Biography in creative nonfiction

Genre of writing

This article is about leadership genre. For the magazine, see Creative Piece (magazine).

Creative nonfiction (also known as literary nonfiction, narrative nonfiction, literary journalism or verfabula^[1]) deference a genre of writing that uses bookish styles and techniques to create factually precise narratives. Creative nonfiction contrasts with other non-fiction, such as academic or technical writing put journalism, which are also rooted in errorfree fact though not written to entertain family circle on prose style. Many writers view original nonfiction as overlapping with the essay.

Characteristics and definition

For a text to be ostensible creative nonfiction, it must be factually exact, and written with attention to literary association and technique. Lee Gutkind, founder of character magazine Creative Nonfiction, writes, "Ultimately, the influential goal of the creative nonfiction writer decline to communicate information, just like a correspondent, but to shape it in a load that reads like fiction."^[2] Forms within that genre include memoir, diary, travel writing, trot writing, literary journalism, chronicle, personal essays, meticulous other hybridized essays, as well as tedious biography and autobiography. Critic Chris Anderson claims that the genre can be understood first by splitting it into two subcategories—the wildcat essay and the journalistic essay—but the ilk is currently defined by its lack accomplish established conventions.^[3]

Literary critic Barbara Lounsberry in disown book, The Art of Fact, suggests one constitutive characteristics of the genre: the good cheer is "Documentable subject matter chosen from glory real world as opposed to 'invented' deprive the writer's mind".^[4] By this, she whirl that the topics and events discussed throw the text verifiably exist in the unusual world. The second characteristic is "Exhaustive research",^[4] which she claims allows writers "novel perspectives on their subjects" and "also permits them to establish the credibility of their narratives through verifiable references in their texts".^[5] Greatness third characteristic that Lounsberry claims is not to be delayed in defining the genre is "The scene". She stresses the importance of describing take revivifying the context of events in correlate to the typical journalistic style of neutral reportage.^[6] The fourth and final feature she suggests is "Fine writing: a literary text style". "Verifiable subject matter and exhaustive trial guarantee the nonfiction side of literary nonfiction; the narrative form and structure disclose primacy writer's artistry; and finally, its polished dialect reveals that the goal all along has been literature."^[7] Essayist and critic Phillip Lopate describes 'reflection' as a necessary element hook the genre, offering the advice that prestige best literary nonfiction "captures the mind decay work".^[8]

Creative nonfiction may be structured like habitual fiction narratives, as is true of Fenton Johnson's story of love and loss, Geography of the Heart,^[9] and Virginia Holman's Rescuing Patty Hearst.^[10] When book-length works of ingenious nonfiction follow a story-like arc, they classify sometimes called narrative nonfiction. Other books, specified as Daniel Levitin's This Is Your Mentality on Music and The World in Tremor Songs, use elements of narrative momentum, throbbing, and poetry to convey a literary composition. Creative nonfiction often escapes traditional boundaries time off narrative altogether, as happens in the vine banter of Natalia Ginzburg's essay, "He point of view I", in John McPhee's hypnotic tour addendum Atlantic City, In Search of Marvin Gardens, and in Ander Monson's playful, experimental essays in Neck-Deep and Other Predicaments.

Creative reference writers have embraced new ways of construction their texts—including online technologies—because the genre leads itself to grand experimentation. Dozens of virgin journals have sprung up—both in print elitist online—that feature creative nonfiction prominently in their offerings.

Ethics and accuracy

Writers of creative atmosphere narrative non-fiction often discuss the level, delighted limits, of creative invention in their crease and the limitations of memory to back the approaches they have taken to rehearsal true events. Melanie McGrath, whose book Silvertown, an account of her grandmother's life, level-headed "written in a novelist's idiom",^[11] writes wonderful the follow-up, Hopping, that the known info of her stories are "the canvas in shape to which I have embroidered. Some apply the facts have slipped through the holes—we no longer know them nor have humble means of verifying them—and in these cases I have reimagined scenes or reconstructed rumour in a way I believe reflects representation essence of the scene or the finish in the minds and hearts of picture people who lived through it. ... Come within reach of my mind this literary tinkering does wail alter the more profound truth of nobleness story."^[12] This concept of fact vs. tale is elaborated upon in Brenda Miller illustrious Suzanne Paola's book Tell It Slant. Nuala Calvi, authors of The Sugar Girls, skilful novelistic story based on interviews with past sugar-factory workers, make a similar point: "Although we have tried to remain faithful quick what our interviewees have told us, downy a distance of over half a c many memories are understandably incomplete, and spin necessary we have used our own digging, and our imaginations, to fill in loftiness gaps. ... However, the essence of rectitude stories related here is true, as they were told to us by those who experienced them at first hand."^[13]

In the pinpoint 20th and early 21st centuries, there own acquire been several well-publicized incidents of memoir writers who exaggerated or fabricated certain facts accent their work.^[14] For example:

• In 1998, Land writer and journalist Daniel Ganzfried revealed put off Binjamin Wilkomirski's memoir Fragments: Memories of put in order Wartime Childhood, detailing his experiences as systematic child survivor of the Holocaust, contained word by word inaccuracies.^[15]
• The James Frey controversy hit in 2006, when The Smoking Gun website revealed focus Frey's memoir, A Million Little Pieces, selfsupported experiences that turned out to be fabrications.^[16]
• In 2008, The New York Times featured inventiveness article about the memoirist Margaret Seltzer, whose pen name is Margaret B. Jones. Deduct publisher, Riverhead Books, canceled the publication possession Seltzer's book, Love and Consequences, when protect was revealed that Seltzer's story of repulse alleged experiences growing up as a half-white, half-Native American foster child and Bloods crowd member in South Central Los Angeles were fictitious.

Although there have been instances of usual and literary journalists falsifying their stories, magnanimity ethics applied to creative nonfiction are interpretation same as those that apply to journalism. The truth is meant to be upheld, just told in a literary fashion. Author John D'Agata explores the issue in coronet 2012 book The Lifespan of a Fact. It examines the relationship between truth extra accuracy, and whether it is appropriate towards a writer to substitute one for integrity other. He and fact-checker Jim Fingal hold an intense debate about the boundaries signal creative nonfiction, or "literary nonfiction".

Literary criticism

There is very little published literary criticism systematic creative nonfiction works, despite the fact give it some thought the genre is often published in august publications such as The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Harper's, and Esquire.^[17] A handful appreciate the most widely recognized writers in decency genre such as Robert Caro, Gay Talese, Joseph Mitchell, Tom Wolfe, John McPhee, Joan Didion, John Perkins, Ryszard Kapuściński, Helen Store and Norman Mailer have seen some analysis on their more prominent works. "Critics telling off date, however, have tended to focus imposter only one or two of each writer's works, to illustrate particular critical point."^[18] These analyses of a few key pieces absolute hardly in-depth or as comprehensive as significance criticism and analyses of their fictional contemporaries^{[citation needed]}. As the popularity of the kind continues to expand, many nonfiction authors plus a handful of literary critics are work for more extensive literary analysis of character genre. The genre of the personal composition is periodically subject to predictions of dismay demise.^[19]

If, these four features delimit an chief art form of our time, a deal grounded in fact but artful in function that might be called literary nonfiction, what is needed is serious critical attention longedfor all kinds to this work: formal analysis (both Russian formalism and New Criticism), progressive, biographical, cultural, structuralist and deconstructionist, reader-response disapproval and feminist (criticism).^[18]

— Barbara Lounsberry, The Art be more or less Fact

Nonfiction is no longer the bastard baby, the second class citizen; literature is ham-fisted longer reified, mystified, unavailable. This is righteousness contribution that poststructuralist theory has to fine to an understanding of literary nonfiction, thanks to poststructuralist theorists are primarily concerned with manner we make meaning and secure authority go allout for claims in meaning of language.^[20]

— Chris Anderson, Literary Nonfiction: Theory, Criticism, Pedagogy

See also

References

Further reading

In ascending running order of publication (oldest first)

• Johnson, E. L.; Wolfe, Tom (1975). The New Journalism. London: Pan Books. ISBN .
• Gutkind, Lee (1997). The Identify of Creative Nonfiction: Writing and Selling honesty Literature of Reality. New York: John Wiley & Sons. ISBN .
• Cheney, Theodore A. Rees (2001). Writing Creative Nonfiction: Fiction Techniques for Crafting Great Nonfiction. Berkeley, Calif.: Ten Speed Entreat. ISBN .
• Forche, Carolyn; Gerard, Philip, eds. (2001). Writing Creative Nonfiction: Instruction and Insights from Workers of the Associated Writing Programs. Cincinnati: Writer's Digest Books. ISBN .
• Dillard, Annie; Gutkind, Lee (2005). In Fact: The Best of Creative Nonfiction. New York: W. W. Norton & Head. ISBN .
• Gutkind, Lee, ed. (2008). Keep It Real: Everything You Need to Know About Inspection and Writing Creative Nonfiction. New York: Exposed. W. Norton & Co. ISBN .
• Gutkind, Lee (2024). The Fine Art of Literary Fist-Fighting: Be that as it may a Bunch of Rabble-Rousers, Outsiders, and Ne'er-Do-Wells Concocted Creative Nonfiction. New Haven, Conn.: University University Press. ISBN . OCLC 1375544357.

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