Creative Nonfiction:

An Overview
 Objectives:
At the end of the course overview you are to:
⊷ 1. enumerate the types of creative nonfiction;
⊷ 2. discriminate the different strategies of
creative nonfiction;
⊷ 3. write a one-paragraph evaluation of an
⊷ essay in terms of the right balance of
information, imagination, facts, and
personal impression

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 Review
Creative Nonfiction:
Also referred as
⊶ Personal Journalism
⊶ Literary Journalism
⊶ Dramatic Journalism
⊶ New Journalism
⊶ Parajournalism
⊶ The New Nonfiction
⊶ The Literature of Fact

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 Review
Why did creative nonfiction develop?
(Cheney 1991)
1. Addresses a new kind of reading
public in the west – a reasonably well-
educated public.
2. Addresses a public interested in
nonfiction because it is often stranger
than fiction

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 Introduction
Creative Nonfiction (1991)
1. requires the skill of the storyteller and the
research ability of the reporter

2. doesn’t just report facts; delivers facts in

ways that move people toward a deeper
understanding of the topic

3. creative non-fiction writers must see beyond

facts “to discover their underlying meaning”;
they must “dramatize that meaning in an
interesting, evocative, informative way.”

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 Introduction
Applications/Types of Creative Nonfiction

1. Autobiography (Memoir and

Micromemoir)
2. Biography
3. Travel Essays/ Travel Literature
4. Literary Reportage
5. Character Sketches/Profiles
6. Personal reflections/memoir
7. Testimonio

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 Introduction
Why do we have to study creative nonfiction?

1. Conventional thought: non-fiction’s

purpose was not to entertain, but to inform,
to teach, to lecture

2. Research findings: we learn best when

we are at the same time entertained, when
there is joy and pleasure in the learning;
the strongest, most lasting memories are
those embedded in emotion

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 Introduction
Why do we have to study creative nonfiction?

3. Insight: Creative nonfiction writers inform

their readers better by making the reading
experience vivid and enjoyable.

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 Introduction
Nonfiction writers’ thoughts

There is a definite advantage to the newspaperman in

recreating reality if he uses every conceivable literary
avenue open to him; for his job, depending on the
intensity of his sense of mission, is to penetrate ever
more deeply into the truth of every story – and this
can only be done if he has the instruments of
language, narrative know-how, character-
development, etc., that until now have always been
associated with fiction.
Seymour Krim
(a newspaperman) in Reporter as Artist

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 Introduction
Nonfiction writers’ thoughts

“The advantages of writing nonfiction in ‘story’ form

are many. You get the reader involved. You make the
reader want to know what happens next. You get the
reader closer to the action or the personalities you
portray. And, perhaps, you even come a little closer to
‘truth.’”

Ken Metzler
(a professor of journalism) in an article “Show, Don’t
Tell: How to Write Dramatic Nonfiction”

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 Introduction
Nonfiction writers’ thoughts

The new journalism allows, demands in fact, a more

imaginative approach to reporting, and it permits the
writer to inject himself into the narrative if he wishes,
as many writers do, or to assume the role of a
detached observer, as other writers do, including
myself.
Gay Talese
(one of the first and best practitioners of
creative non-fiction) in his book Fame and Obscurity

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 Elements of Nonfiction

When police, responding to her call, arrived at her East Harlem tenement, she was
hysterical: “The dog ate my baby.” The baby girl had been four days old, twelve
hours “home” from the hospital. Home was two rooms and a kitchen on the sixth
floor, furnished with a rug, a folding chair, and nothing else, no bed, no crib.
“Is the baby dead?” asked an officer. “Yes,” the mother said, “I saw the baby’s
insides.” Her dog, a German shepherd, had not been fed for five days. She
explained: “I left the baby on the floor with the dog to protect it.” She had bought the
dog in July for protection from human menaces.

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 Elements of Nonfiction

George Will’s On Her Own in the City mentions

1. concrete, realistic details about life in an

East Harlem tenement to make a
commentary about poverty and the
welfare system.

2. He utilizes conversation to provide

“emotion”, i.e. to make the article more
human, more understandable, and more
memorable.
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 Elements of Nonfiction

“New York City is a city of things unnoticed. It is a city with cats sleeping under parked cars,
two stone armadillos crawling up St. Patrick’s Cathedral, and thousands of ants creeping on
top of the Empire State Building. The ants probably were carried there by winds or birds, but
nobody is sure; nobody in New York knows any more about the ants than they do about the
panhandler who takes taxis to the Bowery; or the dapper man who picks trash out of Sixth
Avenue trash cans; or the medium in the West Seventies who claims, ‘I am clairvoyant,
clairaudient and clairsensuous.’”
New York City is a city for eccentrics and a center for odd bits of information. New Yorkers
blink twenty-eight times a minute, but forty when tense. Most popcorn chewers at Yankee
Stadium stop chewing momentarily just before the pitch. Gum chewers on Macy’s escalators
stop chewing momentarily before they get off – to concentrate on the last step. Coins, paper
clips, ballpoint pens, and little girls’ pocketbooks are found by workmen when they clean the
sea lion’s pool at the Bronx Zoo.
Gay Talese, using suggestive description in his opening of the article “New York”
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 Elements of Nonfiction

Gay Talese’s New York utilizes:

1. suggestive description. This kind of

description suggests (and only suggests)
something to the reader’s imagination,
enabling it to bring to the description its
own previous similar experiences in order
to understand.

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 Elements of Nonfiction

I spy on my patients. Ought not a doctor to observe his patients by any means and from any
stance, that he might the more fully assemble evidence? So I stand in the doorways of
hospital rooms and gaze. Oh, it is not all that furtive an act. Those in bed need only look up
to discover me. But they never do.
From the doorway of Room 542 the man in the bed seems deeply tanned. Blue eyes and
close-cropped white hair give him the appearance of vigor and good health. But I know that
his skin is not brown from the sun. It is rusted, rather, in the last stage of containing the vile
repose within. And the blue eyes are frosted, looking inward like the windows of a
snowbound cottage. This man is blind. This man is also legless – the right leg missing from
midthigh down, the left from just below the knee. It gives him the look of a bonsai, roots and
branches pruned into the dwarfed facsimile of a great tree.
- Dr. Richard Seltzer in “The Discuss Thrower”

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 Elements of Nonfiction

1. Richard Zelzer’s The Discus Thrower

describes a man physically in very vivid
language, one that gives us unexpected
images, unexpected metaphors.

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 Elements of Nonfiction

1. Narration
2. Description
3. Definition
4. Comparison and Contrast
5. Classification
6. Illustration/Exemplification
7. Analysis
8. Cause and Effect
9. Argumentation and Persuasion

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 Elements of Nonfiction

Our word for the day is dedma.

Etymology. Dedma is the attenuated form of the English words dead malice. Dead malice, in
turn, is the literal translation of the Tagalog expression, patay malisya. It is conjugated thus:
dedma, dinedma, dededmahin.
I remember my consternation at first hearing dedma used in ordinary conversation. A friend
was describing a chance public encounter between one couple, A and B, and another
couple, Y and Z.
Now A had once been seriously involved with Z, and B had been on the verge of marrying Y,
not to mention that A and Y had been the closest of buddies, so close in fact that they were
rumored to be having a homosexual relationship. Plus B and Z were cousins, so you can
imagine the possibilities for going ballistic. The spectators licked their chops and held their
breaths in anticipation of a juicy, scandalous scene, and then…
Hidalgo, C.P. (2003) Creative Nonfiction: A reader. Quezon City: The University of the
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Philippines Press
 1. approach
2. point-of-view
3. tone
4. voice
5. structure
6. strong beginning
7. rhetorical techniques
8. character
9. concrete and evocative details
10. scene
11. convincing ending

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