writing creative nonfiction requires facts as basic information

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Last updated on Feb 20, 2023

Creative Nonfiction: How to Spin Facts into Narrative Gold

Creative nonfiction is a genre of creative writing that approaches factual information in a literary way. This type of writing applies techniques drawn from literary fiction and poetry to material that might be at home in a magazine or textbook, combining the craftsmanship of a novel with the rigor of journalism. 

Here are some popular examples of creative nonfiction:

• The Collected Schizophrenias by Esmé Weijun Wang
• Intimations by Zadie Smith
• Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris
• The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot
• Translating Myself and Others by Jhumpa Lahiri
• The Madwoman in the Attic by Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar
• I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
• Trick Mirror by Jia Tolentino

Creative nonfiction is not limited to novel-length writing, of course. Popular radio shows and podcasts like WBEZ’s This American Life or Sarah Koenig’s Serial also explore audio essays and documentary with a narrative approach, while personal essays like Nora Ephron’s A Few Words About Breasts and Mariama Lockington’s What A Black Woman Wishes Her Adoptive White Parents Knew also present fact with fiction-esque flair.

Writing short personal essays can be a great entry point to writing creative nonfiction. Think about a topic you would like to explore, perhaps borrowing from your own life, or a universal experience. Journal freely for five to ten minutes about the subject, and see what direction your creativity takes you in. These kinds of exercises will help you begin to approach reality in a more free flowing, literary way — a muscle you can use to build up to longer pieces of creative nonfiction.

If you think you’d like to bring your writerly prowess to nonfiction, here are our top tips for creating compelling creative nonfiction that’s as readable as a novel, but as illuminating as a scholarly article.

Write a memoir focused on a singular experience

Humans love reading about other people’s lives — like first-person memoirs, which allow you to get inside another person’s mind and learn from their wisdom. Unlike autobiographies, memoirs can focus on a single experience or theme instead of chronicling the writers’ life from birth onward.

For that reason, memoirs tend to focus on one core theme and—at least the best ones—present a clear narrative arc, like you would expect from a novel. This can be achieved by selecting a singular story from your life; a formative experience, or period of time, which is self-contained and can be marked by a beginning, a middle, and an end. 

When writing a memoir, you may also choose to share your experience in parallel with further research on this theme. By performing secondary research, you’re able to bring added weight to your anecdotal evidence, and demonstrate the ways your own experience is reflective (or perhaps unique from) the wider whole.

Example: The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion

Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking , for example, interweaves the author’s experience of widowhood with sociological research on grief. Chronicling the year after her husband’s unexpected death, and the simultaneous health struggles of their daughter, The Year of Magical Thinking is a poignant personal story, layered with universal insight into what it means to lose someone you love. The result is the definitive exploration of bereavement — and a stellar example of creative nonfiction done well.

📚 Looking for more reading recommendations? Check out our list of the best memoirs of the last century .

Tip: What you cut out is just as important as what you keep

When writing a memoir that is focused around a singular theme, it’s important to be selective in what to include, and what to leave out. While broader details of your life may be helpful to provide context, remember to resist the impulse to include too much non-pertinent backstory. By only including what is most relevant, you are able to provide a more focused reader experience, and won’t leave readers guessing what the significance of certain non-essential anecdotes will be.

💡 For more memoir-planning tips, head over to our post on outlining memoirs .

Of course, writing a memoir isn’t the only form of creative nonfiction that lets you tap into your personal life — especially if there’s something more explicit you want to say about the world at large… which brings us onto our next section.

Pen a personal essay that has something bigger to say

Personal essays condense the first-person focus and intimacy of a memoir into a tighter package — tunneling down into a specific aspect of a theme or narrative strand within the author’s personal experience.

Often involving some element of journalistic research, personal essays can provide examples or relevant information that comes from outside the writer’s own experience. This can take the form of other people’s voices quoted in the essay, or facts and stats. By combining lived experiences with external material, personal essay writers can reach toward a bigger message, telling readers something about human behavior or society instead of just letting them know the writer better.

Example: The Empathy Exams by Leslie Jamison

Leslie Jamison's widely acclaimed collection The Empathy Exams  tackles big questions (Why is pain so often performed? Can empathy be “bad”?) by grounding them in the personal. While Jamison draws from her own experiences, both as a medical actor who was paid to imitate pain, and as a sufferer of her own ailments, she also reaches broader points about the world we live in within each of her essays.

Whether she’s talking about the justice system or reality TV, Jamison writes with both vulnerability and poise, using her lived experience as a jumping-off point for exploring the nature of empathy itself.

Tip: Try to show change in how you feel about something

Including external perspectives, as we’ve just discussed above, will help shape your essay, making it meaningful to other people and giving your narrative an arc. 

Ultimately, you may be writing about yourself, but readers can read what they want into it. In a personal narrative, they’re looking for interesting insights or realizations they can apply to their own understanding of their lives or the world — so don’t lose sight of that. As the subject of the essay, you are not so much the topic as the vehicle for furthering a conversation.

Often, there are three clear stages in an essay:

• Initial state 
• Encounter with something external
• New, changed state, and conclusions

By bringing readers through this journey with you, you can guide them to new outlooks and demonstrate how your story is still relevant to them.

Had enough of writing about your own life? Let’s look at a form of creative nonfiction that allows you to get outside of yourself.

Tell a factual story as though it were a novel

The form of creative nonfiction that is perhaps closest to conventional nonfiction is literary journalism. Here, the stories are all fact, but they are presented with a creative flourish. While the stories being told might comfortably inhabit a newspaper or history book, they are presented with a sense of literary significance, and writers can make use of literary techniques and character-driven storytelling.

Unlike news reporters, literary journalists can make room for their own perspectives: immersing themselves in the very action they recount. Think of them as both characters and narrators — but every word they write is true. 

If you think literary journalism is up your street, think about the kinds of stories that capture your imagination the most, and what those stories have in common. Are they, at their core, character studies? Parables? An invitation to a new subculture you have never before experienced? Whatever piques your interest, immerse yourself.

Example: The Botany of Desire by Michael Pollan

If you’re looking for an example of literary journalism that tells a great story, look no further than Michael Pollan’s The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s-Eye View of the World , which sits at the intersection of food writing and popular science. Though it purports to offer a “plant’s-eye view of the world,” it’s as much about human desires as it is about the natural world.

Through the history of four different plants and human’s efforts to cultivate them, Pollan uses first-hand research as well as archival facts to explore how we attempt to domesticate nature for our own pleasure, and how these efforts can even have devastating consequences. Pollan is himself a character in the story, and makes what could be a remarkably dry topic accessible and engaging in the process.

Tip: Don’t pretend that you’re perfectly objective

You may have more room for your own perspective within literary journalism, but with this power comes great responsibility. Your responsibilities toward the reader remain the same as that of a journalist: you must, whenever possible, acknowledge your own biases or conflicts of interest, as well as any limitations on your research. 

Thankfully, the fact that literary journalism often involves a certain amount of immersion in the narrative — that is, the writer acknowledges their involvement in the process — you can touch on any potential biases explicitly, and make it clear that the story you’re telling, while true to what you experienced, is grounded in your own personal perspective.

Approach a famous name with a unique approach 

Biographies are the chronicle of a human life, from birth to the present or, sometimes, their demise. Often, fact is stranger than fiction, and there is no shortage of fascinating figures from history to discover. As such, a biographical approach to creative nonfiction will leave you spoilt for choice in terms of subject matter.

Because they’re not written by the subjects themselves (as memoirs are), biographical nonfiction requires careful research. If you plan to write one, do everything in your power to verify historical facts, and interview the subject’s family, friends, and acquaintances when possible. Despite the necessity for candor, you’re still welcome to approach biography in a literary way — a great creative biography is both truthful and beautifully written.

Example: American Prometheus  by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin

Alongside the need for you to present the truth is a duty to interpret that evidence with imagination, and present it in the form of a story. Demonstrating a novelist’s skill for plot and characterization, Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin’s American Prometheus is a great example of creative nonfiction that develops a character right in front of the readers’ eyes.

American Prometheus follows J. Robert Oppenheimer from his bashful childhood to his role as the father of the atomic bomb, all the way to his later attempts to reckon with his violent legacy.

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The biography tells a story that would fit comfortably in the pages of a tragic novel, but is grounded in historical research. Clocking in at a hefty 721 pages, American Prometheus distills an enormous volume of archival material, including letters, FBI files, and interviews into a remarkably readable volume. 

📚 For more examples of world-widening, eye-opening biographies, check out our list of the 30 best biographies of all time .

Tip: The good stuff lies in the mundane details

Biographers are expected to undertake academic-grade research before they put pen to paper. You will, of course, read any existing biographies on the person you’re writing about, and visit any archives containing relevant material. If you’re lucky, there’ll be people you can interview who knew your subject personally — but even if there aren’t, what’s going to make your biography stand out is paying attention to details, even if they seem mundane at first.

Of course, no one cares which brand of slippers a former US President wore — gossip is not what we’re talking about. But if you discover that they took a long, silent walk every single morning, that’s a granular detail you could include to give your readers a sense of the weight they carried every day. These smaller details add up to a realistic portrait of a living, breathing human being.

But creative nonfiction isn’t just writing about yourself or other people. Writing about art is also an art, as we’ll see below.

Put your favorite writers through the wringer with literary criticism

Literary criticism is often associated with dull, jargon-laden college dissertations — but it can be a wonderfully rewarding form that blurs the lines between academia and literature itself. When tackled by a deft writer, a literary critique can be just as engrossing as the books it analyzes.

Many of the sharpest literary critics are also poets, poetry editors , novelists, or short story writers, with first-hand awareness of literary techniques and the ability to express their insights with elegance and flair. Though literary criticism sounds highly theoretical, it can be profoundly intimate: you’re invited to share in someone’s experience as a reader or writer — just about the most private experience there is.

Example: The Madwoman in the Attic by Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar

Take The Madwoman in the Attic by Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, a seminal work approaching Victorian literature from a feminist perspective. Written as a conversation between two friends and academics, this brilliant book reads like an intellectual brainstorming session in a casual dining venue. Highly original, accessible, and not suffering from the morose gravitas academia is often associated with, this text is a fantastic example of creative nonfiction.

Tip: Remember to make your critiques creative

Literary criticism may be a serious undertaking, but unless you’re trying to pitch an academic journal, you’ll need to be mindful of academic jargon and convoluted sentence structure. Don’t forget that the point of popular literary criticism is to make ideas accessible to readers who aren’t necessarily academics, introducing them to new ways of looking at anything they read. 

If you’re not feeling confident, a professional nonfiction editor could help you confirm you’ve hit the right stylistic balance.

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What is creative nonfiction? Despite its slightly enigmatic name, no literary genre has grown quite as quickly as creative nonfiction in recent decades. Literary nonfiction is now well-established as a powerful means of storytelling, and bookstores now reserve large amounts of space for nonfiction, when it often used to occupy a single bookshelf.

Like any literary genre, creative nonfiction has a long history; also like other genres, defining contemporary CNF for the modern writer can be nuanced. If you’re interested in writing true-to-life stories but you’re not sure where to begin, let’s start by dissecting the creative nonfiction genre and what it means to write a modern literary essay.

What Creative Nonfiction Is

Creative nonfiction employs the creative writing techniques of literature, such as poetry and fiction, to retell a true story.

How do we define creative nonfiction? What makes it “creative,” as opposed to just “factual writing”? These are great questions to ask when entering the genre, and they require answers which could become literary essays themselves.

In short, creative nonfiction (CNF) is a form of storytelling that employs the creative writing techniques of literature, such as poetry and fiction, to retell a true story. Creative nonfiction writers don’t just share pithy anecdotes, they use craft and technique to situate the reader into their own personal lives. Fictional elements, such as character development and narrative arcs, are employed to create a cohesive story, but so are poetic elements like conceit and juxtaposition.

The CNF genre is wildly experimental, and contemporary nonfiction writers are pushing the bounds of literature by finding new ways to tell their stories. While a CNF writer might retell a personal narrative, they might also focus their gaze on history, politics, or they might use creative writing elements to write an expository essay. There are very few limits to what creative nonfiction can be, which is what makes defining the genre so difficult—but writing it so exciting.

Different Forms of Creative Nonfiction

From the autobiographies of Mark Twain and Benvenuto Cellini, to the more experimental styles of modern writers like Karl Ove Knausgård, creative nonfiction has a long history and takes a wide variety of forms. Common iterations of the creative nonfiction genre include the following:

Also known as biography or autobiography, the memoir form is probably the most recognizable form of creative nonfiction. Memoirs are collections of memories, either surrounding a single narrative thread or multiple interrelated ideas. The memoir is usually published as a book or extended piece of fiction, and many memoirs take years to write and perfect. Memoirs often take on a similar writing style as the personal essay does, though it must be personable and interesting enough to encourage the reader through the entire book.

Personal Essay

Personal essays are stories about personal experiences told using literary techniques.

When someone hears the word “essay,” they instinctively think about those five paragraph book essays everyone wrote in high school. In creative nonfiction, the personal essay is much more vibrant and dynamic. Personal essays are stories about personal experiences, and while some personal essays can be standalone stories about a single event, many essays braid true stories with extended metaphors and other narratives.

Personal essays are often intimate, emotionally charged spaces. Consider the opening two paragraphs from Beth Ann Fennelly’s personal essay “ I Survived the Blizzard of ’79. ”

We didn’t question. Or complain. It wouldn’t have occurred to us, and it wouldn’t have helped. I was eight. Julie was ten.

We didn’t know yet that this blizzard would earn itself a moniker that would be silk-screened on T-shirts. We would own such a shirt, which extended its tenure in our house as a rag for polishing silver.

The word “essay” comes from the French “essayer,” which means “to try” or “attempt.” The personal essay is more than just an autobiographical narrative—it’s an attempt to tell your own history with literary techniques.

Lyric Essay

The lyric essay contains similar subject matter as the personal essay, but is much more experimental in form.

The lyric essay contains similar subject matter as the personal essay, with one key distinction: lyric essays are much more experimental in form. Poetry and creative nonfiction merge in the lyric essay, challenging the conventional prose format of paragraphs and linear sentences.

The lyric essay stands out for its unique writing style and sentence structure. Consider these lines from “ Life Code ” by J. A. Knight:

The dream goes like this: blue room of water. God light from above. Child’s fist, foot, curve, face, the arc of an eye, the symmetry of circles… and then an opening of this body—which surprised her—a movement so clean and assured and then the push towards the light like a frog or a fish.

What we get is language driven by emotion, choosing an internal logic rather than a universally accepted one.

Lyric essays are amazing spaces to break barriers in language. For example, the lyricist might write a few paragraphs about their story, then examine a key emotion in the form of a villanelle or a ghazal . They might decide to write their entire essay in a string of couplets or a series of sonnets, then interrupt those stanzas with moments of insight or analysis. In the lyric essay, language dictates form. The successful lyricist lets the words arrange themselves in whatever format best tells the story, allowing for experimental new forms of storytelling.

Literary Journalism

Much more ambiguously defined is the idea of literary journalism. The idea is simple: report on real life events using literary conventions and styles. But how do you do this effectively, in a way that the audience pays attention and takes the story seriously?

You can best find examples of literary journalism in more “prestigious” news journals, such as The New Yorker , The Atlantic , Salon , and occasionally The New York Times . Think pieces about real world events, as well as expository journalism, might use braiding and extended metaphors to make readers feel more connected to the story. Other forms of nonfiction, such as the academic essay or more technical writing, might also fall under literary journalism, provided those pieces still use the elements of creative nonfiction.

Consider this recently published article from The Atlantic : The Uncanny Tale of Shimmel Zohar by Lawrence Weschler. It employs a style that’s breezy yet personable—including its opening line.

So I first heard about Shimmel Zohar from Gravity Goldberg—yeah, I know, but she insists it’s her real name (explaining that her father was a physicist)—who is the director of public programs and visitor experience at the Contemporary Jewish Museum, in San Francisco.

How to Write Creative Nonfiction: Common Elements and Techniques

What separates a general news update from a well-written piece of literary journalism? What’s the difference between essay writing in high school and the personal essay? When nonfiction writers put out creative work, they are most successful when they utilize the following elements.

Just like fiction, nonfiction relies on effective narration. Telling the story with an effective plot, writing from a certain point of view, and using the narrative to flesh out the story’s big idea are all key craft elements. How you structure your story can have a huge impact on how the reader perceives the work, as well as the insights you draw from the story itself.

Consider the first lines of the story “ To the Miami University Payroll Lady ” by Frenci Nguyen:

You might not remember me, but I’m the dark-haired, Texas-born, Asian-American graduate student who visited the Payroll Office the other day to complete direct deposit and tax forms.

Because the story is written in second person, with the reader experiencing the story as the payroll lady, the story’s narration feels much more personal and important, forcing the reader to evaluate their own personal biases and beliefs.

Observation

Telling the story involves more than just simple plot elements, it also involves situating the reader in the key details. Setting the scene requires attention to all five senses, and interpersonal dialogue is much more effective when the narrator observes changes in vocal pitch, certain facial expressions, and movements in body language. Essentially, let the reader experience the tiny details – we access each other best through minutiae.

The story “ In Transit ” by Erica Plouffe Lazure is a perfect example of storytelling through observation. Every detail of this flash piece is carefully noted to tell a story without direct action, using observations about group behavior to find hope in a crisis. We get observation when the narrator notes the following:

Here at the St. Thomas airport in mid-March, we feel the urgency of the transition, the awareness of how we position our bodies, where we place our luggage, how we consider for the first time the numbers of people whose belongings are placed on the same steel table, the same conveyor belt, the same glowing radioactive scan, whose IDs are touched by the same gloved hand[.]

What’s especially powerful about this story is that it is written in a single sentence, allowing the reader to be just as overwhelmed by observation and context as the narrator is.

We’ve used this word a lot, but what is braiding? Braiding is a technique most often used in creative nonfiction where the writer intertwines multiple narratives, or “threads.” Not all essays use braiding, but the longer a story is, the more it benefits the writer to intertwine their story with an extended metaphor or another idea to draw insight from.

“ The Crush ” by Zsofia McMullin demonstrates braiding wonderfully. Some paragraphs are written in first person, while others are written in second person.

The following example from “The Crush” demonstrates braiding:

Your hair is still wet when you slip into the booth across from me and throw your wallet and glasses and phone on the table, and I marvel at how everything about you is streamlined, compact, organized. I am always overflowing — flesh and wants and a purse stuffed with snacks and toy soldiers and tissues.

The author threads these narratives together by having both people interact in a diner, yet the reader still perceives a distance between the two threads because of the separation of “I” and “you” pronouns. When these threads meet, briefly, we know they will never meet again.

Speaking of insight, creative nonfiction writers must draw novel conclusions from the stories they write. When the narrator pauses in the story to delve into their emotions, explain complex ideas, or draw strength and meaning from tough situations, they’re finding insight in the essay.

Often, creative writers experience insight as they write it, drawing conclusions they hadn’t yet considered as they tell their story, which makes creative nonfiction much more genuine and raw.

The story “ Me Llamo Theresa ” by Theresa Okokun does a fantastic job of finding insight. The story is about the history of our own names and the generations that stand before them, and as the writer explores her disconnect with her own name, she recognizes a similar disconnect in her mother, as well as the need to connect with her name because of her father.

The narrator offers insight when she remarks:

I began to experience a particular type of identity crisis that so many immigrants and children of immigrants go through — where we are called one name at school or at work, but another name at home, and in our hearts.

How to Write Creative Nonfiction: the 5 R’s

CNF pioneer Lee Gutkind developed a very system called the “5 R’s” of creative nonfiction writing. Together, the 5 R’s form a general framework for any creative writing project. They are:

• Write about r eal life: Creative nonfiction tackles real people, events, and places—things that actually happened or are happening.
• Conduct extensive r esearch: Learn as much as you can about your subject matter, to deepen and enrich your ability to relay the subject matter. (Are you writing about your tenth birthday? What were the newspaper headlines that day?)
• (W) r ite a narrative: Use storytelling elements originally from fiction, such as Freytag’s Pyramid , to structure your CNF piece’s narrative as a story with literary impact rather than just a recounting.
• Include personal r eflection: Share your unique voice and perspective on the narrative you are retelling.
• Learn by r eading: The best way to learn to write creative nonfiction well is to read it being written well. Read as much CNF as you can, and observe closely how the author’s choices impact you as a reader.

You can read more about the 5 R’s in this helpful summary article .

How to Write Creative Nonfiction: Give it a Try!

Whatever form you choose, whatever story you tell, and whatever techniques you write with, the more important aspect of creative nonfiction is this: be honest. That may seem redundant, but often, writers mistakenly create narratives that aren’t true, or they use details and symbols that didn’t exist in the story. Trust us – real life is best read when it’s honest, and readers can tell when details in the story feel fabricated or inflated. Write with honesty, and the right words will follow!

Ready to start writing your creative nonfiction piece? If you need extra guidance or want to write alongside our community, take a look at the upcoming nonfiction classes at Writers.com. Now, go and write the next bestselling memoir!

Sean Glatch

Thank you so much for including these samples from Hippocampus Magazine essays/contributors; it was so wonderful to see these pieces reflected on from the craft perspective! – Donna from Hippocampus

Absolutely, Donna! I’m a longtime fan of Hippocampus and am always astounded by the writing you publish. We’re always happy to showcase stunning work 🙂

[…] Source: https://www.masterclass.com/articles/a-complete-guide-to-writing-creative-nonfiction#5-creative-nonfiction-writing-promptshttps://writers.com/what-is-creative-nonfiction […]

So impressive

Thank you. I’ve been researching a number of figures from the 1800’s and have come across a large number of ‘biographies’ of figures. These include quoted conversations which I knew to be figments of the author and yet some works are lauded as ‘histories’.

excellent guidelines inspiring me to write CNF thank you

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Writing Creative Nonfiction: Everything That You Need To Know

Creative nonfiction is a genre that includes a wide range of categories and topics, including memoirs, cookbooks, self-help books, and more. Writers in this genre will often blur line between fiction and nonfiction when facts are unavailable or are unclear. The creativity of a good nonfiction writer will enhance the facts and bring a reader into the nonfiction world just as much as if it were a wholly new fiction work. Real life can be pretty interesting on its own, which is why creative nonfiction is such a popular category at book retailers worldwide.

This post will guide you through some key methods for making sure your book is creative and well planned, which leads to success in gaining a following.

Your perspective

What about the nonfiction topic first drew you to it? Why did you decide to write about that topic? The first piece of advice when writing creative nonfiction is to choose a topic you're passionate about! If you are not passionate about the topic, then chances are your readership won't feel the excitement and won't be interested in reading your work. Start with that, and you will have a great foundation for writing your nonfiction book in a creative and engaging way.

When you choose a topic that you have a personal connection to or that you are passionate about, you will be able to show the reader what your personal connection is to that topic. If you're writing a cookbook, for example, include personal stories about each recipe. Show the reader how that food can evoke a similar emotion in them or why that food would be perfect for the upcoming family barbecue. If you're writing a travelogue, include details about your personal experiences at a location, such as special interactions you had with locals or reflective moments drawn out by the unique architectural designs of the area. By giving your readers the human element in your nonfiction work, you are bringing them along with you for the ride.

Even if your book is about computer programming, tie programming principles to other situations that could connect with a broader audience so that more readers will be able to understand the concepts.

Avoid technical jargon

Speaking of computer programming, creative nonfiction doesn't have to be restricted to technical terms. Get creative with your wording while still explaining or describing the correct terminology for that industry. Conceptual understanding of a topic shouldn't require that the reader know the full nomenclature. A reader can learn about the latest cyber security breakthroughs without knowing the specific functions of IIS and the requirements for SOC2 compliance.

If you were writing a biography about a composer and how they developed their orchestrations, you wouldn't necessarily want to use terms like harmonic interval, circle of fifths, secondary dominant, or rootless voicing. Instead, describe those concepts using plain language. For example:

• Instead of this: "Using rootless voicing, Neuford was able to successfully integrate the time's popular jazz into his composition."
• Write this: "By taking out the main note in some of the longer-lasting chords, Neuford weaved the cool essence of jazz into this new composition. This technique is known in the musical community as rootless voicing."

Even when building in some more creative vocabulary, you must remain true to the facts. A nonfiction writer's job is to join facts with a narrative without contradicting those facts. Building a story requires a foundation, and in creative nonfiction that foundation is the truth and a steadfast grasp of the facts being used.

Let's take the example of a book about an unsolved murder that occurred in the 1980s. Witness statements would be an important inclusion in such a book. There are two ways that could go:

• The writer could embellish or change a witness statement to fit a theory they are presenting.
• The writer could present the witness statement as it was and then explain how that could lead to the writer's theory.

The second option is always going to be the best when it comes to writing creative nonfiction. Never change the facts to fit your narrative! You are the writer with creativity and imagination, so adjust your narrative to fit the facts.

Using outlines to build a framework is a huge benefit for all genres. Creative nonfiction is no different. Writers of all types of nonfiction would benefit greatly from starting with the most basic of outlines.

The scaffold should be built from the known facts first. The story can be built around that using first-hand research. Without an outline to start from, all subsequent steps could fall into disarray, leading to mismanaged facts and a disorganized structure. This ultimately is a turn off for readers, especially in nonfiction writing. Even something as simple as a fun cookbook will benefit from having an outline as its starting point.

Going back to our example of a book about an unsolved murder in the 1980s, an outline could help you better understand the theories from that time and will help you figure out how to guide the reader through evidence, witness statements, locations, situations, and other related data connected to the event being covered. Who knows, maybe it could even help solve the murder!

Give accurate credit

Most creative nonfiction is going to include primary and secondary sources. There are various methods for documenting your sources in your work. One method is to use endnotes connected to dialogue or direct quotes used in your text. For example, Kate Colquhoun, in her 2014 book Did She Kill Him? , italicized quotes from historical documents she used and then cited the sources in endnotes.

Another method is to use an evidence file. This method allows you to take a little bit of creative license to increase the drama in your text, but the actual original text is included at the end of the book. This method is a good option because it leaves no room for doubt on what was actually said. The reader can trust that you are providing high quality recreations of situations and dialogue while also being engaged by the heightened drama in the narrative.

In the end, the important part is making sure that you are not plagiarizing, misquoting facts, taking too much creative license, or deliberately misleading your readers.

Disclaimers

If you are writing a memoir or other personal nonfiction work, keep in mind that memory isn't perfect. Furthermore, our perception is unique and may differ significantly from the perception of others involved in events throughout our lives. It's almost impossible to remember each word we had in a conversation, and it gets more difficult the longer time goes on.

While this can benefit a creative nonfiction writer, it is important to remain honest about our inherent limited capabilities with memory. It is good practice to include a disclaimer about what creative liberties you have taken with information or situations you describe. Being upfront is always going to be the right choice over asking for forgiveness later.

Tell the story

Even though you are writing nonfiction, you are still telling a story. Whether your work is a collection of personal essays, a biography, or a career journal, there is still a story being told. Use classic storytelling techniques like bringing characters to life:

• Show, don't tell
• Create suspense
• End with a positive
• The hero's journey

Building your nonfiction narrative in the same manner will keep your reader engaged in the natural suspense that can be offered by real-life events.

A good example of this is nonfiction war stories. In The Good War , author Studs Terkel takes the reader on a vivid journey through history through well-organized and engaging interviews with 121 men and women about their experiences leading up to World War II and during the war. The structure and creativity that Terkel used earned him a Pulitzer Prize.

As a writer, have you grown as a result of your research for your work? Chances are, you have or you will. Tell the reader how the events in your book changed you or how the process of writing about it made you reflect on your own life experiences. Put a piece of yourself into the story and invite your readers to open themselves up to the same. Readers are often looking for connection, and this is the perfect opportunity to open the door and invite them in.

Using these tips, you'll be able to write an engaging, creative, nonfiction work that many people will be excited to read. Focus on your desired audience, be honest, and include yourself in the work. Don't hesitate to indulge your creative side while diving deep into the history or truth of real life experiences. From recipes to tales of the bravery of soldiers, creative nonfiction should connect readers to others through shared feelings of excitement, memory, tragedy, and love.

Header photo by Thought Catalog .

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Creative Nonfiction Course Guide (Lisa Heise)

• About Creative Nonfiction
• Writing Creative Nonfiction
• Diane Ackerman
• Joan Didion
• Annie Dillard
• Martin Espada
• Carolyn Forché
• Lee Gutkind
• Maxine Hong-Kingston
• Jane Kramer
• Anne Lamott
• Erik Larson
• Barry Lopez
• Joseph Mitchell
• N. Scott Momaday
• Dinty W. Moore
• Judith Ortiz Cofer
• Lia Purpura
• Robert Root
• David Sedaris
• Michael Steinberg
• Terry Tempest Williams
• Sarah Vowell
• Robin Wall Kimmerer
• Alice Walker
• William Zinsser
• New Yorker Magazine
• Learning Commons
• Writing Center
• Creative Nonfiction OER

Writing Creative Nonfiction - Getting Strated

As a former journalist and current professor of creative nonfiction, I appreciated Michael McGregor's Green-Haired Gumshoes or Hidebound Hacks? Creative Nonfiction vs. Journalism . It reinforces the innate contradictions of this hybrid form. I recently met Lee Gutkind, that hardworking and earnest godfather of the genre, who seems to have no patience for what he calls 'faction' the intentional blending of fact and fiction.

I think intention is the key word, especially with all the fabricated memoirs and fictitious news sources out there. As Roy Peter Clark writes in his essay The Line Between Fact and Fiction in Telling True Stories , "Do not add. Do not deceive." The reader of creative nonfiction--first-person memoir, third-person narrative journalism, or a subgenre--needs to trust the writer or it's all over. 

Source:  Schneider, Nina R. "In Truth We Trust."  Poets & Writers Magazine , vol. 37, no. 3, May-June 2009, p. 11.  Gale Literature Resource Center , link.gale.com/apps/doc/A241944062/LitRC?u=la74598&sid=bookmark-LitRC&xid=9dc3d663. Accessed 21 Aug. 2023.

Image Source: Pixabay

• Green-Haired Gumshoes Or Hidebound Hacks? Creative nonfiction vs. journalism This new generation may include the journalists Moore was warning his audience about, authors like Orlean and Krakauer, Jonathan Harr and Jane Kramer, whose fact-based books are finding a larger readership. What distinguishes them from traditional journalists is that they trust their perceptions, accept that objectivity is a myth, and work hard to communicate the human dimensions of their subjects by using storytelling techniques--a narrative approach, a distinctive voice, scenes and dialogue and setting. | Poets & Writers Magazine(Vol. 37, Issue 2) | Gale Literature Resource Center (Library Database)
• The Line Between Fact and Fiction Journalists should report the truth. Who would deny it? But such a statement does not get us far enough, for it fails to distinguish nonfiction from other forms of expression. Novelists can reveal great truths about the human condition, and so can poets, film makers and painters. Artists, after all, build things that imitate the world. So do nonfiction writers. To make things more complicated, writers of fiction use fact to make their work believable. | by Roy Peter Clark | Creative Nonfiction (Website)
• What Is Creative Nonfiction in Writing? In this post, we look at what creative nonfiction (also known as the narrative nonfiction) is, including what makes it different from other types of fiction and nonfiction writing and more. | Writer's Digest (Website)

Preparing to Write

• Creative Nonfiction Writing by Rita Berman Focuses on creative nonfiction writing. Range of creative nonfiction; Significance of specific details in nonfiction articles; Benefits of incorporating personal observations in nonfiction pieces. | Writer (Kalmbach Publishing Co.). Dec97, Vol. 110 Issue 12, p5. 4p. | Literary Reference Center Plus (EBSCO) (Library Database)
• Preparing to Write by Todd James Pierce The article offers tips regarding narrative nonfiction research. Topics discussed include detail on how to create a robust scene by the help of collect information from newspaper, personal interviews and site visits; exploring narrative material for creation of important moment of tension, desire and conflict; and creating a correct point of views by the help of research about nonfictional narration. | Writer (Madavor Media). Apr2017, Vol. 130 Issue 4, p14-19. 6p. | MasterFILE Complete (EBSCO) (Library Database)

Story / Story Narrative

• Creative Nonfiction: Where Journalism and Storytelling Meet by Mark Masse Discusses the traits needed for writing creative nonfiction narratives. Credibility of story; Choice of appropriate subject; Generation of story from facts; Structuring of dramatic scenes. | Writer (Kalmbach Publishing Co.). Oct95, Vol. 108 Issue 10, p13. 4p. | Literary Reference Center Plus (EBSCO) (Library Database)
• Finding Meaning by. Jack Hart. Stresses the need for news stories to make basic facts meaningful by placing them in the context of social responsibility theory. Use of historical connections as an approach to news writing; Use of parameters; Showing of relationships between things and creating a broad base of knowledge organized into meaningful patterns. | Editor & Publisher. 7/9/94, Vol. 127 Issue 28, p5. 1p. | Academic Search Premier (EBSCO) (Library Database)
• Storytelling by Jack Hart. Discusses the return of storytelling in newspaper reporting. Literary-style stories' focus on a protagonist; Scenic construction technique of story writing; Effort required of writers, editors, photographers and others involved in a daily newspaper to develop storytelling skills; Possible benefits. | Editor & Publisher. 2/5/94, Vol. 127 Issue 6, p5. 1p. | Academic Search Premier (EBSCO) (Library Database)
• Slow down and Find the Story Worth Telling. The article presents information on how to write narrative journalism, referred to as literary journalism and defined as creative nonfiction that contains accurate, well-researched information. It mentions that making narrative will allow the journalist to break the informaton or subject matter into smaller pieces. | Quill. Sep/Oct2016, Vol. 104 Issue 5, p9-18. 2p. | Academic Search Premier (Library Database)
• Use the 5 "R's": How to Write Creative Nonfiction: Use Modern Nonfiction Narratives Use Techniques from Fiction to Create Unforgettable Writing by Catherine Gourley "The first step in writing a creative nonfiction story is to focus on a real person or event. Whatever the subject, your goal should be to discover and communicate something new." | Writing!, vol. 26, no. 1, Sept. 2003. | Gale Power Search (Library Database)
• Structure and Narrative All narratives contain events that happened - or, in fiction, are supposed to have happened - which authors shape into the form then encountered by readers. The first of these areas, the set of events to be communicated, is often referred to simply as ‘story’. The second, the communication itself, is usually referred to as ‘text’ or ‘narrative text’. | The Edinburgh Introduction to Studying English Literature | Credo Reference (Library Database)
• Structure by John McPhee In this article the author, a nonfiction writer, comments on the role played by structure in the composition of factual writing pieces. He discusses his use of structure in authoring articles for the magazines "Time" and "The New Yorker," explores the role of chronology and time in narrative nonfiction writing. | McPhee, John, New Yorker. 1/14/2013, Vol. 88 Issue 43, p46-55. 10p | Literary Reference Center Plus (EBSCO) (Library Database)
• Series for Effects by Jack Hart Comments on the importance of coordinating grammatical structure in sentences for superior writing. | Editor & Publisher. 02/07/98, Vol. 131 Issue 6, p4. 1/2p. | Academic Search Premier (Library Database)
• Music in the Words by Jack Hart Considers the characteristics of rhythm added to written works. Power of the rhythm honored by newspaper journalists; Balance; Alliteration; Varied structures; Hearing the beat. | Editor & Publisher. 01/31/98, Vol. 131 Issue 5, p6. 1p. | Academic Search Premier (EBSCO) (Library Database)
• How to organize a nonfiction feature: Structure in the road map to successful storytelling. by Mark Masse This article offers tips on how to organize a nonfiction article. The writer must first be able to state the focus, theme or premise of his story in one brief sentence. An advice on how to find the focus of a story is presented. The writer must also need to analyze his material through categorization. The article also advises writers to select the appropriate story structure. | Writer (Kalmbach Publishing Co.). Sep2006, Vol. 119 Issue 9, p26-28. 3p. | Academic Search Premier (EBSCO) (Library Database)

Point of View

• Choosing a Place to Stand by Jack Hart Focuses on three point-of-view questions in journalism. Geography; Voice; Character. | Editor & Academic Search Premier (EBSCO) (Library Database)
• In Defense of Lyric: Point of View The lyrical point of view in poetry prevents poems from becoming just talk and can allow the poet to steer readers through emotions that would not be their initial reaction. | The Southern Review(Vol. 29, Issue 2) | Gale Literature Resource Center (Library Database)
• Point of View in Narrative Point of view in narrative is a focal angle of seeing, hearing, smelling, and sensing the story's settings, characters, and events. Researchers within the fields of language, linguistics and literature, assert that there are three main types of narrator: first-person, second-person, and third-person. The current paper depicts the three types, highlighting each in terms of aim, use, and potential for narrative effectiveness. | Theory and Practice in Language Studies(Vol. 9, Issue 8) | Gale Literature Resource Center (Library Database)

Voice and Style

• Voice Lessons: How to Find the Right Voice for Your Creative Nonfiction. by Mimi Schwartz. This article discusses the right voice for creative nonfiction writing. Voice is the mix of words, rhythms and attitude in writing. In creative nonfiction writing, voice is important because the author and the narrator are the same. Some steps that writers keep in mind when searching for the right voice for a particular story are provided. INSET: Give your writing authenticity. Writer (Kalmbach Publishing Co.). Jun2006, Vol. 119 Issue 6, p28-31. 4p. | Literary Reference Center Plus (EBSCO) (Library Database)
• 10 Ways to Evoke Emotion in Prose: A Close Look Reveals the Stylistic devices at Work in Some Choice Samples of Nonfiction Writing. by Kathy Bricetti Looks at stylistic devices such as: pacing, setting, the senses, voice and tone, dialogue, interior monologue, metaphor, symbolism, character development as stylistic devices do writers use to move readers to tears, laughter or other powerful emotions. | The Writer, vol. 120, no. 9, Sept. 2007, | Gale Power Search (Library Database)
• Building Charcter by Jack Hart. Offers advice on writing stories with human interest. Author's opinion on the use of quotations; Determining the character of individuals; close-up detail that creates true character of an individual. | Editor & Publisher. 12/28/96, Vol. 129 Issue 52, p5. 1p | Academic Search Premier (EBSCO) (Library Database)
• Quoting for Character by Jack Hart. Urges journalists to use the original wording when including quotes from people who are featured in news stories. Distinctive language patterns as a prime source of revealed character; Bigger impact of a faithful rendition of the original; Examples of these quotes. Editor & Publisher. 8/10/96, Vol. 129 Issue 32, p1. | Academic Search Premier (EBSCO) (Library Database)
• The Determination of Incident or What Is Character? PDF Link. The author presents the method he developed for talking to students about how to imagine and develop characters in a novel. Topics discussed include the complaint of writing students concerning their difficulty of developing a plot, tips on devising a single character, and the importance of desire for the development of narrative. | Sewanee Review, vol. 126, no. 4, Fall 2018, pp. 738–53. | MasterFILE Complete (EBSCO) (Library Database)
• Choosing the Perfect Lead from Many Styles by Jack Hart Presents a lexicon of feature leads used on news stories. Anecdotal leads; Narrative leads; Scene-stealer leads; Scene-wraps or gallery leads; Significant detail leads; Single-instance lead; Word-play Leads. | Editor & Publisher. 09/26/98, Vol. 131 Issue 39, p41 | Academic Search Premier (EBSCO) (Library Database)
• Keep It Fresh: How to Turn the Same Old Scene into Something New In order to avoid repetition in writing nonfiction, the author suggested to go deeper into the material, consider the negatives and flaws and being selective. Seeing anew in nonfiction is not a matter of imagination. It is a matter of being there, immersed in a place and event and character. Every scene in a nonfiction book needs to add something to what the reader already knows | Writer (Kalmbach Publishing Co.). Aug2006, Vol. 119 Issue 8, p24-26. | MasterFILE Complete (EBSCO) (Library Database)
• Keeping Pace by Jack Hart. Points out the importance of pace in a nonfiction narrative. William Howard Russell's mastery of narrative pacing in his eyewitness report on the Battle of Balaklava in 1854. | Editor & Publisher. 6/08/96, Vol. 129 Issue 23, p5. 2p. | Database: MasterFILE Complete.
• High Tension by Jack Hart Focuses on the use of the foreshadowing technique in journalism. Device for novels, short stories, television shows and movies; Mystery pronouns; Mystery nouns; Ominous detail; Highly specific narrative; Dramatic payoff expected by readers from a highly specific action sequence; Leads used in reporting. | Editor & Publisher. 2/11/95, Vol. 128 Issue 6, p3. 1p | Database: Academic Search Premier (EBSCO)
• Writing Clinic by Jack Hart Journalists sell information about action. And when they lose sight of that simple truth, they lose their audience. It follows that journalists should pay particular attention to verbs, the words created to capture action | The Quill, vol. 80, no. 1, Jan.-Feb. 1992, pp. 40+. | Database: Gale Academic OneFile.
• How to write effective dialogue in narrative nonfiction: A longtime editor and teacher shares tips for adapting a fiction tool to true storytelling—without upsetting journalism ethics. by Jack Hart. The article presents suggestions to authors of narrative nonfiction for writing dialogue that does not violate journalism ethics. A passage from the book "Travels in Georgia," by John McPhee is considered in terms of how dialogue is mixed with direct action. Ways that dialogue can be used to enhance an author's narrative are discussed. Other topics include conducting interviews with research subjects, the use of unspoken thoughts in literature, memory, and internal monologue. | Writer (Kalmbach Publishing Co.). Jun2011, Vol. 124 Issue 6, p28-29. 2p. | Literary Reference Center Plus (EBSCO)
• Once Upon a Cliche by Jack Hart "The reviewer who begins his essay 'Once upon a time' does so not because the phrase captures his thought precisely but because his deadline is looming and he wants to go home." Exactly. A cliche is a quick out. A substitute for thinking." | Editor & Publisher. 9/2/95, Vol. 128 Issue 35, p5. 1p. | Database: Academic Search Premier (EBSCO)
• How to Write Effective Dialogue in Narrative Nonfiction The article presents suggestions to authors of narrative nonfiction for writing dialogue that does not violate journalism ethics. A passage from the book "Travels in Georgia," by John McPhee is considered in terms of how dialogue is mixed with direct action. Ways that dialogue can be used to enhance an author's narrative are discussed. Other topics include conducting interviews with research subjects, the use of unspoken thoughts in literature, memory, and internal monologue. | Writer (Kalmbach Publishing Co.), vol. 124, no. 6, June 2011, pp. 28–29. | Academic Search Premier (Library Database)
• Help! I Can't Find My Theme! by Steven Pressfield "Theme influences and determines everything in our story. Mood, setting, tone of voice, narrative device. Theme tells us what clothes to put on our leading lady, what furniture to put in our hero’s house, what type of gun our villain carries strapped to his ankle." (Author Website)
• Dealing with Danglers bu Jack Hart Focuses on the risks of committing mistakes when using dangling modifiers in newspaper reporting. Examples of mistakes related to the careless use of dangling modifiers; Guidelines in using such modifiers; Suggestion for newspapers to make their statements simple. | Editor & Publisher. 07/18/98, Vol. 131 Issue 29, p5. 1p | Database: Academic Search Premier (EBSCO)
• Painting Portraits with Words by Jack Hart Discusses the importance of text description in newspaper reporting. Argument by some reporters that text description is not necessary when stories appear with photographs of principals; Ability of text description to focus on distinctive aspects of appearance in ways that a photograph cannot. | Editor & Publisher. 8/12/95, Vol. 128 Issue 32, p5. 1p. | Database: Academic Search Premier (EBSCO)
• Missed Opportunities by Jack Hart Focuses on the obligations of newspapers in presenting news stories to the public. Linkage of readers to the rest of humanity; Recognition of ingredients of a good story; Tendency of newspapers to pass up opportunities for first-class storytelling. | Editor & Publisher. 7/8/95, Vol. 128 Issue 27, p5. 1p. | Database: Academic Search Premier (EBSCO)
• A Sense of Order by Jack Hart Stresses the need to present news information in logical order to avoid confusing the readers. Listing of questions most likely asked by readers; Importance of making assumptions about readers; Flexibility of mind to see the world the way it is seen by readers. Editor & Publisher. 6/11/94, Vol. 127 Issue 24, p3. 1p. | Database: Academic Search Premier (EBSCO)
• In the Reader's Shoes by Jack Hart Emphasizes effective written communication in journalism. Clear writing as a matter of empathy; Basis of meaning in people; Overlapping of personal experiences with common words; Samples of ineffective reporting. | Editor & Publisher. 8/20/94, Vol. 127 Issue 34, p3. 1p | Database: Academic Search Premier (EBSCO)

Jack Hart Writing

• Organize your writing: A veteran writing coach offers an antidote to false starts, wasted time and flat storytelling "A fiction writer or essayist may work with details gathered long before she actually puts hands to keyboard. But gathering those details is still reporting, and many a fiction writer draws on specifics recorded in a journal or a daybook at the time they were experienced." | Writer (Kalmbach Publishing Co.). May2007, Vol. 120 Issue 5, p41-43. 3p. | Literary Reference Center Plus (EBSCO) (Library Database)
• How to write effective dialogue in narrative nonfiction: A longtime editor and teacher shares tips for adapting a fiction tool to true storytelling—without upsetting journalism ethics. by Jack Hart. The article presents suggestions to authors of narrative nonfiction for writing dialogue that does not violate journalism ethics. A passage from the book "Travels in Georgia," by John McPhee is considered in terms of how dialogue is mixed with direct action. Ways that dialogue can be used to enhance an author's narrative are discussed. Other topics include conducting interviews with research subjects, the use of unspoken thoughts in literature, memory, and internal monologue. | Writer (Kalmbach Publishing Co.). Jun2011, Vol. 124 Issue 6, p28-29. 2p. | Literary Reference Center Plus (EBSCO) (Library Database)
• Keeping Pace by Jack Hart. Points out the importance of pace in a nonfiction narrative. William Howard Russell's mastery of narrative pacing in his eyewitness report on the Battle of Balaklava in 1854. | Editor & Publisher. 6/08/96, Vol. 129 Issue 23, p5. 2p. | MasterFILE Complete (Library Database)

JacK Hart Bio

• Jack Hart "Jack Hart has drawn on his experience as a reporter and editor to compose advice books about his profession. Explaining his philosophy of writing in a Writers on the Rise Web site interview with Susan W. Clark, Hart commented: "I've learned that your writing process is the most important, and if you want to change the way you write, you need to change that process. Then constantly expand your craft and you'll write well." | From: Gale Literature: Contemporary Authors | Gale Literature Resources Center (Library Database)

• Storycraft: The Complete Guide to Writing Narrative Nonfiction, 2ed. Amazon Link | Paperback $13.71, 286 pages
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Introduction

Creative nonfiction—you’ve probably heard the term before, but what exactly does it mean? At first glance, the term may seem almost oxymoronic. If it’s nonfiction, where does the creative come in? you might ask yourself. Isn’t creativity about making things up?

In fact, creative nonfiction involves plenty of creativity, just as much as fiction or poetry. As Lee Gutkind, editor of the journal Creative Nonfiction, says, creative nonfiction is, plainly, “true stories, well told.”

It’s that well told part that it’s imperative. Creative nonfiction writers use the same techniques as playwrights or novelists. They may write memoirs, personal essays, long-form journalism; they may write travelogues or biographies or very brief essays called flash nonfiction. What’s common across these forms of creative nonfiction is the reliance on scene. Scene, many argue, is what separates creative nonfiction from informational nonfiction.

And scenes contain other literary elements. Scenes are set in a time and a place, and a good writer sketches out those details for their reader. Scenes contain characters, people the writer describes with precision and clarity. Most importantly, scenes contain conflict. And that’s one more distinction between creative nonfiction and informational nonfiction. There’s a problem or crisis or conflict at the heart of creative nonfiction and, like in a story or a novel or a play, the protagonist is trying to see some part of that problem resolved. All that’s different is the premise: when you read creative nonfiction, you always remember, “this really happened.”

What is Creative Nonfiction?

There are many ways to define the literary genre we call Creative Nonfiction. It is a genre that answers to many different names, depending on how it is packaged and who is doing the defining. Some of these names are: Literary Nonfiction; Narrative Nonfiction; Literary Journalism; Imaginative Nonfiction; Lyric Essay; Personal Essay; Personal Narrative; and Literary Memoir. Creative Nonfiction is even, sometimes, thought of as another way of writing fiction, because of the way writing changes the way we know a subject.

I like to define the genre in as broad a way as possible. I describe it as memory-or-fact-based writing that makes use of the styles and elements of fiction, poetry, memoir, and essay. It is writing about and from a world that includes the author’s life and/or the author’s eye on the lives of others.

Under the umbrella called Creative Nonfiction we might find a long list of sub-genres such as: memoir, personal essay, meditations on ideas, literary journalism, nature writing, city writing, travel writing, journals or letters, cultural commentary, hybrid forms, and even, sometimes, autobiographical fiction.

Creative nonfiction writing can embody both personal and public history. It is a form that utilizes memory, experience, observation, opinion, and all kinds of research. Sometimes the form can do all of the above at the same time. Other times it is more selective.

What links all these forms is that the “I,” the literary version of the author, is either explicitly or implicitly present—the author is in the work. This is work that includes the particular sensibility of the author while it is also some sort of report from the world. Be it a public or a personal world. Be the style straightforward like a newspaper feature, narrative like a novel, or metaphorical like a poem.

One of my favorite words to attach to the art of creative nonfiction writing is the word “actual.” I prefer the word actual to the word truth. Fiction writers insist that they too write the truth, and that they must invent in order to tell this truth. I prefer the word actual to the word fact. Facts alone are too dry, and too absent of association. I prefer the word actual to the word real. What is and is not real is continually up for grabs. Do we know, for instance, what is a real woman? A real man? The word real is too laden with assumption. I prefer the word actual because it refers to simple actuality. We begin a work of creative nonfiction not with the imaginary but with the actual, with what actually is or actually was, or what actually happened. From this point we might move in any direction, but the actual is our touchstone.

Different writers have said very different things about why they write in this form. Lee Gutkind, the editor of the magazine Creative Nonfiction, has described the form as a quest for understanding and information. The cultural critic bell hooks has said she wrote her memoir Bone Black in order to “recover the past.” Essayist, memoirist, and diva of nonfiction prose style Annie Dillard has said she writes to “fashion a text.” Dorothy Allison has used the stories of her life in both fiction and nonfiction in order, she’s written, “to save my life.”

The various roots of this form are quite widespread. The practice of narrative and social witness reportage can be traced all the way back to Daniel Defoe’s (fictional) Journal of a Plague Year as well as to 18th century “disaster journalism.” In the 1960’s the New Journalists revolutionized modern journalistic form by insisting on inserting the first person into their reportage. These writers, such as Tom Wolfe and Joan Didion, were interested in bringing the presence of an individual awareness to the work, acknowledging that the writer is incapable of complete subjectivity and is constantly interpreting what he or she observes. From this tradition we inherit countless models of the ways to translate interviews and research into a style that resembles the storytelling and dramatic movement of fiction and the language and rhythms of poetry.

The personal essay form is much older. It dates back, according to some, to 16th century French writer Montaigne and to the French root of the word “essay,” which means to “attempt” or “try.” Others suggest we might date the essay form back even further, and include such works as The Pillow Book of Sei Shonogan,the eloquent musings of a 10th century Japanese lady of the court. The personal essay reflects the mind at odds with itself, and some of the most beautiful personal essays ask questions they cannot hope to answer. It’s the meander through ideas and stories that make the work wonderful to read.

We can look, also, to St. Augustine’s Confessions, written in the 5th century, as a model for writing out of our own life and experience. Sometimes referred to as “the first memoir” St. Augustine’s story is one of conversion and rebirth, not unlike today’s familiar recovery-from-addiction narrative. Personal memoir is a form that has slowly evolved into the sort of the book commonly found on the contemporary bookstore new release table. At one time the actual memoirist was considered insignificant to the memoir. When a soldier described the battle, for instance, it was the battle that mattered, not the soldier. Public events were considered historical, while private life was seen as inappropriate to the written word, unless you were a person considered of singular historical importance—Winston Churchill, or a Kennedy, for instance. All this has changed in our postmodern day-to-day. Feminism has privileged the personal, changing the paradigms of what is worthy of cultural notice and recovering the stories of lives previously absent from history. Identity and cultural politics redirected attention to people of color, gays and lesbians, the disabled, and anyone else who was up to that point missing from the public record. The mainstreaming of psychoanalysis and related disciplines suggested that our conscious and unconscious motivations and feelings are no longer considered strictly private matters.

A negative interpretation of these cultural changes suggests we are interested in the private story and the personal vantage point only because we are held hostage by talk show and “reality TV” culture. While it is true that it’s often difficult to fully comprehend how commercial culture has influenced our tastes and cravings, I believe that these phenomena are coupled with what has become a healthy intellectual and emotional curiosity about the world as it actually exists. We want to know what really happened. What distinguishes quality literary endeavor from media manipulation has as much to do with intention and artistry as it does public confession. Beyond the hype and exploitation of the worst of the commercial personal forms, what I continue to value is one person’s story—the world as seen through the scrim of each of our personal experiences. For better or worse, we are more aware than we once were of the role the personal plays in everything we do. These changes in literary nonfiction grow out of parallel changes in our world.

The report, the critique, the rumination, the lyric impression and the hard fact are all found in contemporary creative nonfiction writing. It is the mix of all these elements that make creative nonfiction an illuminating and moving form of historical documentary, as well as lovely literature. Finally, I’m with Annie Dillard when I say creative nonfiction writing is first about the formation of a text, the creation of piece of art, just like any painting or musical composition. Your life and the life of the world is your raw material, as much a part of the mix as is the paint, the chords, the words. Your subjects might be any part of this world.

Accounting for the fluid lines of tradition streaming into the creative nonfiction of today can be overwhelming, but also freeing. We creative nonfiction writers can make form out of whatever containers we are capable of imagining, and still be working within the wide parameters of the actual. Let’s end with some famous words on the subject of creating creative nonfiction literature. This is a quote from Annie Dillard, from her famous essay “To Fashion a Text.”

“When I gave up writing poetry I was very sad, for I had devoted 15 years to the study of how the structures of poems carry meaning. But I was delighted to find that nonfiction prose can also carry meaning in its structures, can tolerate all sorts of figurative language, as well as alliteration and even rhyme. The range of rhythms in prose is larger and grander than it is in poetry, and it can handle discursive ideas and plain information as well as character and story. It can do everything. I felt as though I had switched from a single reed instrument to a full orchestra.”

“What is Creative Nonfiction?” by Barrie Jean Borich. Licensed under CC BY SA 4.0 http://barriejeanborich.com/what-is-creative-nonfiction-an-introduction/

Creative nonfiction has been growing in popularity for years. After the rise of new journalism and the memoir boom of the 1990s, we find ourselves in a literary landscape teeming with creative nonfiction. Now, whenever you go to a bookstore, you’re bound to find a creative nonfiction section sure to rival the fiction section (and sure to trump the poetry section!). Memoirs, essay collections, biographies—these are examples of creative nonfiction, and as often as anything else, they become best sellers.

What makes creative nonfiction so compelling? Perhaps it’s as simple as Gutkind’s definition of the genre: “true stories, well told.” As readers, we care about being told a good story. We want to enter the realm of make-believe, if we know that the make-believe we’re reading about isn’t make-believe at all! By using literary elements like scene, which inherently necessitate things like character, plot, conflict, and setting, creative nonfiction writers weave compelling tales. These tales contain drama and action, peril and intrigue, and they become all the more powerful when you, as a reader, consider that the events described or explored may have happened to someone just like you.

ENG134 – Literary Genres Copyright © by The American Women's College and Jessica Egan is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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Introduction

Creative nonfiction is a broad term and encompasses many different forms of writing. This resource focuses on the three basic forms of creative nonfiction: the personal essay, the memoir essay, and the literary journalism essay. A short section on the lyric essay is also discussed.

The Personal Essay

The personal essay is commonly taught in first-year composition courses because students find it relatively easy to pick a topic that interests them, and to follow their associative train of thoughts, with the freedom to digress and circle back.

The point to having students write personal essays is to help them become better writers, since part of becoming a better writer is the ability to express personal experiences, thoughts and opinions. Since academic writing may not allow for personal experiences and opinions, writing the personal essay is a good way to allow students further practice in writing.

The goal of the personal essay is to convey personal experiences in a convincing way to the reader, and in this way is related to rhetoric and composition, which is also persuasive. A good way to explain a personal essay assignment to a more goal-oriented student is simply to ask them to try to persuade the reader about the significance of a particular event.

Most high-school and first-year college students have plenty of experiences to draw from, and they are convinced about the importance of certain events over others in their lives. Often, students find their strongest conviction in the process of writing, and the personal essay is a good way to get students to start exploring these possibilities in writing.

A personal essay assignment can work well as a prelude to a research paper, because personal essays will help students understand their own convictions better, and will help prepare them to choose research topics that interest them.

An Example and Discussion of a Personal Essay

The following excerpt from Wole Soyinka's (Nigerian Nobel Laureate) Why Do I Fast? is an example of a personal essay. What follows is a short discussion of Soyinka's essay.

Soyinka begins with a question that fascinates him. He doesn’t feel required to immediately answer the question in the second paragraph. Rather, he takes time to consider his own inclination to believe that there is a connection between fasting and sensuality.

Soyinka follows the flowing associative arc of his thoughts, and he goes on to write about sunsets, and quotes from a poem that he wrote in his cell. The essay ends, not on a restatement of his thesis, but on yet another question that arises:

This question remains unanswered. Soyinka is not interested in even attempting to answer it. The personal essay doesn’t necessarily seek to make sense out of life experiences; rather, personal essays tend to let go of that sense-making impulse to do something else, like nose around a bit in the wondering, uncertain space that lies between experience and the need to organize it in a logical manner.

However informal the personal essay may seem, it’s important to keep in mind that, as Dinty W. Moore says in The Truth of the Matter: Art and Craft in Creative Nonfiction , “the essay should always be motivated by the author’s genuine interest in wrestling with complex questions.”

Generating Ideas for Personal Essays

In The Truth of the Matter: Art and Craft in Creative Nonfiction , Moore goes on to explain an effective way to help students generate ideas for personal essays:

“Think about ten things you care about deeply: the environment, children in poverty, Alzheimer’s research (because your grandfather is a victim), hip-hop music, Saturday afternoon football games. Make your own list of ten important subjects, and then narrow the larger subject down to specific subjects you might write about. The environment? How about that bird sanctuary out on Township Line Road that might be torn down to make room for a megastore?..."

"...What is it like to be the food service worker who puts mustard on two thousand hot dogs every Saturday afternoon? Don’t just wonder about it - talk to the mustard spreader, spend an afternoon hanging out behind the counter, spread some mustard yourself. Transform your list of ten things into a longer list of possible story ideas. Don’t worry for now about whether these ideas would take a great amount of research, or might require special permission or access. Just write down a master list of possible stories related to your ideas and passions. Keep the list. You may use it later.”

It is this flexibility of form in the personal essay that makes it easy for students who are majoring in engineering, nutrition, graphic design, finance, management, etc. to adapt, learn and practice. The essay can be a more worldly form of writing than poetry or fiction, so students from various backgrounds, majors, jobs and cultures can express interesting and powerful thoughts and feelings in them.

The essay is more worldly than poetry and fiction in another sense: it allows for more of the world and its languages, its arts and food, its sport and business, its travel and politics, its sciences and entertainment, to be present, valid and important.

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• Sep 4, 2023

Your Life as a Narrative: A Guide to Creative Nonfiction

Updated: Sep 19, 2023

By Erin Yoo

Creative nonfiction can sometimes be a difficult genre to pinpoint. It requires the use of traditional narrative elements as seen in any sort of creative writing, while also needing to stay true to real events from the author’s lived experiences. To write in this genre, you must simultaneously be an author and a character, and striking the right balance can be a difficult task when starting out. Below are some aspects of creative nonfiction that you might want to keep in mind as you make your foray!

Character Development

Especially in creative nonfiction, character development is critical, as it is often what drives the plot. One of the trickiest parts of writing creative nonfiction is character development. From a submissions standpoint, it can be what bridges the divide between a piece’s acceptance or decline. When employing the “Show, Don’t Tell” strategy of writing, writers might forget to provide sufficient background information or context as well as humanize the character. This may cause the primary character to seem like a “flat” character, instead of a “round” character, when well-developed narrators are foundational in exemplary creative nonfiction writing. Remember that in nonfiction, you’re sharing a part of your story, but readers won’t know everything that has affected your perceptions and identity up to that point—giving them a layout of the “before” part of your narrative can help make sure everyone is on the right page to go forward.

Dialogue is an essential aspect of the creative nonfiction genre, but is oftentimes overlooked by writers. Even if you are planning to utilize the “Show, Don’t Tell strategy,” it is still important to consider adding dialogue. Dialogue not only provides a humanizing and immersive atmosphere for the reader to be actively engaged in the piece throughout, but it also provides a means to introduce a character more effectively when utilized well.

Figurative Language and Literary Devices

Figurative language is often seen as an aspect of writing that is used strictly for poetry. However, that doesn’t need to be the case! Employing figurative language and literary devices – including metaphors, motifs, themes, personification, etc. – can be an equally effective tool for creative nonfiction pieces as well. A creative nonfiction author can compare their past experiences to any number of abstract things, and might even find recurring objects, location, or moods (such as a favorite food or a type of weather) to use as symbolism while staying true to themselves and their personal story.

The “Show, Don’t Tell” Technique

The common writing strategy of “Show, Don’t Tell” can be a difficult line to walk. If writers withhold too much information from the reader in favor of “showing” it, they might inadvertently make it harder for readers to catch onto the piece’s true meaning, arc, and intentions. However, it’s still worth it to try contextualizing your story in a subtle way. Making sure to “show” the reader background information and relevant context, rather than just stating it and moving on, can also be an excellent way of incorporating some elements of imagery and other literary devices.

Hopefully this advice might help you along your creative nonfiction journey! Good luck in telling your own stories, and thank you for reading.

Erin Yoo is a blogger at Voices and a Senior Editor at Polyphony.

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Creative Nonfiction: What It Is, Why You Should Use It And How

by Bennett R. Coles

Creative nonfiction is a genre of writing that combines the formality and factual basis of traditional journalism with the more subjective creativity of storytelling. This blog post will discuss what it means to write in this genre, why it matters and how you should approach it.

What is creative nonfiction?

The genre of creative nonfiction is one of the most interesting kinds of nonfiction, and a popular way to present fact-based literature. Particularly effective in historical writing, biographies and world affairs, it can often read like a novel despite being based firmly in real-world truths. It blends the factual reporting typical of journalism with more creative approaches to connect ideas , develop themes and weave a broad tapestry of narrative. Creative nonfiction can make connections between isolated facts that are real, but difficult to see when each element is viewed independently.

Creative nonfiction is often written without a strict chronological order, which allows it to be flexible and free-flowing while still grounded in truthful events. It may contain subjective commentary that can color those events, often by pulling in archival reporting or dialogue from the time, as well as first person narratives by witnesses as they recount past events. Using these sources naturally lends itself to interpretation and sometimes bias, but a good creative nonfiction will balance personal accounts to provide a full picture of events.

Why is creative nonfiction important?

Creative nonfiction is a valuable tool to educate and build new understanding. Unlike old-fashioned history books that provided dry, date-filled accounts of events from a high level point of view, creative nonfiction works to bring the reader into the events, giving glimpses of what really happened from very personal perspectives. Whereas old-fashioned history books set out merely to inform, creative nonfiction wants to enlighten .

As a nonfiction writer , it’s important to be able to employ an array of tools and techniques in order to create a compelling piece. Facts are essential, as is the proper presentation of interviews (no mis-quoting!). But from this framework of truth certain ideas will emerge, and the writer can choose what to highlight in order to bring those ideas to life. Creative nonfiction allows the writer more freedom to emphasize certain themes or viewpoints within their work while still being grounded in reality.

What are the 6 characteristics of creative nonfiction?

Creative nonfiction tends to focus on real-life events and people. Sometimes it can be categorized as journalistic because it contains well-cited research from primary sources or interviews with witnesses. But whereas traditional journalism usually steers clear from offering personal opinion within a piece, creative nonfiction gives the author freedom to provide commentary and insights about the facts.

Another characteristic of creative nonfiction is its use of dialog passages or first person narratives recounting events – this could be anything from public speeches, private conversations, journal entries, letters, old interviews and so on.

What are the key elements of creative nonfiction?

There are 6 elements to creative nonfiction:

• Everything is based on facts
• Direct use of primary references and witness accounts
• Many scenes are told in a fiction-style narrative
• A sense of progression, even of story, in the narrative
• A commonality of theme that is introduced early, built upon and brought to conclusion
• Thoughtful commentary from the author to tie everything together

Dialog in creative nonfiction

Scenes in creative nonfiction often include dialog. Many times these are direct transcripts from official or public records, and even though they may be edited for style (the removal of words like “umm,” etc.) and sometimes edited for content (to remove side topics that were discussed at the time but that are irrelevant to the theme of the book) they will be true to the meaning of the original.

When no such transcripts exist, dialogs can sometimes be re-imagined based on reliable witness accounts. In this case the exact wording of the dialog will be the invention of the author, but the meaning behind it will be true to the facts. In cases like this, it’s best, as the author, to make it clear to your reader which dialogs are direct transcripts and which are recreations.

What is an example of creative nonfiction?

There are many great examples of creative nonfiction. Here is one of my personal favorites:

War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning by Chris Hedges, © 2002, Anchor Books

What makes good creative nonfiction?

Good creative nonfiction should have a unique voice and theme. It has to have a purpose – a point it wants to make. Creative nonfiction may be based in facts, but it is never a dry recitation of those facts. The author’s task is to find meaning within those facts and bring the people and events to life within that meaning.

If a work is exploring a famous historical event it certainly won’t be the only book on that subject, so the author will need to imbue the work with a new perspective. There may possibly be new information that’s come to light, or a new eye-witness has agreed to share their thoughts. It needs to be grounded in reality, but the author can choose what parts of reality to emphasize or focus on to tell the story. This can create vastly different books talking about the same person or event – and both of them, if written well, will be true and accurate.

For example, two authors set out to discuss the Battle of Britain from the perspective of a single Royal Air Force squadron. But one author focuses on the mechanics desperately trying to keep the Spitfires ready to fly, while the other author follows the pilots as they endure the exhaustion and stress of near-constant battle. These two books are covering the same historical event, will mention the same battles, will describe in detail the same buildings and aircraft, and may even share characters. But they will be very different from each other.

How do you write creative nonfiction?

The best approach to writing creative nonfiction is to write from personal experience and set your own narrative. If you can report on real events as a witness you’ll bring your own unique perspective to the historical facts. But even if you’re separated in time and space from the events, you can still bring your own personal experience into the narrative.

For example, you might want to write a creative nonfiction book about ancient Rome. If you’re a civil engineer, your own training and experience can bring to light many fascinating details of how the Romans built their cities. If you’re a teacher, you can offer intriguing insights into the emphases Romans put into their education system and how that shaped their society.

Ultimately, creative nonfiction is intended to enlighten, and your personal perspective as an author will help you do that.

How do you analyze creative nonfiction?

Reading creative nonfiction is the best way to understand it. There are many great examples out there and the more you read the better prepared you’ll be to embark on your own project. But how do you analyze creative nonfiction? How do you “get behind the curtain” and learn how your favorite authors do what they do?

The first thing to do when analyzing creative nonfiction is to figure out what type of voice the author is using. Is it personal and intimate? Or objective and detached? Or cynical and funny? The tone of the writing gives the first clue to what sort of theme the author is exploring, and what kind of thoughts and feelings they wish to evoke in their reader.

The second thing to do is look at how the story unfolds. Does it follow a purely chronological path, or do the chapters jump back and forth in time? Does one thing seem to lead naturally into another, or does the narrative seem to be broken into separate paths (with them hopefully all coming together at the end)? Leaving the reader puzzled (for a short while) can even be a technique in creative nonfiction, if the author wants to force the readers to think for themselves.

As with anything, the more you study and practice, the better you’ll be at it. Good luck!

Best wishes!

If you enjoyed this article and are in the process of writing a nonfiction book, be sure to check out my free nonfiction success guide, drawn from years of experience editing books for bestselling authors (including a New York Times bestseller) and ghostwriting for CEOs and politicians. Simply click here to get instant access .

Leave me a comment below if you have any questions or a specific need that I can help you address – I operate an author services firm that specializes in helping entrepreneurs, professionals and business owners who want to publish books as a calling card for prospects, to establish their status as an expert or to generate additional leads for their businesses.

Here are some related posts I highly recommend:

The 7 Most Effective Book Promotion Ideas For Nonfiction Authors

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How to Promote Your Nonfiction Book to Rank High on Amazon

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7 Writing Tips To Bring Your Nonfiction Content to Life

There is some general writing advice about how to write a book that applies to anyone. You can find ample blog posts about how to write better . Writing consistently, mapping out the trajectory of your book, and working through a thorough editing process is important no matter what you’re writing. And every genre or kind of book has its own hurdles. Today we’re going to look at a few types of nonfiction writing and strategies to overcome the unique challenges writing nonfiction brings.

The most important thing to remember about nonfiction books is that they are still a story . Even a math textbook is telling a story (about increasingly complex equations I guess? Okay, maybe this is a stretch). Great fiction authors know it’s the engaging story (alongside compelling characters) that drives a good read.

With that in mind, these writing tips will help you look at your next nonfiction project from a storyteller’s perspective.

1. Writing Creative Nonfiction

Once you have your subject and you sit down to start writing, consider how you might instill creative elements. This doesn’t mean making up facts or anything like that. Sometimes also called narrative nonfiction, the goal is to use a story to relate the true details you’re trying to share. Consider this passage from Susan Orleans The Library Book :

I grew up in libraries, or so it seems. My mother and I would take regular trips to the branch library near my house at least twice a week, and those trips were enchanted. The very air in the library seemed charged with possibility and imagination; books seem to have their own almost human vitality. But over time, I had become more of a book buyer than a book borrower, and I had begun to forget how magical libraries are. I never stopped loving libraries, but they receded in my mind, and seemed like a piece of my past.

Orlean is arguably a master of literary nonfiction, bringing to life vivid scenes built on historic events. If a journalist relays the facts of an event and an author relays the feeling, literary journalism attempts to do both. 

This is the heart of creative nonfiction writing and it is the strongest way to grab and hold a reader’s attention. An effective way to get better at writing creatively is to use a daily prompt app or journal to write short stories or even just little anecdotes. It’s like a gym session for your writing muscles. 

2. Make It Emotional

Building on the idea that creative writing elements can help make your nonfiction book more engaging, an appeal to the reader’s emotion can amp up the story’s impact. Note that I said story –you should think of your nonfiction book as a story with a plot, even if that plot is constrained by facts. Fiction writers know that creativity and emotional connection drive a reader to keep reading; nonfiction writers can use this.

From the NFAA, I found this quotation from nonfiction author Alexander Porter that resonates with me: “As a non-fiction author I am limited by reality.” I love this idea because, yes, nonfiction is bounded by reality, but the world is a messy, vibrant, and emotional place. You can tap into that messiness and instill your work with the kinds of emotions fiction authors rely on.

Imagine you have a book idea that centers on exploring language evolution. You could write and publish a highly academic piece that delves into the etymology of certain words as examples to prove your point.

Or you could tell a story about using and acclimating to social media dialects, the rise of modern short-hand, and maybe tie all of it together with a (real or hypothetical) story about language in a real situation. Like on a dating app that uses texting to communicate. Now there’s an emotionally charged situation!

Adding emotional elements makes your book more interesting while still conveying the information you want to share.

3. Use Simple Language

The words you use in your nonfiction writing matter. A lot. I love words and I particularly love exotic and highly specific words ( Defenestrate ? Panivorous ? I could go on…). But let’s be real; no one wants to stop and look up words every couple of pages. If you’re writing a true crime book and you can work in ‘he defenestrated his third victim’ then yeah, you should do that. Because it’s accurate. 

What you don’t want to do is riddle your book with complex words when simple words will do.

“Definition of the regulation spherical apparatus utilized to perform competitive interactions resulted in unwarranted and partisan advantage accommodating one competitor grouping at the expense of the other.” 

Yeah, that’s nonsense when you could just say “Deflating the ball helped them win.”

Since the goal of nonfiction writing is to share knowledge, you should strive to make that knowledge as accessible as possible. That means simple, accurate language and clear sentence structures.

4. Write With a Linear Structure

A nonfiction book is not a personal essay or social media post. Based on the length alone, you’ll need to employ some structural design to your book that helps the reader follow along.

Remember too that you should be thinking of the book itself as a story (a true story) and aim to build your nonfiction writing with a story arc. The best way to achieve this is to prepare your writing just like a fiction author would; with an outline or story map . Plan how each section or chapter will link together and prepare an ending point you’ll be driving toward. That way, when you finish writing your book will have a natural flow or direction that holds to common story structures .

You can think about the physical structure of your nonfiction writing too; how will the book look when it’s published? Because the design of the book can also contribute to the flow of the story elements you’re incorporating. That might take the form of sections with clear titles or using your Headers to guide readers by reiterating the chapter title.

5. Write In Scenes

If you’re ready to buy into writing in a linear, story/act fashion, then you know using a scene-based design will be natural. Let’s say you want to write a book about the architectural design of banks over a hundred-year span in America. 

You could write literal, technical information about the design, the prevailing norms in architecture, and how they’ve changed. Maybe you pick a half dozen buildings to focus on and tear them down to expose the bones of each in their own chapter.

Or you could tell the story of each building. The community they serviced, the people involved in designing the building, how they ended up on the job over other architects, and what that individual brought to the work. Most of the design details still have space in this version, but if the focus is on the people, you’ve humanized the story (and opened up the possibility to include some of the elements I’ve already mentioned).

More importantly, you might start in an earlier era and let the designs of one architect inform the designs of the next so that we can see the thread of similar ideas as they grow, change, and are used by generations. That’s linear storytelling; using scenes with human focal points to drive the narrative. All while giving us the information you wanted to share about bank design.

6. Speak to an Audience

Here’s an exercise I love (though I admit, I’m not consistently good at it); each night when I carve out time to write, I open my notebook and I write down the name of the person I’m writing for. Since I mostly write short fiction in my free time, this is either a friend, family member, or another author I think might like my story. That person is my audience for the writing session. 

And so I spend an hour or so writing for that person. 

The moral here is to always be writing for an audience. Think about who you want to read your book. Even for nonfiction writing that might have a very distinct audience, your writing will benefit from consciously thinking about individual readers. 

7. Use Authoritative and Appropriate Sources

Finally, your sources. Might be kind of obvious, but you’ve always got to know your sources. And no, I don’t mean like personally know each source. But you should look into the history, background, and education behind the source.

Because you might be a spectacular storyteller who skillfully crafts an amazing nonfiction work, but if your sources aren’t reputable, the trust in your work is damaged. And without trust, all six of my previous tips are meaningless. Nonfiction writing hinges on your readers seeing you as a trusted voice. 

So this might seem obvious, but spend some time digging into your source materials and developing a little historical perspective. It will help ensure you use the right sources in your book and may even give you some additional material to write about!

Nonfiction Writing Is Still Storytelling

There are academic treatises on topics and there is nonfiction writing. Don’t confuse the two. A textbook provides information and facts with only the most important context. When you take on one subject or set of related subjects to write a nonfiction book, you’re telling readers the story of that subject.

Using these tips and thinking like a storyteller will help readers connect to your book. The story will be more interesting and you’ll earn more readers if you wrap your facts in an exciting story.

Paul is the Senior Content Manager at Lulu.com . When he’s not entrenched in the publishing and print-on-demand world, he likes to hike the scenic North Carolina landscape, read, sample the fanciest micro-brewed beer, and collect fountain pens. Paul is a dog person but considers himself cat-tolerant.

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Creative Nonfiction: A Movement, Not a Moment

This may come as a surprise, but I don’t know who actually coined the term creative nonfiction. As far as I know, nobody knows. I have been using it for a long time, though, as have others, and although the term came into vogue relatively recently (about the time I started this journal, 13 years ago), the kind of writing it describes has a long history. George Orwell’s famous essay, “Shooting an Elephant,” is textbook creative nonfiction, combining personal experience with high-quality literary-writing techniques. Ernest Hemingway’s paean to bullfighting, “Death in the Afternoon,” falls under the creative nonfiction umbrella as does Tom Wolfe’s “The Right Stuff” and Frank McCourt’s “Angela’s Ashes.”

For a time, this kind of writing gained popularity as “New Journalism” due in large part to Wolfe, who published a book of that title in 1973 which declared that this style of writing “would wipe out the novel as literature’s main event.” Gay Talese described New Journalism in the introduction to his landmark collection, “Fame and Obscurity”: “Though often reading like fiction, it is not fiction. It is, or should be, as reliable as the most reliable reportage, although it seeks a larger truth [my italics] than is possible through a mere compilation of verifiable facts, the use of direct quotation and the adherence to the rigid organizational style of the older form.”

This is perhaps creative nonfiction’s greatest asset: It offers flexibility and freedom while adhering to the basic tenets of nonfiction writing and/or reporting. In creative nonfiction, writers can be poetic and journalistic simultaneously. Creative nonfiction writers are encouraged to utilize literary techniques in their prose—from scene to dialogue to description to point of view—and be cinematic at the same time. Creative nonfiction writers write about themselves and others, capturing real people and real life in ways that can and have changed the world. What is most important and enjoyable about creative nonfiction is that it not only allows but also encourages the writer to become a part of the story or essay being written. The personal involvement creates a special magic that alleviates the suffering and anxiety of the writing experience; it provides many outlets for satisfaction and self discovery, flexibility and freedom.

Since the early 1990s, there has been an explosion of creative nonfiction in the publishing and academic worlds. Many of our best magazines—The New Yorker, Harper’s, Vanity Fair, Esquire—publish more creative nonfiction than fiction and poetry combined. Every year, more universities offer Master of Fine Arts degrees in creative nonfiction. Newspapers are publishing an increasing amount of creative nonfiction, not only as features but in the news and Op-Ed pages, as well.

This wasn’t always the case. When I started teaching in the English department at the University of Pittsburgh in the 1970s, the concept of an “artful” or “new” nonfiction was considered, to say the least, unlikely. My colleagues snickered when I proposed teaching a “creative” nonfiction course, while the dean of the College of Arts and Sciences proclaimed that nonfiction writing in general—forget the use of the word creative—was, at best, a craft, not too different from plumbing. As the chairman of our department put it one day in a faculty meeting while we were debating the legitimacy of the course: “After all, gentlemen”—the fact that many of his colleagues were women often slipped his mind—“we’re interested in literature here, not writing.” That remark and the subsequent debate had been precipitated by a contingent of students from the school newspaper who marched on the chairman’s office and politely requested more nonfiction writing courses “of the creative kind.”

One colleague, aghast at the prospect of this “new thing” (creative nonfiction), carried a dozen of his favorite books to the meeting— poetry, fiction and nonfiction—gave a belabored mini-review of each and then, pointing a finger at the editor of the paper and pounding a fist, stated: “After you read all these books and understand what they mean, I will consider voting for a course called creative nonfiction. Otherwise, I don’t want to be bothered.” Luckily, most of my colleagues didn’t want to be bothered fighting the school newspaper, so the course was approved—and I became one of the first people, if not the first, to teach creative nonfiction at the university level, anywhere. That was in 1973.

Twenty years later, I started the journal Creative Nonfiction to provide a literary outlet for those journalists who aspired to experiment with combining fact and narrative. I wrote an editorial statement, put out a call for manuscripts and waited for the essays to pour in. Which they did: Many dozens of nonfiction pieces arrived at our mailbox over the first few weeks, more and more as the word spread, and we filled our first few issues.

And this was as I had expected. I had been confident that there were great creative nonfiction writers everywhere waiting for the opportunity to liberate themselves—all they needed was a venue. But I soon began to realize, as I spread the essays out on the floor in my office, as I tended to do when selecting and choreographing an issue, that most of the best essays were written not by journalists but by poets and novelists.

In fact, writers crossing genres seems to be another significant hallmark of the creative nonfiction genre and a reason for its popularity. Many of the writers whose works have appeared in the pages of Creative Nonfiction over the years first made their marks in other genres.

All this flexibility—writers crossing genres, applying tools from poetry and fiction to true stories—has made some people, writers of creative nonfiction included, uncomfortable. I travel often and give talks to groups of students and other aspiring writers. Invariably, people in the audience ask questions about what writers can or can’t do, stylistically and in content, while writing creative nonfiction. The questioners are unrelenting: “How can you be certain that the dialogue you are remembering and recreating from an incident that occurred months ago is accurate?” “How can you look through the eyes of your characters if you are not inside their heads?”

I always answer as best I can. I try to explain that such questions have a lot to do with a writer’s ethical and moral boundaries and, most important, how hard writers are willing to work to achieve accuracy and credibility in their narratives. Making up a story or elaborating extemporaneously on a situation that did, in fact, occur can be interesting but unnecessary. Truth is often more compelling to contemplate than fiction. But the questions and the confusion about what a writer can or cannot do often persist—for too long.

The Creative Nonfiction Police

Once, at a college in Texas, I finally threw up my hands in frustration and said, “Listen, I can’t answer all of these questions with rules and regulations. I am not,” I announced, pausing rather theatrically, “the creative nonfiction police!”

There was a woman in the audience—someone I had noticed earlier during my reading. She was in the front row: hard to miss— older than most of the undergraduates, blond, attractive, in her late 30s maybe. She had the alert yet composed look of a nurse, a person only semi-relaxed, always ready to act or react. She had taken her shoes off and propped her feet on the stage; I remember how her toes wiggled as she laughed at the essay I had been reading.

But when I announced, dramatically, “I am not the creative nonfiction police,” although many people chuckled, this woman suddenly jumped to her feet, whipped out a badge and pointed in my direction. “Well I am,” she announced. “Someone has to be. And you are under arrest.”

Then she scooped up her shoes and stormed barefooted from the room. The Q-and-A ended soon after, and I rushed into the hallway to find the woman with the badge. I had many questions, beginning with “Who the hell are you? Why do you have a badge? And how did you know what I was going to say when I didn’t have any idea?” I had never used the term creative nonfiction police before that moment. But she was gone. My host said the woman was a stranger. We asked around, students and colleagues. No one knew her. She was a mystery to everyone, especially me.

The bigger mystery, however, then and now, is the debate that triggered my symbolic arrest: the set of parameters that govern or define creative nonfiction and the questions writers must consider while laboring in or struggling with what we call the literature of reality.

I meant what I said to that audience: I am not the creative nonfiction police. But I have been called “the Godfather behind creative nonfiction,” and I have been doing this for a long time—more than a dozen published books, 30 years of teaching and then editing this groundbreaking journal. And so, while I won’t lay down the law, I will define some of the essential elements of creative nonfiction. The

Basic public education once covered the three R’s: Reading, ’Riting and ’Rithmatic. I find it’s helpful to think of the basic tenets of creative nonfiction (especially immersion journalism) in terms of the five R’s.

The first R is the “real life” aspect of the writing experience. As a writing teacher, I design assignments that have a real life, or immersion, aspect: I force my students out into their communities for an hour, a day or even a week so that they see and understand that the foundation of good writing is personal experience. I’ve sent my students to police stations, bagel shops, golf courses; together, my classes have gone on excursions and participated in public-service projects—all in an attempt to experience or to recreate from experience real life.

Which is not to say that all creative nonfiction has to involve the writer’s immersion into the experiences of others; some writers (and students) may utilize their own personal experience. In one introductory course I taught, a young man working his way through school as a salesperson wrote about selling shoes, while another student who served as a volunteer in a hospice captured a dramatic moment of death, grief and family relief.

Not only were these essays—and many others my students have written over the years—based on real life, but they also contained personal messages from writer to reader, which gave them extra meaning. “An essay is when I write what I think about something,” students will often say to me. Which is true, to a certain extent—and also the source of the meaning of the second R: “reflection.” In creative nonfiction, unlike in traditional journalism, a writer’s feelings and responses about a subject are permitted and encouraged. But essays can’t just be personal opinion; writers have to reach out to readers in a number of different and compelling ways.

This reaching out is essential if a writer hopes to find an audience. Creative Nonfiction receives approximately 200 unsolicited essays a month, sent in by writers seeking publication. The vast majority of these submissions are rejected, and one common reason is an overwhelming egocentrism: In other words, writers write too much about themselves and what they think without seeking a universal focus so that readers are properly and firmly engaged. Essays that are so personal that they omit the reader are essays that will never see the light of print. The overall objective of a writer should be to make the reader tune in— not out.

Another main reason Creative Nonfiction and many other journals and magazines reject essays is a lack of attention to another essential element of the creative nonfiction genre, which is to gather and present information, to teach readers about a person, place, idea or situation, combining the creativity of the artistic experience with the essential third R in the formula: “research.”

Even the most personal essay is usually full of substantive detail about a subject that affects or concerns a writer. Read the books and essays of the most renowned nonfiction writers in this century, and you will find writers engaged in a quest for information and discovery. From Orwell to Hemingway to John McPhee and Joan Didion, books and essays written by these writers are invariably about a subject other than themselves, although the narrator will be intimately included in the story. What’s more, the subject—whatever it is—has been carefully researched and described or explained in such a way as to make a lasting impression on readers.

Personal experience, research and spontaneous intellectual discourse—an airing and exploration of ideas—are equally vital elements in creative nonfiction. Annie Dillard, another prominent creative nonfiction writer, takes great pains to achieve this balance in her work. In her first book, “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek,” which won the Pulitzer Prize, and in her other books and essays, Dillard repeatedly overwhelms her readers with factual information: minutely detailed descriptions of insects, botany and biology, history and anthropology, blended with her own feelings about life.

One of my favorite Dillard essays, “Schedules,” focuses on the importance of writers working on a regular schedule rather than writing only intermittently. In this essay, she discusses, among many other subjects, Hasidism, chess, baseball, warblers, pine trees, June bugs, writers’ studios and potted plants—as well as her own schedule and writing habits and those of Wallace Stevens and Jack London.

What I am saying is that the genre of creative nonfiction is open to anyone with a curious mind and a sense of self. The research phase actually launches and anchors the creative effort. Whether it is a book or essay I am planning, I always begin my quest in the library (or, increasingly, online) for three reasons. First, I need to familiarize myself with the subject. If I don’t know much about it, I want to make myself knowledgeable enough to ask intelligent questions when I begin interviewing people. If I can’t display at least a minimal understanding of the subject about which I want to write, I will lose the confidence and support of the people who must provide me access to the experience.

Second, I want to assess my competition. What other essays, books and articles have been written about this subject? Who are the experts, the pioneers, the most controversial figures? I want to find a new angle—not write a story similar to one that has already been written. And finally, how can I reflect on and evaluate a person, subject or place unless I know all of the contrasting points of view? Reflection may permit a certain amount of speculation, but only when based on a solid foundation of knowledge.

This brings me to the fourth R: “reading.” Writers must read not only the research material unearthed in the library but also the work of the masters of their profession. I have heard some very fine writers claim that they don’t read too much any more or that they don’t read for long periods, especially during the time they are laboring on a lengthy writing project. But almost all writers have read the best writers in their field and are able to converse in great detail about their stylistic approaches and the intellectual content of their work, much as any good visual artist is able to discuss the work of Picasso, Van Gogh, Michelangelo and Warhol.

Finally, there’s the fifth R: the “’riting,” the most artistic and romantic aspect of the whole experience. The first four R’s relate to the nonfiction part of creative nonfiction; this last R is the phase where writers get to create. This often happens in two phases: Usually there is an inspirational explosion at the beginning, a time when writers allow instinct and feeling to guide their fingers as they create paragraphs, pages and even entire chapters or complete essays. This is what art of any form is all about: the passion of the moment and the magic of the muse. I am not saying this always happens; it doesn’t. Writing is a difficult labor in which a daily grind or struggle (ideally with a regular schedule, as Annie Dillard concludes) is inevitable. But this first part of the experience— for most writers, most of the time—is rather loose and spontaneous and, therefore, more creative and fun. The second part of the writing experience—the craft part, which comes into play after your basic essay is written—is equally important and a hundred times more difficult.

The Building Blocks of Creative Nonfiction: Scene, Dialogue, Intimate Detail and Other Essentials

The craft part means the construction of the essay (or chapter or even book):how the research, reflection and real life experience are arranged to make a story meaningful and important to readers.

The primary way this is accomplished in creative nonfiction is through the use of scene. In fact, one of the most obvious distinguishing factors between traditional journalism and creative nonfiction—or simply between ordinary prose and good, evocative writing—is the use of vignettes, episodes and other slices of reality. The uninspired writer will tell the reader about a subject, place or personality, but the creative nonfiction writer will show that subject, place or personality in action.

There’s an easy way to see how essential scene is to building a story; I like to call it “The Yellow Test.” Take a yellow highlighter or magic marker and leaf through your favorite magazine—Vanity Fair, Esquire, The New Yorker or Creative Nonfiction—or return to a favorite chapter in a book by an author like Annie Dillard or John McPhee. Highlight the scenes, the passages—large or small—where things happen. Then return to the beginning and review your handiwork. Chances are, anywhere from 50 to 80 percent of each essay or chapter will be yellow. (This test works equally well with other forms of creative writing: Plays are obviously constructed of scenes, as are novels and short stories and films. Even most poems are very scenic.)

But what makes a scene? First and foremost, a scene contains action. Something happens. I jump on my motorcycle and go helter-skelter around the country; suddenly, in the middle of July in Yellowstone National Park, I am confronted with 20 inches of snow. Action needn’t be wild, sexy and death-defying, however. There’s also action in the classroom: A student asks a question, which requires an answer, which necessitates a dialogue, which is a marvelously effective tool to trigger or record action.

Dialogue, another important element of creative nonfiction, means people saying things to one another, expressing themselves. It is a valuable element of scene. Collecting dialogue is one of the reasons writers immerse themselves at a police station, bagel shop or zoo. It lets them discover what people have to say spontaneously—not just in response to a reporter’s questions.

Another technique that helps writers create scene may be described as “intimate and specific detail.” This is a lesson that writers of all genres need to know: The secret to making prose (or, for that matter, poetry) memorable—and, therefore, vital and important—is to catalogue with specificity the details that are most intimate. By intimate, I mean ideas and images that readers won’t easily imagine—ideas and images you observed that symbolize a memorable truth about the characters or the situations about which you are writing. Intimate means recording and noting details that the reader might not know or even imagine without your particular inside insight. Sometimes intimate detail can be so specific and special that it becomes unforgettable in the reader’s mind.

A very famous “intimate” detail appears in a classic creative nonfiction profile, “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold,” written by Gay Talese in 1966 and published in Esquire. In this profile, Talese leads readers on a whirlwind cross-country tour, revealing Sinatra and his entourage interacting with one another and with the rest of the world, and demonstrating how Sinatra’s world and the world inhabited by everyone else often collide. The scenes are action-oriented; they contain dialogue and evocative description, including a moment when Talese spotted a gray-haired lady with a tiny satchel in the shadows of the Sinatra entourage and put her in the story. She was, it turned out, the guardian of Sinatra’s collection of toupees. This tiny detail—Sinatra’s wig lady—made such an impression when I first read the essay that even now, years later, any time I see Sinatra on television or in rerun movies, or spot his photo in a magazine, I find myself searching the background for the gray-haired lady with the satchel.

The gray-haired lady was a detail that readers wouldn’t have known about if Talese hadn’t shown it to them, and her constant presence there in the shadows—hovering to service or replace Sinatra’s toupee— offered important insight into Sinatra’s character. And although we can’t achieve such symbolism each time we capture an incident, writers who want their words to be remembered beyond the dates on which their stories are published or broadcast will seek to discover the special observations that symbolize the intimacy they have attained with their subjects.

Of course, all of these vividly told scenes have to be organized according to some larger plan to make a complete story. We call this plan, or structure, the frame of the story. The frame represents a way of ordering or controlling a writer’s narrative so that the elements of his book, article or essay are presented in an interesting and orderly fashion with an interlaced integrity from beginning to end.

The most basic frame is a simple beginning-to-end chronology. For example, “Hoop Dreams,” a dramatic documentary (which is classic creative nonfiction in a different medium) begins with two African American teenage basketball stars living in a ghetto and sharing a dream of stardom in the NBA, and dramatically tracks both of their careers over the next six years.

Other frames are very complicated; in the movie, “Pulp Fiction,” Quentin Tarantino skillfully tangles and manipulates time. For a variety of reasons, writers often choose not to frame their stories in a strictly chronological sequence. My book “One Children’s Place” begins in the operating room at a children’s hospital. It introduces a surgeon, whose name is Marc Rowe; his severely handicapped patient, Danielle; and her mother, Debbie, who has dedicated her every waking moment to Danielle. Two years of her life have been spent inside the walls of this building with parents and children from all around the world whose lives are too endangered to leave the confines of the hospital. As Danielle’s surgery goes forward, the reader tours the hospital in a very intimate way, observing in the emergency room; participating in helicopter rescue missions as part of the emergency trauma team; and attending ethics meetings, well-baby clinics, child abuse examinations— every conceivable activity that happens at a typical high-acuity children’s hospital—so that readers will learn from the inside out how such an institution and the people it serves and supports function on an hour-by-hour basis. We even learn about Marc Rowe’s guilty conscience for having slighted his own wife and children over the years so that he can care for other families.

The book ends when Danielle is released from the hospital. It took me two years to research and write this book, returning day and night to the hospital in order to understand the hospital and the people who made it special, but the story in which it is framed begins and ends in a few months.

A Code for Creative Nonfiction Writers

Finally, harder to define than the elements of craft are all the ethical and moral issues writers of creative nonfiction have to consider—the kinds of questions audiences ask me about whenever I speak about the creative nonfiction genre, the kinds of questions that lead me to proclaim that I am not, and do not want to be, the creative nonfiction police.

But I will recommend a code for creative nonfiction writers—a kind of checklist. The word checklist is carefully chosen; there are no rules, laws or specific prescriptions dictating what you can or can’t do as a creative nonfiction writer. The gospel according to Lee Gutkind doesn’t and shouldn’t exist. It’s more a question of doing the right thing, following the Golden Rule: Treat others with courtesy and respect. First, strive for the truth. Be certain that everything you write is as accurate and honest as you can make it. I don’t mean that everyone who has shared the experience you are writing about should agree that your account is true. As I said, everyone has his or her own very precious and private and shifting truth. But be certain your narrative is as true to your memory as possible.

Second, recognize the important distinction between recollected conversation and fabricated dialogue. Don’t make anything up, and don’t tell your readers what you think your characters are thinking during the time about which you are writing. If you want to know how or what people are or were thinking, then ask them. Don’t assume or guess.

Third, don’t round corners—or compress situations or characters— unnecessarily. Not that it’s absolutely wrong to round corners or compress characters or incidents, but if you do experiment with these techniques, make certain you have a good reason. Making literary decisions based on good narrative principles is often legitimate—you are, after all, writers. But stop to consider the people about whom you are writing. Unleash your venom on the guilty parties; punish them as they deserve. But also ask yourself: Who are the innocent victims? How have you protected them? Adults can file suit against you, but are you violating the privacy or endangering the emotional stability of children? Are you being fair to the aged or infirm?

Fourth, one way to protect the characters in your book, article or essay is to allow them to defend themselves—or at least to read what you have written about them. Few writers do this, because they are afraid of litigation or ashamed or embarrassed about the intimacies they have revealed. But sharing your narrative with the people about whom you are writing doesn’t mean that you have to change what you say about them; rather, it only means that you are being responsible to your characters and their stories. I understand why you would not want to share your narrative; it could be dangerous. It could ruin your friendship, your marriage, your future. But by the same token, this is the kind of responsible action you might appreciate if the shoe were on the other foot. I have, on occasion, shared parts of books with the characters I have written about with positive results. First, my characters corrected my mistakes. But, more important, when you come face to face with a character, you are able to communicate on a different and deeper level. When you show them what you think and feel, when they read what you have written, they may get angry—an action in itself that is interesting to observe and even to write about.

Or they may feel obliged to provide their side of the situation— a side that you have been hesitant to listen to or interpret. With the text in the middle, as a filter, it is possible to discuss personal history as a story somewhat disconnected from the reality you are universally experiencing. It provides a way to communicate as an exercise in writing—it filters and distances the debate. Moreover, it defines and cements your own character. The people about whom you have written may not like what you have said—and may, in fact, despise you for saying it—but they can only respect and admire the forthright way in which you have approached them. No laws govern the scope of good taste and personal integrity.

The creative nonfiction writer must rely on his or her own conscience and sensitivity to others, and display a higher morality and a healthy respect for fairness and justice. We all harbor resentments, hatreds and prejudices, but being writers doesn’t give us special dispensation to behave in ways that are unbecoming to ourselves and hurtful to others. This rationale sounds so simple—yet, it is so difficult. The moral and ethical responsibility of the creative nonfiction writer is to practice the golden rule and to be as fair and truthful as possible—to write both for art’s sake and for humanity’s sake. In other words, we police ourselves.

By saying this, I do not feel that I am being overly simplistic. As writers we intend to make a difference, to affect someone’s life over and above our own. To say something that matters—this is why we write, after all. That’s the bottom line: to impact society, to put a personal stamp on history, to plant the seed of change. Art and literature are our legacies to other generations. We will be forgotten, most of us writers, but our books and essays, our stories and poems will always, somewhere, have a life.

Wherever you personally draw lines in your writing, remember the basic rules of good citizenship: Do not recreate incidents and characters who never existed; do not write to do harm to innocent victims; do not forget your own story but, while considering your struggle and the heights of your achievements, think repeatedly about how your story will affect your reader. Over and above the creation of a seamless narrative, you are seeking to touch and affect someone else’s life—which is the goal creative nonfiction writers share with novelists and poets. We all want to connect with another human being— or as many people as possible—in such a way that they will remember us and share our legacy with others.

Someday, I hope to connect with the woman with the badge and the bare feet, face-to-face. I have never forgotten her. She has, in some strange way, become my conscience, standing over me as I write, forcing me to ask the questions about my work that I have recommended to you. I hope we all feel her shadow over our shoulders each time we sit down, face the keyboard and begin to write.

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Examples of Creative Nonfiction: What It Is & How to Write It

POSTED ON Jul 21, 2023

Written by P.J McNulty

When most people think of creative writing, they picture fiction books – but there are plenty of examples of creative nonfiction. In fact, creative nonfiction is one of the most interesting genres to read and write. So what is creative nonfiction exactly? 

More and more people are discovering the joy of getting immersed in content based on true life that has all the quality and craft of a well-written novel. If you are interested in writing creative nonfiction, it’s important to understand different examples of creative nonfiction as a genre. 

If you’ve ever gotten lost in memoirs so descriptive that you felt you’d walked in the shoes of those people, those are perfect examples of creative nonfiction – and you understand exactly why this genre is so popular.

But is creative nonfiction a viable form of writing to pursue? What is creative nonfiction best used to convey? And what are some popular creative nonfiction examples?

Today we will discuss all about this genre, including plenty of examples of creative nonfiction books – so you’ll know exactly how to write it. 

This Guide to Creative Nonfiction Covers:

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What is Creative Nonfiction?

Creative nonfiction is defined as true events written about with the techniques and style traditionally found in creative writing . We can understand what creative nonfiction is by contrasting it with plain-old nonfiction. 

Think about news or a history textbook, for example. These nonfiction pieces tend to be written in very matter-of-fact, declarative language. While informative, this type of nonfiction often lacks the flair and pleasure that keep people hooked on fictional novels.

Imagine there are two retellings of a true crime story – one in a newspaper and the other in the script for a podcast. Which is more likely to grip you? The dry, factual language, or the evocative, emotionally impactful creative writing?

Podcasts are often great examples of creative nonfiction – but of course, creative nonfiction can be used in books too. In fact, there are many types of creative nonfiction writing. Let's take a look!

Types of creative nonfiction

Creative nonfiction comes in many different forms and flavors. Just as there are myriad types of creative writing, there are almost as many types of creative nonfiction.

Some of the most popular types include:

Literary nonfiction

Literary nonfiction refers to any form of factual writing that employs the literary elements that are more commonly found in fiction. If you’re writing about a true event (but using elements such as metaphor and theme) you might well be writing literary nonfiction.

Writing a life story doesn’t have to be a dry, chronological depiction of your years on Earth. You can use memoirs to creatively tell about events or ongoing themes in your life.

If you’re unsure of what kind of creative nonfiction to write, why not consider a creative memoir? After all, no one else can tell your life story like you. 

Nature writing

The beauty of the natural world is an ongoing source of creative inspiration for many people, from photographers to documentary makers. But it’s also a great focus for a creative nonfiction writer. Evoking the majesty and wonder of our environment is an endless source of material for creative nonfiction. 

Travel writing

If you’ve ever read a great travel article or book, you’ll almost feel as if you've been on the journey yourself. There’s something special about travel writing that conveys not only the literal journey, but the personal journey that takes place.

Writers with a passion for exploring the world should consider travel writing as their form of creative nonfiction. 

For types of writing that leave a lasting impact on the world, look no further than speeches. From a preacher's sermon, to ‘I have a dream’, speeches move hearts and minds like almost nothing else. The difference between an effective speech and one that falls on deaf ears is little more than the creative skill with which it is written. 

Biographies

Noteworthy figures from history and contemporary times alike are great sources for creative nonfiction. Think about the difference between reading about someone’s life on Wikipedia and reading about it in a critically-acclaimed biography.

Which is the better way of honoring that person’s legacy and achievements? Which is more fun to read? If there’s someone whose life story is one you’d love to tell, creative nonfiction might be the best way to do it. 

So now that you have an idea of what creative nonfiction is, and some different ways you can write it, let's take a look at some popular examples of creative nonfiction books and speeches.

Examples of Creative Nonfiction

Here are our favorite examples of creative nonfiction:

1. In Cold Blood by Truman Capote

No list of examples of creative nonfiction would be complete without In Cold Blood . This landmark work of literary nonfiction by Truman Capote helped to establish the literary nonfiction genre in its modern form, and paved the way for the contemporary true crime boom.  

2. A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway's A Moveable Feast is undeniably one of the best creative memoirs ever written. It beautifully reflects on Hemingway’s time in Paris – and whisks you away into the cobblestone streets.  

3. World of Wonders by Aimee Nezhukumatathil

If you're looking for examples of creative nonfiction nature writing, no one does it quite like Aimee Nezhukumatathil. World of Wonders  is a beautiful series of essays that poetically depicts the varied natural landscapes she enjoyed over the years. 

4. A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson

Bill Bryson is one of the most beloved travel writers of our time. And A Walk in the Woods is perhaps Bryson in his peak form. This much-loved travel book uses creativity to explore the Appalachian Trail and convey Bryson’s opinions on America in his humorous trademark style.

5. The Gettysburg Address by Abraham Lincoln

 While most of our examples of creative nonfiction are books, we would be remiss not to include at least one speech. The Gettysburg Address is one of the most impactful speeches in American history, and an inspiring example for creative nonfiction writers.

6. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou

Few have a way with words like Maya Angelou. Her triumphant book, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings , shows the power of literature to transcend one’s circumstances at any time. It is one of the best examples of creative nonfiction that truly sucks you in.

7. Hiroshima by John Hershey

Hiroshima is a powerful retelling of the events during (and following) the infamous atomic bomb. This journalistic masterpiece is told through the memories of survivors – and will stay with you long after you've finished the final page.

8. Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert

If you haven't read the book, you've probably seen the film. Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert is one of the most popular travel memoirs in history. This romp of creative nonfiction teaches us how to truly unmake and rebuild ourselves through the lens of travel.

9. Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris

Never has language learning brought tears of laughter like Me Talk Pretty One Day . David Sedaris comically divulges his (often failed) attempts to learn French with a decidedly sadistic teacher, and all the other mishaps he encounters in his fated move from New York to Paris.

10. The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls

Many of us had complicated childhoods, but few of us experienced the hardships of Jeannette Walls. In The Glass Castle , she gives us a transparent look at the betrayals and torments of her youth and how she overcame them with grace – weaving her trauma until it reads like a whimsical fairytale.

Now that you've seen plenty of creative nonfiction examples, it's time to learn how to write your own creative nonfiction masterpiece.

Tips for Writing Creative Nonfiction

Writing creative nonfiction has a lot in common with other types of writing. (You won’t be reinventing the wheel here.) The better you are at writing in general, the easier you’ll find your creative nonfiction project. But there are some nuances to be aware of.

Writing a successful creative nonfiction piece requires you to:

Choose a form

Before you commit to a creative nonfiction project, get clear on exactly what it is you want to write. That way, you can get familiar with the conventions of the style of writing and draw inspiration from some of its classics.

Try and find a balance between a type of creative nonfiction you find personally appealing and one you have the skill set to be effective at. 

Gather the facts

Like all forms of nonfiction, your creative project will require a great deal of research and preparation. If you’re writing about an event, try and gather as many sources of information as possible – so you can imbue your writing with a rich level of detail.

If it’s a piece about your life, jot down personal recollections and gather photos from your past. 

Plan your writing

Unlike a fictional novel, which tends to follow a fairly well-established structure, works of creative nonfiction have a less clear shape. To avoid the risk of meandering or getting weighed down by less significant sections, structure your project ahead of writing it.

You can either apply the classic fiction structures to a nonfictional event or take inspiration from the pacing of other examples of creative nonfiction you admire. 

You may also want to come up with a working title to inspire your writing. Using a free book title generator is a quick and easy way to do this and move on to the actual writing of your book.

Draft in your intended style

Unless you have a track record of writing creative nonfiction, the first time doing so can feel a little uncomfortable. You might second-guess your writing more than you usually would due to the novelty of applying creative techniques to real events. Because of this, it’s essential to get your first draft down as quickly as possible.

Rewrite and refine

After you finish your first draft, only then should you read back through it and critique your work. Perhaps you haven’t used enough source material. Or maybe you’ve overdone a certain creative technique. Whatever you happen to notice, take as long as you need to refine and rework it until your writing feels just right.

Ready to Wow the World With Your Story?

You know have the knowledge and inspiring examples of creative nonfiction you need to write a successful work in this genre. Whether you choose to write a riveting travel book, a tear-jerking memoir, or a biography that makes readers laugh out loud, creative nonfiction will give you the power to convey true events like never before.  

Who knows? Maybe your book will be on the next list of top creative nonfiction examples!

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