Forum / tools for creative nonfiction?

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  brian warfield

  Feb 10, 02:09am

  does anyone have any good resources for helping with creative nonfiction especially in contrast to fiction. as in how to distinguish these two, how to critique for the creative nonfiction, etc.

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  strannikov

  Feb 10, 01:31pm

  I advise no pursuit of “creative non-fiction” if by this you mean the rough equivalent of what otherwise has earned its notoriety as “narrative journalism”.
  
  Narrative journalism is a highly convenient method for telling two kinds of lies simultaneously: innocuously borrowing or guiltily stealing fictional approaches to narration and editing, it invariably muddies and buries relevant facts in order to make its otherwise prosaic accounts palatable, entertaining, and "humane"; while with its departure from rigorous forensic standards of objectivity and neutrality and discontented with mere recitations of quotidia, in its numerous advocacies it assumes an unquestioned, self-righteous moral posture belying its actual ethical capability and its quite ordinary service as corporate shill or corporate whore.

  False both to artistic authenticity and to scientific accuracy, narrative journalism deviates from both professional and moral integrity. Credulous Americans as a consequence have greater difficulty distinguishing fact from fiction, news from entertainment, mundane reporting from lively opinion: which perhaps sufficiently explains the journalistic credibility imputed generously to a Maher, a Stewart, a Colbert (nota bene: these are NOT literary practitioners). Beware!

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  Ann Bogle

  Feb 10, 02:17pm

  William Styron's Darkness Visible.

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  David Ackley

  Feb 10, 03:08pm

  In the 1960's/'70's what was then called the "non-fiction novel" [and probably other terms] first made its appearance in works most notably by Norman Mailer, (STEPS OF THE PENTAGON and others)Tom Wolfe (JUNIOR JOHNSON IS THE LAST GREAT AMERICAN HERO and other essays)Truman Capote (IN COLD BLOOD) and all of Hunter Thompson's work all applying fictional techniques--poeticized description; speculative Points of View; narrative disruption etc. to journalistic writing. Put simply, naked fact was treated in a highly subjective way.

  This still seems the essence of what is called now "creative non-fiction."If you wanted a how-to manual, one could do worse than read a few of the writers mentioned. I'd add, from my own preferences, Michael Herr's great DISPATCHES sent from the shifting lines of the Vietnam conflict.

  From the onset, this sort of work has received the sort of criticism Strannikov ably lays out above. The response it seems to me is simple: as long as the reader knows what she is getting, that is that the work does not masquerade as objective reportage, I don't see a problem. So far as I know, none of the works above, with the possible exception of Tom Wolfe's, claimed anything other than a personal point of view.

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  Gloria Garfunkel

  Feb 12, 04:34am

  Darkness Visible is memoir, the difference beting it is a story about the self where you can take all kinds of looseness with literalness. Creative nonfiction extends to the world out there and is a whole other, very controversial ball game. It blurs lines. No one likes blurred lines.

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  Gloria Garfunkel

  Feb 12, 04:41am

  Lauren Slater wrote a memoir "Lying" in which she gave herself every possible psych. diagnosis. She is a psychologist. She was panned for her last book of fake interviews with famous and often dead psychologists. Darkness Visible is a memoir with no insight into the fact that he is more an alcoholic than a depressive.

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  brian warfield

  Feb 13, 10:35pm

  I guess I am referring not to journalistic writing but more personal reportage. What goes into the decision to take an event that happened to you and either fictionalize it or to pose it as nonfiction? How do those decisions affect the reader? When writing such a story how do the questions one asks oneself differ for fiction vs. nonfiction, etc.?

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  Matthew Robinson

  Feb 14, 08:48am

  For a textbook, I would suggest the book I used in college for CNF which proved quite useful called The Fourth Genre. But really the trick to personal writing is to tell the truth while still forming a cohesive narrative arc. My personal favorite memoir-essayist is William Kittredge. His essay collection, Owning It All, is the real shit. He's a master.

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  Jane Hammons

  Feb 24, 05:44pm

  There are a lot of good resources for narrative nonfiction (I avoid the term creative nonfiction only because it raises so many hackles). Lee Gutkind, the editor of the magazine Creative Nonfiction, has a book (I forget the title). In teaching longform nonfiction, I've used Telling True Stories, edited by Mark Kramer and Wendy Call, put together by the Newman Foundation (the journalism school at Harvard). And I've used exercises from Writing Nonfiction by Christina Boufis (it is in the Complete Idiots Guide series but it's not for idiots!). And I agree with Matt that The Fourth Genre is good.

  Vivian Gornick has a great book called The Situation and the Story, more about the personal essay & memoir, but relevant if you are including yourself as part of the writing.

  I write narrative nonfiction. And I tell the truth. I teach narrative nonfiction at UC Berkeley along with the ethics of writing in this genre.

  As with any writing called nonfiction, it can lie or tell the truth. Writer's choice. I don't find lying to be inherent in the genre.

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  strannikov

  Feb 24, 08:59pm

  @ Jane: fine, let journalism submit gladly to academic captivity: but if literary fiction plans to thrive in THIS country in THIS century, if it plans to survive at all, its practitioners need to escape academic captivity with all due haste. ("It's only 'literature' if the MFA department heads say it is", ad absurdum. Equally: a pox on MFA chairs who betray literary fiction by celebrating “literary journalism”.) Until American literary fiction is being written and read well outside of the academy, litterateurs cannot well afford to submit to academic taste-mongering. American literature was born outside of the academy: to this day its merit consists in the distinctive quality of its imaginative recreations and its ability to thrive outside of the academy, and in its willingness to resist and confront the academy when necessary.

  This necessity, I argue, is upon us: our literature is strangling on MFA programs and university imprimaturs.

  I can readily conceive why journalists aspire to the relevance conferred by literature: nevertheless, such aspiration itself does not make "journalism" literary, and we can all remain grateful for the extent to which it fails to make "literature" journalistic (meaning: not worth reading twice). "Literary journalism" is neither, not in these perilous times.

  "News" is no longer the first draft of history: it has long since become "the first draft of myth", a process only propelled by radio and television. The public is ill-served by this practice, but then, I do find dishonesty inherent to the conception and intrinsic to the practice of narrative journalism. (I speak as a non-journalist and as a mere someone without MFA pedigree. I worked for over three years as a middle school English instructor in public schools and almost an equal period as a TV news producer: the profound intellectual laziness common to the teaching and journalistic professions strikes me to this day.)

  (I can hardly wait to read what narrative journalists will make of the "cannibal cop" story making the rounds in today's Google newsfeed: early reports suggest that further attempts to blend fact with fiction will be no less pernicious than they've become already, but I begin to repeat.)

  If "nonfiction" is the avowed aim of journalists, if in fact journalists are not seeking shortcuts to keep their prose lively, entertaining, and “humane”, if in fact journalists are not relying on literary narrative and editing strategies to conceal facts or to insert editorial opinionation, then journalists have much more to learn from responsible historians or humble court reporters than from literary practitioners per se. Journalists need to confront for themselves why they find “facts” so untrustworthy.

  Yes, you can readily conclude that by implication I would further accuse narrative journalism of elitist snobbery, and yes, I speak with the snobbery of a mere provincial who continues to insist that a literary practitioner cannot afford to be as intellectually lazy as a professional journalist or a tenured academic, that he does not need (and does well not to solicit) the institutional patronage of the academy to substantiate his artistic efforts: to rely on the endorsement of the academy is to risk death to literary imagination. Death instead to imaginative journalism.

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