Creative Nonfiction Resources
Some Definitions of Creative Nonfiction
Creative nonfiction is writing about real events, real people, and real places using the storytelling techniques of fiction writers and the lyrical language of poets. Some of these storytelling techniques include experiments with scene building, dialogue, characterization, sensory details, suspense, personal experience, and reflection.
The Associated Writing Programs (a national organization of college and university creative writing instructors and graduate students) defines creative nonfiction as “factual and literary writing that has the narrative, dramatic, meditative, and lyrical elements of novels, plays, and poetry.”
Creative nonfiction includes the essay, memoir, diary/journal, letter, autobiography, biography, literary journalism, and oral history. In his important anthology The Art of the Personal Essay, editor Phillip Lopate also includes many forms of the essay: analytic meditation, book review, consolation, diary/journal entry, diatribe, humor, list, lecture, letter, mosaic, memoir, newspaper column, portrait, prose poem, reverie, reportage, and valediction. Essayist Carolyn Kremers adds elegy, celebration, prayer, reflection, interview, and profile.
Lee Gutkind, founder and editor of the literary journal Creative Nonfiction, writes: “Creative nonfiction writers write about themselves and/or capture real people and real life in ways that can and have changed the world. What is most important and enjoyable about creative nonfiction is that is not only allows, but encourages, the writer to become a part of the essay being written…Currently, many of our best magazines—The New Yorker, Harper’s, Vanity Fair, Esquire—publish more creative nonfiction than fiction and poetry combined. Universities offer Master of Fine Arts degrees in creative nonfiction. Newspapers are publishing an increasing amount of creative nonfiction, not only as features, but in the news and op-ed pages, as well.” Gutkind goes on to list his “5 Rs” of creative nonfiction: real life, reflection, research, reading (meaning: reading fine examples of the genre), and [w]riting (drafting and crafting).
In his book Creative Nonfiction: Researching and Crafting Stories of Real Life, Philip Gerard lists another “5 hallmarks” of creative nonfiction: apparent subject and deeper subject, urgency of the event and timelessness of its meaning, narrative style (tells a story using fictional techniques such as character, plot, scene building, and dialogue), a sense of reflection on the part of the author, and serious attention to the craft of writing. Gerard says: “Creative nonfiction is the stories you find out, captured with a clear eye and an alert imagination, filtered through a mind passionate to know and tell, told accurately and with compelling grace.”