative nonfiction, you have access to--and use for--every single tool in each of the belts. At all times.

The trick is knowing which ones to use when.

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