Writing Creative Nonfiction the Literature of Reality

Creative nonfiction

Last updated November 03, 2021

Genre of writing

Creative nonfiction (also known as literary nonfiction or narrative nonfiction or literary journalism or verfabula ^[1] ) is a genre of writing that uses literary styles and techniques to create factually accurate narratives. Creative nonfiction contrasts with other nonfiction, such as academic or technical writing or journalism, which is also rooted in accurate fact but is not written to entertain based on prose style. Many writers view creative nonfiction as overlapping with the essay.

• Characteristics and definition
• Ethics and accuracy
• Literary criticism
• See also
• References
• Further reading
• External links
• Audio/video links

Characteristics and definition

For a text to be considered creative nonfiction, it must be factually accurate, and written with attention to literary style and technique. Lee Gutkind, founder of Creative Nonfiction magazine, writes, "Ultimately, the primary goal of the creative nonfiction writer is to communicate information, just like a reporter, but to shape it in a way that reads like fiction." ^[2] Forms within this genre include memoir, diary, travel writing, food writing, literary journalism, chronicle, personal essays, and other hybridized essays, as well as some biography and autobiography. According to Vivian Gornick, "A memoir is a tale taken from life—that is, from actual, not imagined, occurrences—related by a first-person narrator who is undeniably the writer. Beyond these bare requirements it has the same responsibility as the novel or the short story: to shape a piece of experience so that it moves from a tale of private interest to one with meaning for the disinterested reader." Critic Chris Anderson claims that the genre can be understood best by splitting it into two subcategories—the personal essay and the journalistic essay—but the genre is currently defined by its lack of established conventions. ^[3]

Literary critic Barbara Lounsberry—in her book, The Art of Fact—suggests four constitutive characteristics of the genre, the first of which is "Documentable subject matter chosen from the real world as opposed to 'invented' from the writer's mind". ^[4] By this, she means that the topics and events discussed in the text verifiably exist in the natural world. The second characteristic is "Exhaustive research," ^[4] which she claims allows writers "novel perspectives on their subjects" and "also permits them to establish the credibility of their narratives through verifiable references in their texts". ^[5] The third characteristic that Lounsberry claims is crucial in defining the genre is "The scene". She stresses the importance of describing and revivifying the context of events in contrast to the typical journalistic style of objective reportage. ^[6] The fourth and final feature she suggests is "Fine writing: a literary prose style". "Verifiable subject matter and exhaustive research guarantee the nonfiction side of literary nonfiction; the narrative form and structure disclose the writer's artistry; and finally, its polished language reveals that the goal all along has been literature." ^[7] Essayist and critic Phillip Lopate describes reflection as a necessary element of the genre, offering the advice that the best literary nonfiction captures "the mind at work." ^[8]

Creative nonfiction may be structured like traditional fiction narratives, as is true of Fenton Johnson's story of love and loss, Geography of the Heart, ^[9] and Virginia Holman's Rescuing Patty Hearst . ^[10] When book-length works of creative nonfiction follow a story-like arc, they are sometimes called narrative nonfiction. Other books, such as Daniel Levitin's This Is Your Brain on Music and The World in Six Songs , use elements of narrative momentum, rhythm, and poetry to convey a literary quality. Creative nonfiction often escapes traditional boundaries of narrative altogether, as happens in the bittersweet banter of Natalia Ginzburg's essay, "He and I", in John McPhee's hypnotic tour of Atlantic City, In Search of Marvin Gardens, and in Ander Monson's playful, experimental essays in Neck-Deep and Other Predicaments.

Creative nonfiction writers have embraced new ways of forming their texts—including online technologies—because the genre leads itself to grand experimentation. Dozens of new journals have sprung up—both in print and online—that feature creative nonfiction prominently in their offerings.

Ethics and accuracy

Writers of creative or narrative non-fiction often discuss the level, and limits, of creative invention in their works and the limitations of memory to justify the approaches they have taken to relating true events. Melanie McGrath, whose book Silvertown, an account of her grandmother's life, is "written in a novelist's idiom", ^[11] writes in the follow-up, Hopping, that the known facts of her stories are "the canvas on to which I have embroidered. Some of the facts have slipped through the holes—we no longer know them nor have any means of verifying them—and in these cases I have reimagined scenes or reconstructed events in a way I believe reflects the essence of the scene or the event in the minds and hearts of the people who lived through it. ... To my mind this literary tinkering does not alter the more profound truth of the story." ^[12] This concept of fact vs. fiction is elaborated upon in Brenda Miller and Suzanne Paola's book Tell It Slant. Nuala Calvi, authors of The Sugar Girls , a novelistic story based on interviews with former sugar-factory workers, make a similar point: "Although we have tried to remain faithful to what our interviewees have told us, at a distance of over half a century many memories are understandably incomplete, and where necessary we have used our own research, and our imaginations, to fill in the gaps. ... However, the essence of the stories related here is true, as they were told to us by those who experienced them at first hand." ^[13]

In recent years, there have been several well-publicized incidents of memoir writers who exaggerated or fabricated certain facts in their work. ^[14] For example:

• In 1998, Swiss writer and journalist Daniel Ganzfried revealed that Binjamin Wilkomirski's memoir Fragments: Memories of a Wartime Childhood, detailing his experiences as a child survivor of the Holocaust, contained factual inaccuracies. ^[15]
• The James Frey controversy hit in 2006, when The Smoking Gun website revealed that Frey's memoir, A Million Little Pieces , contained experiences that turned out to be fabrications. ^[16]
• In 2008, The New York Times featured an article about the memoirist Margaret Seltzer, whose pen name is Margaret B. Jones. Her publisher, Riverhead Books, canceled the publication of Seltzer's book, Love and Consequences, when it was revealed that Seltzer's story of her alleged experiences growing up as a half-white, half-Native American foster child and Bloods gang member in South Central Los Angeles were fictitious.

Although there have been instances of traditional and literary journalists falsifying their stories, the ethics applied to creative nonfiction are the same as those that apply to journalism. The truth is meant to be upheld, just told in a literary fashion. Essayist John D'Agata explores the issue in his 2012 book The Lifespan of a Fact . It examines the relationship between truth and accuracy, and whether it is appropriate for a writer to substitute one for the other. He and fact-checker Jim Fingal have an intense debate about the boundaries of creative nonfiction, or "literary nonfiction".

Literary criticism

There is very little published literary criticism of creative nonfiction works, despite the fact that the genre is often published in respected publications such as The New Yorker , Vanity Fair , Harper's , and Esquire . ^[17] A handful of the most widely recognized writers in the genre such as Robert Caro, Gay Talese, Joseph Mitchell, Tom Wolfe, John McPhee, Joan Didion, John Perkins, Ryszard Kapuściński, Helen Garner and Norman Mailer have seen some criticism on their more prominent works. "Critics to date, however, have tended to focus on only one or two of each writer's works, to illustrate particular critical points." ^[18] These analyses of a few key pieces are hardly in-depth or as comprehensive as the criticism and analyses of their fictional contemporaries ^{[ citation needed ]} . As the popularity of the genre continues to expand, many nonfiction authors and a handful of literary critics are calling for more extensive literary analysis of the genre. The genre of the person essay is periodically subject to predictions of its demise. ^[19]

"If, these four features delimit an important art form of our time, a discourse grounded in fact but artful in execution that might be called literary nonfiction, what is needed is serious critical attention of all kinds to this work: formal criticism (both Russian formalism and New Criticism), historical, biographical, cultural, structuralist and deconstructionist, reader-response criticism and feminist (criticism)." ^[18]

"Nonfiction is no longer the bastard child, the second class citizen; literature is no longer reified, mystified, unavailable. This is the contribution that poststructuralist theory has to make to an understanding of literary nonfiction, since poststructuralist theorists are primarily concerned with how we make meaning and secure authority for claims in meaning of language." ^[20]

See also

• Docufiction
• Documentary film
• Essay
• Ethnofiction
• Gonzo Journalism
• Nonfiction novel
• Roman à clef

Related Research Articles

Nonfiction is any document or media content that intends, in good faith, to present only truth and accuracy regarding information, events, or people. Nonfictional content may be presented either objectively or subjectively. Sometimes taking the form of a story, nonfiction is one of the fundamental divisions of narrative writing — in contrast to fiction, which offers information, events, or characters expected to be partly or largely imaginary, or else leaves open if and how the work refers to reality.

Annie Dillard is an American author, best known for her narrative prose in both fiction and non-fiction. She has published works of poetry, essays, prose, and literary criticism, as well as two novels and one memoir. Her 1974 work Pilgrim at Tinker Creek won the 1975 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction. From 1980, Dillard taught for 21 years in the English department of Wesleyan University, in Middletown, Connecticut.

Joan Didion is an American writer who launched her career in the 1960s after winning an essay contest sponsored by Vogue magazine. Her writing during the 1960s through the late 1970s engaged audiences in the realities of the counterculture of the '60s and the Hollywood lifestyle. Her political writing often concentrated on the subtext of political and social rhetoric. In 1991, she wrote the earliest mainstream media article to suggest the Central Park Five had been wrongfully convicted. In 2005, she won the National Book Award for Nonfiction and was a finalist for both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Biography/Autobiography for The Year of Magical Thinking. She later adapted the book into a play, which premiered on Broadway in 2007. In 2017, Didion was profiled in the Netflix documentary The Center Will Not Hold, directed by her nephew Griffin Dunne.

New Journalism is a style of news writing and journalism, developed in the 1960s and 1970s, that uses literary techniques deemed unconventional at the time. It is characterized by a subjective perspective, a literary style reminiscent of long-form non-fiction and emphasizing "truth" over "facts", and intensive reportage in which reporters immersed themselves in the stories as they reported and wrote them. This was in contrast to traditional journalism where the journalist was typically "invisible" and facts are reported as objectively as possible.

Creative writing is any writing that goes outside the bounds of normal professional, journalistic, academic, or technical forms of literature, typically identified by an emphasis on narrative craft, character development, and the use of literary tropes or with various traditions of poetry and poetics. Due to the looseness of the definition, it is possible for writing such as feature stories to be considered creative writing, even though they fall under journalism, because the content of features is specifically focused on narrative and character development. Both fictional and non-fictional works fall into this category, including such forms as novels, biographies, short stories, and poems. In the academic setting, creative writing is typically separated into fiction and poetry classes, with a focus on writing in an original style, as opposed to imitating pre-existing genres such as crime or horror. Writing for the screen and stage—screenwriting and playwriting—are often taught separately, but fit under the creative writing category as well.

Narrative journalism, also referred to as literary journalism, is defined as creative nonfiction that contains accurate, well-researched information. It is related to immersion journalism, where a writer follows a subject or theme for a long period of time and details an individual's experiences from a deeply personal perspective.

Jewell Parker Rhodes is an American bestselling novelist and educator.

Fiction writing is the composition of non-factual prose texts. Fictional writing often is produced as a story meant to entertain or convey an author's point of view. The result of this may be a short story, novel, novella, screenplay, or drama, which are all types of fictional writing styles. Different types of authors practice fictional writing, including novelists, playwrights, short story writers, radio dramatists and screenwriters.

Rhetorical modes describe the variety, conventions, and purposes of the major kinds of language-based communication, particularly writing and speaking. Four of the most common rhetorical modes are narration, description, exposition, and argumentation. The first codification of these rhetorical modes was by Samuel P. Newman in A Practical System of Rhetoric in 1827.

The Asian American Writers' Workshop is a nonprofit literary arts organization founded in 1991 to support Asian American writers, literature and community. Cofounders Curtis Chin, Christina Chiu, Marie Myung-Ok Lee, and Bino A. Realuyo created AAWW because they were searching for New York City community of writers of color who could provide support for new writers.

The non-fiction novel is a literary genre which, broadly speaking, depicts real historical figures and actual events woven together with fictitious conversations and uses the storytelling techniques of fiction. The non-fiction novel is an otherwise loosely defined and flexible genre. The genre is sometimes referred to using the slang term "faction", a portmanteau of the words fact and fiction.

Creative Nonfiction is a literary magazine based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States. The journal was founded by Lee Gutkind in 1993, making it the first literary magazine to publish, exclusively and on a regular basis, high quality nonfiction prose. In Spring 2010, Creative Nonfiction evolved from journal to magazine format with the addition of new sections such as writer profiles and essays on the craft of writing, as well as updates on developments in the literary non-fiction scene.

Lee Gutkind is an American writer, speaker, and founder of the literary magazine Creative Nonfiction.

In Fact: The Best of Creative Nonfiction gathers the best essays published in Creative Nonfiction over its first ten years of publication to create a book - part writing-manual, part prose anthology.

Peter Selgin is an American novelist, short story writer, playwright, essayist, editor, and illustrator. Selgin is Associate Professor of English at Georgia College & State University in Milledgeville, Georgia.

In literature, mood is the atmosphere of the narrative. Mood is created by means of setting, attitude, and descriptions. Though atmosphere and setting are connected, they may be considered separately to a degree. Atmosphere is the aura of mood that surrounds the story. It is to fiction what the sensory level is to poetry or mise-en-scene is to cinema. Mood is established in order to affect the reader emotionally and psychologically and to provide a feeling for the narrative.

Sarah Einstein is an American essayist and writer of memoir and literary nonfiction. She is a recipient of the Association of Writers & Writing Programs Award for Creative Nonfiction, and the Pushcart Prize.

Marcia Aldrich is an American author specializing in literary non-fiction, memoir and personal writing. Her book Companion to an Untold Story won the 2011 AWP Award in Creative Nonfiction. She has written personal essays which have been published in Gettysburg Review, North American Review, Witness, Arts and Letters, Northwest Review, Brevity, and Seneca Review, among others. Fifteen of her essays have been selected as Notable Essays of the year in the Best American Essays series.

Steven Church is an American essayist and writer of memoir and literary nonfiction. Winner of the Glenna Luschei Prize from Prairie Schooner, Recipient of Colorado Book Award in Creative Nonfiction for The Guinness Book of Me: A Memoir of Record, "Auscultation" chosen by Edwidge Danticat for inclusion in the 2011 Best American Essays. Church is the author of The Guinness Book of Me: A Memoir of Record (2005), Theoretical Killings: Essays & Accidents (2009), The Day After The Day After: My Atomic Angst (2010),Ultrasonic: Essays.(2014), One with the Tiger: Sublime and Violent Encounters between Humans and Animals (2016)

References

1. ↑ "Verfabula".
2. ↑ Gutkind, Lee (2007). The Best Creative Nonfiction, Vol. 1. New York: W. W. Norton. pp. xi. ISBN 978-0-393-33003-8.
3. ↑ Anderson, page ix.
4. 1 2 Lounsberry, Barbara (1990). The art of fact: contemporary artists of nonfiction. Westport, Conn: Greenwood Press. xiii. ISBN 0-313-26893-2.
5. ↑ Lounsberry, page xiii-xiv
6. ↑ Lounsberry, page xiv-xv
7. ↑ Lounsberry, page xv
8. ↑ . An Interview with Creative Nonfiction Writer Phillip Lopate Poets & Writers Magazine. Retrieved 2021-04-18.
9. ↑ Johnson, Fenton (1 June 1997). Geography of the Heart. Scribner. ISBN 978-0671009830.
10. ↑ Holman, Virginia (February 25, 2003). Rescuing Patty Hearst: Memories From a Decade Gone Mad (1sted.). Simon & Schuster. ISBN 978-0743222853.
11. ↑ McKay, Sinclair (28 April 2002). "Life is Sweets". The Telegraph . Retrieved 2012-03-04 .
12. ↑ McGrath, Melanie (2009). Hopping. 4th Estate. pp.xiv–xv. ISBN 978-0-00-722365-7.
13. ↑ Barrett and Calvi, Duncan and Nuala (2012). The Sugar Girls. Collins. pp. 337–338. ISBN 978-0-00-744847-0.
14. ↑ "Creative Nonfiction, Issue. 38, Spring 2010". Creative Nonfiction: 7–13. ISSN 1070-0714.
15. ↑ Daniel Ganzfried, translated from the German by Katherine Quimby Johnson. "Die Geliehene Holocaust-Biographie (The Purloined Holocaust Biography)". Die Weltwoche . Retrieved 2010-12-31 .
16. ↑ Wyatt, Edward (2006-01-10). "Best-Selling Memoir Draws Scrutiny". The New York Times . Retrieved 2008-01-24 .
17. ↑ Gutkind, Lee (1997). The Art of Creative Nonfiction: Writing and Selling the Literature of Reality. New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc. pp. 8. ISBN 0-471-11356-5.
18. 1 2 Lounsberry, page xvi
19. ↑ "The Personal Essay Book is Over: 18 May 2017". New Yorker. 18 May 2017. Retrieved April 18, 2021.
20. ↑ Anderson, Chris (1989). Literary nonfiction: theory, criticism, pedagogy. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. xix–x. ISBN 0-8093-1405-3.

Further reading

Chronological order of publication (oldest first)

• Johnson, E. L.; Wolfe (1975). The New Journalism. London: Pan Books. ISBN 0-330-24315-2.
• Gutkind, Lee (1997). The Art of Creative Nonfiction: Writing and Selling the Literature of Reality. New York: Wiley. ISBN 0-471-11356-5.
• Associated Writing Programs; Forche, Carolyn; Gerard, Philip (2001). Writing Creative Nonfiction: Instruction and Insights from Teachers of the Associated Writing Programs. Cincinnati: Writer's Digest Books. ISBN 1-884910-50-5.
• Dillard, Annie; Gutkind, Lee (2005). In Fact: The Best of Creative Nonfiction. New York: W.W. Norton & Co. ISBN 0-393-32665-9.
• Gutkind, Lee, ed. (2008). Keep It Real: Everything You Need to Know About Researching and Writing Creative Nonfiction . New York: W.W. Norton & Co. ISBN 978-0-393-06561-9. CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link) CS1 maint: extra text: authors list (link)

External links

• Creative Nonfiction a magazine and resource devoted to the creative nonfiction genre
• Hippocampus Magazine an online magazine focusing solely on creative nonfiction, founded in 2010
• River Teeth a journal of nonfiction narrative
• Fourth Genre explorations in nonfiction
• Shadowbox Magazine a biannual journal of creative nonfiction
• Poets & Writers a nonprofit literary organization serving poets, fiction and creative nonfiction writers
• Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction (Canada)
• What is creative non-fiction? Phil Druker, University of Idaho
• Creative Nonfiction resources for Australian writers
• Creative Nonfiction Bibliography Joan Clingan, Prescott College
• PodLit Creative Nonfiction Podcast
• UC Irvine Literary Journalism Degree Program
• Stonecoast Main MFA in Creative (Non-fiction) Writing
• The Sugar Girls website
• Living in Italy website
• 1966 - A Journal of Creative Nonfiction a literary magazine devoted to the creative nonfiction genre
• Resources for CNF Writers - a list of resources for creative nonfiction writers

Audio/video links

• Audio CSPAN – Interview with Lee Gutkind gives a definition of the genre
• Audio CSPAN – Interview with Lee Gutkind gives examples of authors who write in the genre

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Writing Creative Nonfiction the Literature of Reality

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