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A review of Writing Creative Nonfiction: Instruction and Insights from Teachers of the Associated Writing Programs

by Carolyn Forche and Philip Gerard

A how-to book on writing the hot new genre: creative nonfiction

Reviewed by: Nancy Chapple

Writing Creative Nonfiction: Instruction and Insights from Teachers of the Associated Writing Programs So you think you want to become a writer ... you have stories you want to tell you think others would like to hear. You’ve started exercising your voice, writing a bit here and there. If you’re like me, you’ve decided invented short stories and novels would be too far away from your own personal truth, so you’re looking for the right literary form to capture what you have to say. I’ve found no more sensitive and inspiring guide than Writing Creative Nonfiction. It consists of a good twenty-five essays on how to go about writing and close to as many self-contained pieces or excerpts by the same folks.

The creative nonfiction genre starts with the writer and how he perceives the world, but the result need not be memoir per se (examples in this volume include essays about the natural world or about how religion is practiced; historical narrative written from a strong personal perspective; wartime journalism from Sarajevo or Baghdad; the personal angle on pursuing a journalistic assignment). "All nonfiction is really told in the technical first-person point of view: There is always a narrator doing the telling, and the narrator is not some fictional persona but the author." So the question or whether one should write in first or third person becomes quite an interesting one.

What if you’re trying to make the leap from short pieces to a coherent longer work: how on earth do you do it? I got great ideas on alternatives to telling a story chronologically, one being: separate out and focus on the elements you want to discuss, then weave a "braided story" combining them. As always, stories about how best not to structure one’s work are as helpful as positively formulated tips. "One filmmaker had done a biography of his father that started with birth and proceeded, lockstep, through all of the major events of his life .. Had the filmmaker begun with his own birth and then simultaneously moved forward and backward in time, portraying his father as he came to know him as a child, as well as how he learned about his father’s earlier life, it would have been a much more dramatic and moving narrative."

What about the question of subjectivity vs. objectivity: is it actually legitimate to tell the story through my own personal lens? There is "an illusion created about storytelling itself that there always exists a single, true, and knowable version of What Happened. ... So as nonfiction writers, should we shy away from stories that thwart our every effort to learn and record Truth? Absolutely not. Rather, we should recognize that the genre of creative nonfiction – with its emphasis on stories – is perfectly suited to deal with contested terrain, both in the past and present."

Many of the pieces in the book’s how-to first half conclude with exercises, so you can try out the proposed methods in your own writing. Admittedly, there’s no one next to you to "correct" them. Writing is lonely hard work. But if you’re like me, you’ll feel more encouraged than frustrated by this lovely collection.

Click here to buy this book, or read more about it at Amazon.com: Writing Creative Nonfiction: Instruction and Insights from Teachers of the Associated Writing Programs

Copyright © by Nancy Chapple, 2003










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