Some of the writer’s boards I’ve been frequenting are full of what people are calling “Creative Nonfiction.” To me, they read like badly written articles that doesn’t fit the form of either standard non-fiction or a short story. Mostly true accounts, they include bits of dialog like fiction, but also long sections of exposition like non-fiction.
I just can’t get my head around it.
Can someone please tell me what these things are supposed to be, and perhaps push me towards some well-written creative nonfiction so I can tell if I just hate the genre as a whole or if I just stumbled across some really, really bad stuff.
I started reading what was then called the New Journalism in college, back when New really meant new, although I was a couple of years too late to catch it from the very beginning. Like any widely-encompassing term, it encompasses both good and bad examples. But that Bruce Dobler listing has on it some of the finest nonfiction writing of the past half-century.
If you want to go more deeply into the field, I suggest starting with the anthologies. The one edited by Gay Talese, Writing Creative Nonfiction: The Literature of Reality, looks good enough to blow the top of your head off, although the others ain’t half shabby.
It’s harder, much harder, to write creative nonfiction - a term I hate, if anyone cares - than to write straight nonfiction, which I can reel off by the yard. I’ve written a few short pieces in that style and I can only get it to work on a really good day, when the style and the event come together in perfect proportion before I touch the keyword. I can’t sit down and tell myself to write that way, though, and I suspect that the pieces Athena has seen were by people who admired the results and tried their own hand at it without understanding just how difficult it is to pull off.
I’m fairly new to the concept, but it isn’t actually that foreign or unique when you think about it. Any history teacher can tell you that having studetns simply read from the textbook doesn’t lead to much memorization of the material. Instead, you could try making students create and perform skits, write fictional articles or letters about a particular event, and so forth.
I’d seen those Web sites before, but maybe not the list of what’s considered best. I’ll take a look at that.
Yeah, what I’ve been reading has been… lacking, for lack of a better word. I try to review them and just so hate the style that I find very little good to say about it. To me, they seem to be what used to be called “personal essays”, except written in the third person and jumping between exposition and dialog.
I just audited a course called Reading and Writing About Place that focused on creative nonfiction. Much of the material we read was memoir or personal narrative about other topics like nature or geography. For example:
What makes them all nonfiction is that the authors are presenting “true” material from their own lives and in some cases factual information about other people or places. The creative part comes in the telling…arranging the narrative to paint a bigger picture, editing events or people to fit that picture, exaggerating some points and downplaying others. We all do the same thing when we tell stories from our own lives.
My sense is that while the term is relatively new, there’s a lot of past fiction that might easily fit the creative nonfiction label. John O’Hara’s Gibbsville stories come to mind.
See, this is the part I don’t get. If you’re editing events or people, isn’t that, in most respects, fiction? What’s the difference between “Creative Nonfiction” and a fictional work with a “based on…” byline? For example, is the movie “Schindler’s List” the motion picture equivalent of Creative Nonfiction?
I’ve read “Angela’s Ashes” and it reads like a story, though it’s based on real events. Most of the stuff I’ve read labelled as “Creative Nonfiction” doesn’t read like stories. Their composition and writing style is very different. Is it because they suck, or is it because “Creative Nonfiction” has different rules than fiction?
Well, the very act of taking pen to paper is editing, whether fiction or non. I went home over lunch and picked up my copy of Tell it Slant, the creative nonfiction text we used in class. I think this paragraph from the author’s introduction sums up the differences best:
Unless the story that unfolds in a movie is clearly connected to its creator (as a memoir is to its author), I’m not sure the creative nonfiction label applies.
From what I’ve read in Tell it Slant, it seems as if the authors of what you’re reading may not be paying enough attention to one of the essential buildling blocks of creative nonfiction, scene. As they describe it:
As in any other genre of literature, I would guess that there’s quite a bit of creative nonfiction that just plain sucks.