CREATIVE NONFICTION

• Creative NonFiction


  • facts and truth

  • research and memory

  • try to understand ourselves, others, and the world
• Poetry


  • “rhythmical creation of beauty”

  • spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.
• The writer must be able to achieve psychic distance from the subject matter to write better.
• Elements of poetry include line, rhyme, meter, metaphor, form, theme, and tone.
• Poetry


  • Heightened attention to and use of language

  • Deft handling of imagery
• Metaphor


  a very important element in any genre and is the conceptual core of the work.
• Fiction has character, point of view, plot and conflict, setting and atmosphere, and theme.
• Drama shares some elements with fiction, with dialogue as its main vehicle. One of its principal attractions when staged is its spectacle.
• Elements of character, setting, plot, and theme are all present in this musical, along with the added element of spectacle, as we have discussed in drama.
• we can bring into creative nonfiction is the element of dialogue.
• The nonfictional novel came into its own in the 1960s.
• Fiction is the province of novels and short stories.
• Fact is the province of journalistic articles and other nonfictional works such as encyclopedias, atlases, and similar reference books.
• Pioneer CNF Writers: Joan Didion, Gay Telese, Truman Capote, and Tom Wolfe.
• The barrier between fact and fiction has been pretty much solid.
• Creative nonfiction uses creativity in its use of fiction techniques to present nonfiction material.
• Creative Nonfiction


  Factually accurate prose about

  real people and events—in a compelling, vivid, dramatic

  manner.
• Creative nonfiction should be about “true stories, well

  told”.
• Creative nonfiction presents factual material in imaginative ways.
• Autobiographical Pact


  Creative nonfiction deals with self-revelation, there is a limit to honesty, and that is compassion.
• Creative nonfiction has been called a lot of names, among them narrative or literary journalism, new journalism, literature of fact, literature of reality, or literary nonfiction.
• literature of witness


  The lens with which we view the world is, by default, subjective.
• five Rs of creative nonfiction

  Real life, Reflection, Research, Reading, and ‘Riting.
• Critic Chris Anderson divided the forms of creative nonfiction into two:The Personal and The Journalistic Essay.
• Personal essays focus on the writer’s particular story and has a more limited audience.
• The journalistic essay focuses on somebody else’s story (as told through the eyes of the writer), ideas that are bigger than just the personal.
• The father of literary or new journalism is Tom Wolfe.
• Tom Wolfe


  He distinguishes the four techniques that new journalism borrowed from the novel.
• Personal Essay

  It deals with more personal themes, the personal essay puts a premium on intimacy of voice and universality of significance.
• “if you are going to write from a memory, it should be

  a memory more than a year old."
• Travelogue is one of the most basic forms of knowledge that we have.
• Travelogue


  The readers must get a feel of the place that you’ve written about, the same way you have experienced it, road bumps and all.
• The memoir is somewhat similar to the premise of the personal essay but shorter than the autobiography.
• Memoir


  It is not an autobiography because it only focuses on some aspects of the writer’s life, not the whole of it.
• The memoir also has the advantage of “unspinning” the tale for us.
• Critic Chris Anderson divided the forms of creative nonfiction into two:


  The Personal and The Journalistic Essay
• Structure


  • practical processes of structure are: the selection of events, the order that you place them in, and the emphasis you give each event."

  (Patti Miller)

  • Literary text as a construction (Margot Singer)
• Memory as Synecdoche


  • "your emotional story is locked into the details you remember of your life." (Miller and Paola)
• Character

  “I” of the author = persona
• Intimate Detail


  Those the reader might not see or imagine without the writer‘s insight.