Creative nonfiction (also known as literary nonfiction , narrative nonfiction , literary journalism or verfabula ) is a genre of writing that uses literary styles and techniques to create factually accurate narratives. Creative nonfiction contrasts with other non-fiction, such as academic or technical writing or journalism, which are also rooted in accurate fact though not written to entertain based on prose style. Many writers view creative nonfiction as overlapping with the essay.
34-625: For a text to be considered creative nonfiction, it must be factually accurate, and written with attention to literary style and technique. Lee Gutkind , founder of the magazine Creative Nonfiction , writes, "Ultimately, the primary goal of the creative nonfiction writer is to communicate information, just like a reporter, but to shape it in a way that reads like fiction." Forms within this genre include memoir, diary, travel writing , food writing , literary journalism , chronicle , personal essays , and other hybridized essays, as well as some biography and autobiography. Critic Chris Anderson claims that
68-408: A discourse grounded in fact but artful in execution that might be called literary nonfiction, what is needed is serious critical attention of all kinds to this work: formal criticism (both Russian formalism and New Criticism ), historical, biographical, cultural, structuralist and deconstructionist , reader-response criticism and feminist (criticism). Nonfiction is no longer the bastard child,
102-453: A few key pieces are hardly in-depth or as comprehensive as the criticism and analyses of their fictional contemporaries . As the popularity of the genre continues to expand, many nonfiction authors and a handful of literary critics are calling for more extensive literary analysis of the genre. The genre of the personal essay is periodically subject to predictions of its demise. If, these four features delimit an important art form of our time,
136-888: A larger thesis. The sentences within a paragraph may support and extend one another in various ways. Advice on the use of paragraphs may include the avoidance of incoherence, choppiness, or long-windedness, and rigid construction; and can be found in style guides. The following rewrite of the sentence, " These are the times that try men's souls. " by Thomas Paine , changes the impact of the message. Authors convey their messages in different manners. For example: Hamlet , Act II, Scene 2 (1599–1602) by William Shakespeare : A Tale of Two Cities (1859) by Charles Dickens : " Memories of Christmas " (1945) by Dylan Thomas : " The Strawberry Window " (1955) by Ray Bradbury : " Letter from Birmingham Jail " (1963) by Martin Luther King Jr. : The writer's voice (or writing voice )
170-442: A little surprised, perhaps expecting the predictable Dickensian East End of much misery-memoir writing. 'This is a lot jollier than we expected,' they told us.' In a quotation featured on the cover of the paperback, Melanie McGrath, author of the books Silvertown and Hopping , described the book as 'An authoritative and highly readable work of social history which brings vividly to life a fascinating part of East End life before it
204-400: A writer's individual style. While this article focuses on practical approaches to style, style has been analyzed from a number of systematic approaches, including corpus linguistics , historical variation, rhetoric , sociolinguistics , sylistics , and World Englishes . Diction , or the choice of words , is an element of a writer's style. Suggestions for using diction include
238-473: Is a term some critics use to refer to distinctive features of a written work in terms of spoken utterance. The voice of a literary work is then the specific group of characteristics displayed by the narrator or poetic "speaker" (or, in some uses, the actual author behind them), assessed in terms of tone , style , or personality . Distinctions between various kinds of narrative voice tend to be distinctions between kinds of narrator in terms of how they address
272-491: Is a term that may refer, at one and the same time, to singular aspects of an individual's writing habits or a particular document and to aspects that go well-beyond the individual writer. Beyond the essential elements of spelling , grammar , and punctuation , writing style is the choice of words , sentence structure, and paragraph structure, used to convey the meaning effectively. The former are referred to as rules , elements , essentials , mechanics , or handbook ;
306-430: Is crucial in defining the genre is "The scene". She stresses the importance of describing and revivifying the context of events in contrast to the typical journalistic style of objective reportage. The fourth and final feature she suggests is "Fine writing: a literary prose style". "Verifiable subject matter and exhaustive research guarantee the nonfiction side of literary nonfiction; the narrative form and structure disclose
340-529: Is elaborated upon in Brenda Miller and Suzanne Paola's book Tell It Slant . Nuala Calvi, authors of The Sugar Girls , a novelistic story based on interviews with former sugar-factory workers, make a similar point: "Although we have tried to remain faithful to what our interviewees have told us, at a distance of over half a century many memories are understandably incomplete, and where necessary we have used our own research, and our imaginations, to fill in
374-567: Is lost forever.' On 8 April 2012, The Sugar Girls debuted at No. 10 in the Sunday Times Bestseller List, spending five weeks in the top ten. In the paper's end-of-year round-up it ranked second for bestsellers in History, having sold 37,760 copies. In 2024, Barrett and Calvi released a sequel, The Sugar Girls of Love Lane , this time focussing on the women who worked at Tate & Lyle’s Liverpool factory, from
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#1732765947753408-464: Is the manner of expressing thought in language characteristic of an individual, period, school, or nation. As Bryan Ray notes, however, style is a broader concern, one that can describe "readers' relationships with, texts, the grammatical choices writers make, the importance of adhering to norms in certain contexts and deviating from them in others, the expression of social identity, and the emotional effects of particular devices on audiences." Thus, style
442-549: The East End in the 1940s and 1950s. They would take in their dungarees, making them figure-hugging, and stuff their turbans with underwear to make them sit high up on their heads, which was considered fashionable. But she also claimed that the women shared a common confident 'attitude' and were 'no pushovers', likening them to the striking workers at Ford's Dagenham plant featured in the popular movie Made in Dagenham . In
476-575: The Heart , and Virginia Holman's Rescuing Patty Hearst . When book-length works of creative nonfiction follow a story-like arc, they are sometimes called narrative nonfiction . Other books, such as Daniel Levitin 's This Is Your Brain on Music and The World in Six Songs , use elements of narrative momentum, rhythm, and poetry to convey a literary quality. Creative nonfiction often escapes traditional boundaries of narrative altogether, as happens in
510-415: The bags of sugar, and making the tins of Lyle's Golden Syrup. Women who worked there showed great 'loyalty' and 'pride'. They were, however, very tribal, and depending on which factory they worked at, workers would speak of themselves as coming from 'Tates's' or 'Lyles's', competing against each other at netball, athletics, football and cricket in the company sports day, which was held once a year. Although
544-821: The bittersweet banter of Natalia Ginzburg 's essay, "He and I", in John McPhee 's hypnotic tour of Atlantic City, In Search of Marvin Gardens , and in Ander Monson 's playful, experimental essays in Neck-Deep and Other Predicaments . Creative nonfiction writers have embraced new ways of forming their texts—including online technologies—because the genre leads itself to grand experimentation. Dozens of new journals have sprung up—both in print and online—that feature creative nonfiction prominently in their offerings. Writers of creative or narrative non-fiction often discuss
578-419: The book is based on interviews with over fifty former workers, the four main characters featured are: As well as these four main women, the book features various other individual stories, such as: Nuala Calvi, one of the co-authors of the book, characterised the female workers at Tate & Lyle – known colloquially as the 'Sugar Girls' – as 'glamorous', at least by the standards of teenagers leaving school in
612-742: The boundaries of creative nonfiction, or "literary nonfiction". There is very little published literary criticism of creative nonfiction works, despite the fact that the genre is often published in respected publications such as The New Yorker , Vanity Fair , Harper's , and Esquire . A handful of the most widely recognized writers in the genre such as Robert Caro , Gay Talese , Joseph Mitchell , Tom Wolfe , John McPhee , Joan Didion , John Perkins , Ryszard Kapuściński , Helen Garner and Norman Mailer have seen some criticism on their more prominent works. "Critics to date, however, have tended to focus on only one or two of each writer's works, to illustrate particular critical point." These analyses of
646-436: The ethics applied to creative nonfiction are the same as those that apply to journalism. The truth is meant to be upheld, just told in a literary fashion. Essayist John D'Agata explores the issue in his 2012 book The Lifespan of a Fact . It examines the relationship between truth and accuracy, and whether it is appropriate for a writer to substitute one for the other. He and fact-checker Jim Fingal have an intense debate about
680-420: The facts have slipped through the holes—we no longer know them nor have any means of verifying them—and in these cases I have reimagined scenes or reconstructed events in a way I believe reflects the essence of the scene or the event in the minds and hearts of the people who lived through it. ... To my mind this literary tinkering does not alter the more profound truth of the story." This concept of fact vs. fiction
714-427: The family income'. In a separate article, her co-author Duncan Barrett made a similar point: 'The women we spoke to recalled the great pride their mothers would take in keeping their houses spotless and how, despite a lack of money, families would always make do, helping out the neighbours when they could, knowing that the favour would always be returned. When we handed in the manuscript of the book, our publishers were
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#1732765947753748-429: The gaps. ... However, the essence of the stories related here is true, as they were told to us by those who experienced them at first hand." In the late 20th and early 21st centuries, there have been several well-publicized incidents of memoir writers who exaggerated or fabricated certain facts in their work. For example: Although there have been instances of traditional and literary journalists falsifying their stories,
782-419: The genre can be understood best by splitting it into two subcategories—the personal essay and the journalistic essay—but the genre is currently defined by its lack of established conventions. Literary critic Barbara Lounsberry in her book, The Art of Fact , suggests four constitutive characteristics of the genre: the first is "Documentable subject matter chosen from the real world as opposed to 'invented' from
816-428: The latter are referred to as style , or rhetoric . The rules are about what a writer does; style is about how the writer does it. While following the rules drawn from established English usage, a writer has great flexibility in how to express a concept. Some have suggested that the point of writing style is to: Some have suggested that writing style should not be used to: although these aspects may be part of
850-400: The level, and limits, of creative invention in their works and the limitations of memory to justify the approaches they have taken to relating true events. Melanie McGrath, whose book Silvertown , an account of her grandmother's life, is "written in a novelist's idiom", writes in the follow-up, Hopping , that the known facts of her stories are "the canvas on to which I have embroidered. Some of
884-659: The mid-1940s onwards. Written by Duncan Barrett and Nuala Calvi , it was published by Collins in 2012. The authors were inspired to write it by Jennifer Worth 's Call the Midwife . In the East End of the 1940s and 1950s, thousands of girls left school every year at fourteen and went to work in the factories that stood alongside the docks in Silvertown , in the East End of London . The stretch of factories running between Tate & Lyle 's refineries for sugar and syrup
918-490: The reader (rather than in terms of their perception of events, as in the distinct concept of point of view ). Likewise in non-narrative poems, distinctions are sometimes made between the personal voice of a private lyric and the assumed voice (the persona ) of a dramatic monologue. An author uses sentence patterns not only to make a point or tell a story, but to do it in a characteristic way. Writing coaches, teachers, and authors of creative writing books often speak of
952-399: The same article, Calvi also commented on the discrepancy between the way the East End of London is often represented – 'linked in the popular imagination with gangsters, criminals and prostitutes (or the grim squalor of Call the Midwife )' – and the reality of life for the families of the women she interviewed – 'honest, hard-working families' who 'brought up their children to contribute to
986-459: The second class citizen; literature is no longer reified, mystified, unavailable. This is the contribution that poststructuralist theory has to make to an understanding of literary nonfiction, since poststructuralist theorists are primarily concerned with how we make meaning and secure authority for claims in meaning of language. In ascending chronological order of publication (oldest first) Writing style In literature , writing style
1020-409: The use of a dictionary, and the avoidance of redundancy and clichés. Such advice can be found in style guides. The choice of sentence structure pertains to how meaning is conveyed, to phrasing, to word choice, and to tone. Advice on these and other topics can be found in style guides. Paragraphs may express a single unfolding idea. Paragraphs may be particular steps in the expression of
1054-439: The writer's artistry; and finally, its polished language reveals that the goal all along has been literature." Essayist and critic Phillip Lopate describes 'reflection' as a necessary element of the genre, offering the advice that the best literary nonfiction "captures the mind at work". Creative nonfiction may be structured like traditional fiction narratives, as is true of Fenton Johnson 's story of love and loss, Geography of
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1088-416: The writer's mind". By this, she means that the topics and events discussed in the text verifiably exist in the natural world. The second characteristic is "Exhaustive research", 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". The third characteristic that Lounsberry claims
1122-576: The writer's voice as distinguished from other literary elements . In some instances, voice is defined nearly the same as style; in others, as genre , literary mode , point of view, mood , or tone. The Sugar Girls The Sugar Girls: Tales of Hardship, Love and Happiness in Tate & Lyle's East End is a work of narrative non-fiction based on interviews with women who worked in Tate & Lyle 's East End factories in Silvertown from
1156-559: Was known as the 'Sugar Mile', and also included Keiller's jam and marmalade factory. Tate & Lyle's two factories had been built in the late nineteenth century by two rival sugar refiners, Henry Tate and Abram Lyle , whose companies had merged in the 1920s. Of all the factories in Silvertown, Tate & Lyle's offered the best wages and social life for girls leaving school. There were various jobs available to women workers at Tate & Lyle's factories, including printing and packing
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