Creative Writing Nonfiction: An Overview

Creative Nonfiction blends storytelling like fiction with the truth of real-life experiences. It follows a narrative
structure with key elements such as an inciting moment, rising action, climax, and denouement. Similar to
poetry, CNF emphasizes the author’s authentic voice, aiming to engage readers through personal candor and
empathy. The genre encompasses a wide range of lengths, from book-length autobiographies to concise 500-
word food blog posts.
Creative Nonfiction encompasses many different forms of prose. As an emerging form, CNF is closely entwined
with fiction. Many fiction writers make the cross-over to nonfiction occasionally, if only to write essays on the
craft of fiction. This can be done fairly easily, since the ability to write good prose—beautiful description,
realistic characters, musical sentences—is required in both genres.
So what, then, makes the literary nonfiction genre unique?
The first key element of nonfiction—perhaps the most crucial thing— is that the genre relies on the author’s
ability to retell events that actually happened. The talented CNF writer will certainly use imagination and craft
to relay what has happened and tell a story, but the story must be true. You may have heard the idiom that “truth
is stranger than fiction;” this is an essential part of the genre. Events—coincidences, love stories, stories of loss
—that may be expected or feel clichéd in fiction can be respected when they occur in real life.
A writer of Creative Nonfiction should alwayss be on the lookout for material that can yield an essay; the world
at-large is their subject matter. Additionally, because Creative Nonfiction is focused on reality, it relies on
research to render events as accurately as possible. While it’s certainly true that fiction writers also research
their subjects (especially in the case of historical fiction), CNF writers must be scrupulous in their attention to
detail. Their work is somewhat akin to that of a journalist, and in fact, some journalism can fall under the
umbrella of CNF as well. Writer Christopher Cokinos claims, “done correctly, lived well, delivered elegantly,
such research uncovers not only facts of the world, but reveals and shapes the world of the writer” (93). In
addition to traditional research methods, such as interviewing subjects or conducting database searches, he
relays Kate Bernheimer’s claim that “A lifetime of reading is research:” any lived experience, even one that is
read, can become material for the writer.
The other key element, the thing present in all successful nonfiction, is reflection. A person could have lived the
most interesting life and had experiences completely unique to them, but without context—without reflection on
how this life of experiences affected the writer—the reader is left with the feeling that the writer hasn’t learned
anything, that the writer hasn’t grown. We need to see how the writer has grown because a large part of
nonfiction’s appeal is the lessons it offers us, the models for ways of living: that the writer can survive a
difficult or strange experience and learn from it. Sean Ironman writes that while “[r]eflection, or the second ‘I,’
is taught in every nonfiction course” (43), writers often find it incredibly hard to actually include reflection in
their work. He expresses his frustration that “Students are stuck on the idea—an idea that’s not entirely wrong—
that readers need to think” (43), that reflecting in their work would over-explain the ideas to the reader. Not so.
Instead, reflection offers “the crucial scene of the writer writing the memoir” (44), of the present-day writer who
is looking back on and retelling the past. In a moment of reflection, the author steps out of the story to show a
different kind of scene, in which they are sitting at their computer or with their notebook in some quiet place,
looking at where they are now, versus where they were then; thinking critically about what they’ve learned. This
should ideally happen in small moments, maybe single sentences, interspersed throughout the piece. Without
reflection, you have a collection of scenes open for interpretation—though they might add up to nothing.