Creative Nonfiction

an introduction
What is CNF?
The Nature of Creative Nonfiction

Creative nonfiction is nonfiction prose which utilizes

the techniques and strategies of fiction.
“to employ diligence of a reporter, the shifting voices
and viewpoints of a novelist, the refined wordplay of a
poet, and the analytical modes of the essayist”

“have purpose and meaning beyond the experiences

related”
Creative nonfiction. . .

is a kind of writing that may begin with a personal experience or

the merely factual, but which reach for greater range and
resonance;

requires the skills of the storyteller and the research ability of

the conscientious reporter;

tells a story using facts, but uses many of the techniques of

fiction for its compelling qualities and emotional vibrancy;

doesn’t just report facts, it delivers fact in ways that move the
reader toward a deeper understanding of a topic.
Creative nonfiction is an attempt to be accurate, to be
interesting, and to offer a perspective.
Types of Creative Nonfiction
Types of CNF
Literary journalism Literary memoir
: formerly “new journalism”
: writing in a personal way
about facts in a news event

magazine feature article, newspaper column as cultural commentary,

review, interview story, character sketch , the biographical sketch or
profile, personal essay, autobiographical sketch
Techniques of Creative Nonfiction
❏ Imagery (sensory details, active verbs, concrete details, ‘’show,
don’t tell’’)
❏ Figures of speech
❏ Point of View
❏ Tone
❏ Structure (chronological, parallel structure or convergent
narratives, flashback, mosaic or collage)
❏ Opening/Closing Methods
❏ Character (revealing character through appearance, actions,
thought, dialogue, other characters, setting)
❏ Setting (place, time, social/historical/political conditions)
Creative Nonfiction in the Philippines
❏ ‘’golden age’’ before World War II, the Commonwealth period
❏ resumption of writing and publishing essays after the war
❏ the ‘60s and the early ‘70s periodicals (Philippine Free Press, the
Philippine Graphic, and the Asia Philippines Leader) as space for
the country’s finest writers
❏ the long hiatus during the Martial Law Period
❏ resumption in the mid-eighties in magazines like The Observer,
Who, Mr. and Ms., Celebrity, Panorama
❏ publication of CNF today: essays (as newspaper columns and
magazine articles), collection of essays, anthology of CNF
(from different writers), autobiography, biography, memoir,
travel writing, writings on the different aspects of Philippine
culture, history, and politics
The Essay
Origin

❏ French essai, “to try” or ‘’to attempt’’ (from Michel de

Montaigne, ‘’father’’ of the essay, 1580)

❏ lineage traced back to ancient Rome in the works of

Seneca and Cicero
Forms

❏ formal essays vs. informal or familiar or personal

essays
❏ Informative essay, humorous essay, impressionistic
essay, opinion essay, social commentary
Content
❏ usually has its origin in something that has
happened in the writer’s life

❏ may represent an area of interest deliberately

explored, likely to give rise to reflection or
intellectual examination

❏ emphasis on a relationship, implied or sought,

between the writer and reader
 “
The world is everything
that is the case.

-Ludwig Wittgenstein
 “
Consciousness plus style equals
good nonfiction.

-Phillip Lopate, To Show and to Tell

Lee Gutkind, Godfather
of Creative Nonfiction

‘’Creative nonfiction allows the

nonfiction writer to use literary
techniques usually used only by
fiction writers, such as scene-setting,
description, dialogue, action, suspense,
plot. All those things that make terrific
short stories and novels allow the
nonfiction writer to tell true stories in
the most cinematic and dramatic way
possible. That’s creative nonfiction.’’
Memoir and the Personal Essay

memoir: sets up a dialogue between the writer and

his/her past

personal essay: emphasis on a relationship, implied or

sought, between the writer and reader

: allows maximum mobility from the small, the daily,

the domestic, to the universal and significant
Memoir and the
Personal Essay
Memoir and the Personal Essay
memoir : a story retrieved from the writer’s memory,
with the writer as protagonist

: the I remembering and commenting on the events

described in the essay

: emphasis on the story

: the “point” likely to emerge from the events and

characters rather than the author’s reflection
Memoir and the Personal Essay
Example:
In the essay “Sundays,” from his memoir What I Can’t Bear Losing, poet
Gerald Stern describes his boyhood in Pittsburgh in a Jewish
neighborhood surrounded by Calvinist Christians. The emphasis is on the
pattern of his Sundays: his parents’ quarrels, his walks with his father,
later his long walks alone through the hills of the city, the concerts of the
Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, the ethnic clubs, an early romance.

But as he recall these days he paints a resonant picture of the ethnic,

religious, and economic demarcations of the city.
Memoir and the Personal Essay
personal essay : usually has its origin in something
that has happened in the writer’s life

: may represent an area of interest deliberately

explored, likely to give rise to reflection or intellectual
examination
Memoir and the Personal Essay
Example:
I took a photograph out of an old frame to put in a picture of my new
husband a step daughter. Because the frame was constructed in an
amazingly solid way, I thought about the man whose photo I was
displacing; his assumptions about permanence; how we use frames to try
to capture and hang onto moments, memories, families, selves that are in
fact always in flux; how we frame our cities with roads, our shoreline with
resorts, our dead with coffins—marking our territory, claiming
possession.

In this instance, a very small task led me to write about the nature of
impermanence and enclosure.
-Janet Burroway, essayist
Memoir and the Personal Essay

memoir: sets up a dialogue between the writer and

his/her past

personal essay: emphasis on a relationship, implied or

sought, between the writer and reader

: allows maximum mobility from the small, the daily,

the domestic, to the universal and significant
Phillip Lopate
I don’t wish to start a feud, since in some ways
I’m in agreement with Gutkind: if he means that a
piece of nonfiction should have a plot,
suspense, and strong characterization—even
character development, in the case of memoir—or
if he means that the nonfiction writer should be
conscious of constructing an artifice, I’m all for
that. But if he means the nonfiction writer
should try to render everything in scenes with
dialogue and sprinkle sense details everywhere so
the text will read as “cinematically” as possible,
while staying away from thoughtful analysis
because it sounds academic or “abstract,” then, no,
I don’t agree. 
Truth in
Creative
Nonfiction
Truth in Creative Nonfiction
What kinds of fictions are allowable and what are not
in creative nonfiction? Just how much emphasis do we
put on “creative” and how much on “nonfiction”?

Some writers believe that nothing at all should ever be

knowingly made up in creative nonfiction.
Truth in Creative Nonfiction
Some writers believe that small details can be
fabricated to create the scenes of memory, and they
knowingly create composite characters because the
narrative structures demand it.

Some writers willingly admit imagination into factual

narratives; others abhor it and see it as a trespass into
fiction.
To be rooted in
the “real” word

Behind the Gare Saint-Lazare.

Henri Cartier-Bresson
To question
and search

The Mind’s Eye. Henri Cartier-Bresson

To convey and
resonate

Henri Cartier-Bresson
Begin with a conventional notion of titling an essay:

On

1) Make a list of at least six titles that represent things you

might like to write about, things that interest you and that you
feel confident you know something about. These may be
either abstractions or specifics (e.g. On Liberty or On Mom’s
Sewing Machine).

2) Then make a list of six subjects you do not want to write

about, and wouldn’t show to anybody if you did.
(On )

3) Make a list of six titles dealing with subjects about which you
know “nothing at all.”
The Permutations
of “Truth”:
Fact Versus Fiction
Memory and Imagination
Memory, in a sense, is imagination: an imagining of the past,
recreating the sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and touches.
 “
I am forced to admit that memoir is not a
matter of transcription, that memory itself is
not a warehouse of finished stories, not a
static gallery of framed pictures. I must admit
that I invented. But why?

-Patricia Hampl, “Memory and Imagination”

Memory and Imagination
In creative nonfiction, the creative aspect involves not only writing
techniques, but also a creative interpretation of the facts of our
lives, plumping the skeletal facts with the flesh of imagination.
 “
We find, in our details and broken and
obscured images, the language of symbol.
Here memory impulsively reaches out its arms
and embraces imagination. That is the resort
to invention. It isn’t a lie but an act of
necessity, as the innate urge to locate personal
truth always is.

-Patricia Hampl, “Memory and Imagination”

 “
Go for the emotional truth, that’s what matters. Yes,
gather the facts by all means. Look at old photos, return
to old places, ask family members what they remember,
look up time-line books for the correct songs and
fashion styles, real old newspapers, encyclopedias,
whatever---and use the imagination to fill in the
remembered experience.

-Mimi Schwartz, “Memoir? Fiction? Where’s the Line?”

 “
It may be ‘murky terrain,’ you may cross the line into
fiction and have to step back reluctantly into what really
happened---the struggle creates the tensions that makes
memoir either powerfuly true or hopelessly phony. The
challenge of this genre is that it hands you characters,
plot, and setting, and says, ;Go figure them out!’---using
fact, memory, and imagination to recreate the
complexity of real moments, big and small, with no
invented rapes or houses burning down.

-Mimi Schwartz, “Memoir? Fiction? Where’s the Line”

 “
In fiction you get to make up what happens; in
creative nonfiction you don’t get to mess with
what happened.

-Bret Lott, “Against Technique”

 “I used to have a cat,
an old fighting tom,
who would jump
through the open
window by my bed in
the middle of the night
and land on my chest.
And some mornings
I’d wake in daylight to
find my body covered
with paw prints in
blood; I looked as
though I’d been
painted with roses.”
“The Whole Truth?”

Sometimes you’ll be troubled not by “facts”’ that are made up, but
by those that are omitted.

In essay writing, it’s nearly impossible to tell the “whole” truth.

Of necessity, certain details, events, and characters have to be

modified to create an essay that makes narrative sense.
 I had three brothers, all of whom died of various
ailments, a sibling history that strains even my
credulity...Very early in the writing of Truth Serum I knew
that a book concerned with homosexual awakening would
sooner or later deal with AIDS and the population of
friends I’ve lost to the disease...To be blunt, I decided to
limit the body count in this book in order to prevent it
from collapsing under the threat of death...There is only so
much loss I can stand to place at the center of the daily
rumination that writing requires...Only when the infinite
has edges am I capable of making art.

-Bernard Cooper, “Marketing Memory”

“The Whole Truth?”

Creating composite characters

Compressing time
Compressing several conversations into one
Clarifying a quotation
Exaggerating one physical detail while omitting
another
Cueing the Reader
“I imagine”
“I would like to believe”
I don’t remember exactly, but, I seem to see”
“I am imagining that it must have been”
“Perhaps”
Cueing the Reader

“This is how my father sounded”

“This is what Sundays were like at my house,”
Cueing the Reader

Writers can also directly tell the reader what they’re up

to. Full disclosure lets readers know what we’re in for.

Example:

Lying: A Metaphorical Memoir (Lauren Slater)

Ethical Habits of Mind

No two nonfiction pieces pose precisely the same ethical

questions or issues.

Writing about the real world is just too complex, too

nuanced, and too filled with unpredictable humanity to
reduce any situation to an ethical formula.
Ethical Habits of Mind

The only workable route to ethical behavior is working

through a process that weighs competing interests, asks
key questions, and considers all practical alternatives.

Only a commitment to truth and decency unbridles the

full power of storytelling.
Ethical Habits of Mind

Insight may be the writer’s most valuable contribution,

the mission that justifies all toil and frustration that
come with an honest effort to find the patterns that
define our common experience.
 “
And all the while, quite beyond matters of
technique, it enjoys an advantage so obvious,
so built-in, one almost forgets what a power it
has: the simple fact that the reader knows all
this actually happened.

-Tom Wolfe
Ethical Habits of Mind

Ultimately, the best reason for ethical reporting and

writing is the power of truth.
References
Burroway, Janet. Imaginative Writing: The Elements of Craft, 4th ed. New
York: Pearson, 2014.

Gutkind, Lee. The Art of Creative Nonfiction. New York: John Wiley & Sons,
Inc., 1997

Hart, Jack. Story Craft: The Complete Guide to Writing Narrative Nonfiction.
Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2011.

Hidalgo, Cristina P. Creative Nonfiction: A Manual for Filipino Writers, 2nd

ed. Quezon City: UP Press, 2005.

Lopate, Phillip. The Craft of Literary Nonfiction. New York: Free Press, 2013.

Miller, Brenda and Suzanne Paola. Tell It Slant: Writing and Shaping
Creative Nonfiction. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2005.