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Creative Nonfiction
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CREATIVE NONFICTION
Professor Henning
LIT 2000
What Is Creative Nonfiction?
What Is Creative Nonfiction?
At its name implies, creative nonfiction is, most simply, works that are not fictive inventions; rather, they rely on real, personal experiences. Today, the genre often manifests in essays, memoirs, profiles, meditations, and some kinds of journalism.
Lee Gutkind, the "guru" of the genre and founder of the literary journal Creative Nonfiction, describes creative nonfiction as such: "True stories, well told."
From the Writers Workshop
The Craft of Creative Nonfiction
The Implications of the Word "Creative"
A Problematic Label?
Some writers and critics see the label "creative" as problematic because it creates a false binary: nonfiction is either creative or not. This implies, then, that other forms of nonfiction (newspaper articles, reports, etc.) do not involve creativity. But this is simply not true. Creativity is always involved in some way with good writing.
As The Handy Literature Answer Book explains, "The creativity in creative nonfiction has a narrower application." Its purpose is to distinguish its prose from other imaginative literary genres, like short stories and novels.
When Do We Turn to Creative Nonfiction?
First, we must think about the purpose of creative nonfiction. When do we read it? When do we write it? What is its purpose?
Key Characteristics
As the textbook Literature: The Human Experience explains, "Writers turn to the essay form when they wish to confront their readers directly with an idea, a problem...an illuminating experience, an important definition, or some flaw (or virtue) in the social system" (30).
The Presence of "I"
Key Characteristic #1
You know how you've been told in most academic writing to avoid the use of first-person? That is not the case in creative nonfiction! Instead, the genre embraces the use of "I," thereby encouraging a break from pure objectivity. This does not mean that creative nonfiction does not depend on facts; these facts are just processed through a first-person perspective.
As The Handy Literature Answer Book explains, this processing through the "I" perspective thus "becomes part of the story or analysis."
The Techniques of Literature
Key Characteristic #2
Unlike traditional journalism or expository nonfiction, creative nonfiction uses literary techniques like setting, dialogue, characters, point of view, poetic devices, and rhythm. (This is where the fun is!)
In this way, creative nonfiction calls attention to itself as constructed, but because we know it actually happened, the reader is no longer concerned with its use of literary techniques to achieve truth (unlike other forms of prose).
The All-Important Nonfiction "Contract"
Creative nonfiction is committed to the actual, and readers hold the genre to this contract. Although creative nonfiction uses literary techniques, as The Handy Literature Answer Book explains, "it is still held to an exacting adherence to the actual."
Key Characteristic #3
Annie Dillard, a well-known writer of essays and short stories, explains, "The essay can do everything a poem can do, and everything a short story can do—everything but fake it. The elements in any nonfiction should be true not only artistically—the connections must hold at base and must be veracious, for that is the convention and the covenant between the nonfiction writer and his reader."
What To Analyze
Aspects for Analysis
Because it mixes the actual with the literary, creative nonfiction asks us to consider both. This duality, then, demands analysis of not only the practicality of the work (Does it provide a true description of something or someone? Does it extend your knowledge of our world? Does it have a compelling focus or thesis?) but also its creative construction (What characters are present? What is the narrative structure? How/why does the author use poetic devices like metaphor and imagery?).
Let's return to Laura Stanfill's "Breathing Lilacs" and do our own literary analysis!