What is Creative

Nonfiction?
Lee Gutkind
The banner of the magazine I’m proud to have founded and I continue to edit, Creative Nonfiction,
defines the genre simply, succinctly, and accurately as “true stories well told.” And that, in essence,
is what creative nonfiction is all about.

In some ways, creative nonfiction is like jazz—it’s a rich mix of flavors, ideas, and techniques, some
of which are newly invented and others as old as writing itself. Creative nonfiction can be an essay,
a journal article, a research paper, a memoir, or a poem; it can be personal or not, or it can be all of
these.

The words “creative” and “nonfiction” describe the form. The word “creative” refers to the use of
literary craft, the techniques fiction writers, playwrights, and poets employ to present nonfiction—
factually accurate prose about real people and events—in a compelling, vivid, dramatic manner. The
goal is to make nonfiction stories read like fiction so that your readers are as enthralled by fact as
they are by fantasy.

The word “creative” has been criticized in this context because some people have maintained that
being creative means that you pretend or exaggerate or make up facts and embellish details. This is
completely incorrect. It is possible to be honest and straightforward and brilliant and creative at the
same time.

"Creative” doesn’t mean inventing what didn’t happen, reporting and describing what wasn’t there. It
doesn’t mean that the writer has a license to lie. The cardinal rule is clear—and cannot be violated.
This is the pledge the writer makes to the reader—the maxim we live by, the anchor of creative
nonfiction: “You can’t make this stuff up!”
The Fastest-Growing Genre
Creative nonfiction has become the most popular genre in the literary and publishing communities.
These days the biggest publishers—HarperCollins, Random House, Norton, and others—are
seeking creative nonfiction titles more vigorously than literary fiction and poetry. Recent creative
nonfiction titles from major publishers on the best-seller lists include Laura Hillenbrand’s Unbroken,
Dave Eggers’s Zeitoun, Rebecca Skloot’s The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, and Jeannette
Walls’s The Glass Castle.

Even small and academic (university) presses that previously would have published only books of
regional interest, along with criticism and poetry, are actively seeking creative nonfiction titles these
days. In the academic community generally, creative nonfiction has become the popular way to
write.

Through creative writing programs, students can earn undergraduate degrees, MFA degrees, and
PhDs in creative nonfiction—not only in the United States but in Australia, New Zealand, and
throughout the world. Creative nonfiction is the dominant form in publications like The New
Yorker, Esquire, and Vanity Fair. You will even find creative nonfiction stories featured on the front
page of The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal.
The Memoir Craze
In the 1990s, the controversy over the publication of a half dozen intimate memoirs triggered what
the publishing industry and the book critics referred to as the “memoir craze.” Angela’s Ashes (1996)
by Frank McCourt and This Boy’s Life (1989) by Tobias Wolff were both made into major motion
pictures; the British actress Emily Watson starred as McCourt’s mother, Angela, and Academy
Award winner Robert De Niro played Wolff’s stepfather, Dwight Hansen. The Liars Club (1995) by
Mary Karr, another of these best-selling tell-all memoirs, rode the new interest in the genre, as did
Kathryn Harrison’s The Kiss.

Memoirs are not new to the literary world. Henry David Thoreau’s Walden is a classic of the form as
is Isak Dinesen’s Out of Africa, first published in this country in 1938. Today the memoir craze
continues in full force. Celebrities, politicians, athletes—victims and heroes alike—are making their
private lives public. And readers can’t get enough of these books. The literature of reality, with all of
the pain and the secrets that authors confess, is helping to connect the nation and the world in a
meaningful and intimate way.
Literary Journalism
Memoir is the personal side of creative nonfiction but there’s a public side as well, often referred to
as narrative or literary journalism—or “big idea” stories. Michael Pollan (The Botany of Desire)
captures big ideas, for example, as does Oliver Sacks (The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat)
through creative nonfiction.

One distinction between the personal and the public creative nonfiction is that the memoir is the
writer’s particular story, nobody else’s. The writer owns it. In contrast, the public side of creative
nonfiction is mostly somebody else’s story; anybody, potentially, owns it, anybody who wants to go
to the time and trouble to write about it. These pieces, although narrative, focus on fact, leading to a
bigger and more universal concept.

In every issue, Creative Nonfiction publishes “big idea/fact pieces”—creative nonfiction about
virtually any subject—from baseball gloves to brain surgery to dog walking to immortality or pig
roasting. There are no limits to the subject matter as long as it is expressed in a story-oriented
narrative way. These are stories almost anyone could research and write.

Because they’re so personal, memoirs have a limited audience, while the public kind of creative
nonfiction—when authors write about something other than themselves—has a larger audience.
These “big idea/factual essays” are more sought after by editors and agents and will more likely lead
to publication.
The Building Blocks of Creative Nonfiction
Scenes and stories are the building blocks of creative nonfiction, the foundation and anchoring
elements of what we do. This is what I tell people who want to write but have no experience writing.
And I tell the same thing to the graduate students in my writing classes—and PhD students. Writing
in scenes is one of the most important lessons for you to take from this book—and to learn.
The idea of scenes as building blocks is an easy concept to understand, but it’s not easy to put into
practice. The stories or scenes not only have to be factual and true (You can’t make them up!), they
have to make a point or communicate information, as I have said, and they have to fit into the overall
structure of the essay or chapter or book. It is often a daunting task. But it’s essential.

Writing in scenes represents the difference between showing and telling. The lazy, uninspired writer
will tell the reader about a subject, place, or personality, but the creative nonfiction writer will show
that subject, place, or personality, vividly, memorably—and in action. In scenes.

—Lee Gutkind

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Home News On Writing 7 tips for writing creative non-fiction

7 tips for writing creative non-fiction

Tuesday, September 20, 2016

By:

Lee Kofman

Photo of Lee Kofman

Lee Kofman

To follow on from last month’s post in which I sang the praises of creative non-fiction, I’d like to share
with you some things I have learned about working in this often misunderstood genre (after much trial
and error). Here are my top tips:

1. Writing is reading

The most obvious, and least sexy, tip is that to engage deeply with creative non-fiction you have to read
as many books in this genre as you can. Of course every writer knows, or at least so I hope, that reading
for writers is as important as the writing itself. Yet, in creative non-fiction, reading may play even a more
significant role, because – as mentioned last month – works published in this genre are so diverse,
playful, surprising and elusive to definition, that the best way to understand creative non-fiction is by
experiencing it.

I suggest starting with creative non-fiction classics – the likes of Truman Capote’s ‘In Cold Blood’, Ernest
Hemingway’s ‘A Moveable Feast’ and Joan Didion’s ‘Slouching Towards Bethlehem’. It is also not a bad
idea to read some popular creative non-fiction -– Gretchen Rubin’s ‘The Happiness Project’, for example.
Finally, read the most adventurous current practitioners, such as Geoff Dyer, Maggie Nelson and David
Shields. If you haven’t read these writers yet, I’m really jealous of you. Reading them is a sort of
revelation.

2. Shape yourself into a character

Craft your ‘I’ with great care, as if you were a fictional character. Be creative and don’t be too earnest. It
is commonly understood among creative non-fiction writers, and also dedicated readers, that the ‘I’ in
the work doesn’t equal the author, that it is a version of her, shaped to fit the story. For example, my
memoir ‘The Dangerous Bride’, was set during a troubled time in my life when my marriage was
unravelling. To fit the narrative’s drama I underplayed the more organised aspects of myself and
emphasised my confusions and inconsistencies. I even portrayed myself with constantly dishevelled hair
even though in reality I sometimes do brush it. I wasn’t faking, but rather working along the lines of
advice from Robin Hemley who in his book about creative non-fiction, ‘Immersion’, wrote: “It’s possible
to be completely honest about yourself and at the same time selective and manipulative in the details
you choose, for the sake of keeping the prose focused.” To reveal the emotional truth of our stories
without boring our readers silly we are ‘allowed’ to reveal about ourselves just the stuff that is relevant
to the particular story we are telling.

3. Be honest about the limits of your memory, but not too honest

In writing creative non-fiction we often engage with our past. Yet memory, as we all know, is a fickle,
capricious princess. Sometimes it’s worth admitting that our memory is more a suspect than a
trustworthy assistant and to write this tension between truth and fiction into the work. Here is a
warning, though – discoursing on memory has become somewhat of a cliché in creative non-fiction and
it is all too easy to slip into self-indulgence here. I have little patience for memoirs and personal essays
where every second sentence contains qualifications, such as “but maybe the wallpaper was yellow, not
brown” or “I don’t remember why I decided to slap my sister”. My suggestion is to tread lightly in this
territory and discuss memory’s puzzling workings only where it is crucial to the narrative and/or when
you can say something fresh on the topic. After all, what your readers are really after is a good story and
thoughtful reflection, not tedious mumbling.

4. Your ethical concerns are often your story

Ethical concerns, such as this question of memory’s accuracy, proliferate in creative non-fiction, which is
what makes this genre so risky to work in and therefore exciting too. It may ease the pressure a bit if we,
as writers, admit that such concerns are actually a part of the story we are writing, rather than
something to deal with on our own, in guilty secrecy. In fact, sometimes, when written into the story,
our dilemmas can become the most interesting part of the work, deepening it greatly. Helen Garner’s
investigative journalism is a fine example of such writing. In her true crime book, ‘Joe Cinque’s
Consolation’, for example, some of my favourite parts are where Garner questions her own motives for
following the murder story and her biases in how she interprets the case, because these passages
illuminate the complexity of human psyche and make us, the readers, question ourselves too.

5. Don’t force your endings

Make your work reflect life’s complexity; don’t look for neat resolutions where there are none. One of
the things that can kill a work of creative non-fiction is an imposed simplification of the reality being
explored. Such simplification is particularly common with bad memoirs where authors often rush to
offer redemptive endings to their sometimes harrowing life dramas as if every difficulty can be ‘fixed’.
Instead, I suggest, stay with the ambivalence and uncertainty if this is what’s true to our experiences.

6. Beware of fiction writers

The following advice may sound arrogant but I think it’s just practical, and may even make the
difference between your finishing your project or losing confidence in it: Don’t show your works-in-
progress to fiction writers! The parameters and conventions of creative non-fiction differ significantly
from fictional ones, despite the many overlaps, and are often quite alien to fiction writers, particularly
those who focus on the storytelling aspects of writing and are less interested in ideas. Showing your
personal essay to a novelist would be like asking a news reporter for advice on a poem.

7. You don’t actually have to write creative non-fiction

Finally, I think it’s important to be vigilant about how emotionally honest you are prepared to be in your
creative non-fiction project. If there are many things you feel you cannot say because you are not
prepared to offend people, or because you don’t want to expose yourself and make yourself vulnerable,
then in my view it is not worth writing this particular work. It is better to focus on writing something
else, maybe fiction, than to end up with a falsely ringing, sentimental piece of writing.

About Lee Kofman

Lee Kofman is an author of four books, including the memoir ‘The Dangerous Bride’ (Melbourne
University Press), and co-editor of ‘Rebellious Daughters’ (Ventura Press), an anthology of memoir by
prominent Australian writers. Her short works have been widely published in Australia, UK, Scotland,
Israel, Canada and US, including in ‘Best Australian Stories’ and ‘Best Australian Essays’. Her blog was a
finalist for Best Australian Blogs 2014. More information at leekofman.com.au.

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