What Is Creative Non-Fiction?
If you’ve ever written a personal statement or college essay, you’ve written creative non-fiction.
Creative non-fiction blends fact and fiction, using the techniques of creative writing to create compelling narratives rooted in reality.
The most common subgenres of creative non-fiction are memoirs, personal essays, narrative history, literary journalism, and travel writing.
In this blog post, we’ll learn what creative non-fiction is, the common types, and get started writing our own.
Memoirs
Memoir comes from the French word for memory, and that is what a memoir encompasses. Memories of our lives, surrounding a theme or narrative thread.
Memoirs have resurged in recent years with the Obamas, Jennette McCurdy, Prince Harry and Britney Spears releasing memoirs in a relatively short space of time.
A memoir might tell the story of an entire life up to the present, such as in Spare and Becoming. It may also narrow down to a specific period in the author’s life, such as President Obama’s odyssey through his campaign and presidency in A Promised Land or Cheryl Strayed’s healing journey and hike along the Pacific Crest Trail in Wild.
To me, the undisputed Queen of Creative Non-Fiction is the late, great Joan Didion. Her two memoirs, Blue Nights and The Year of Magical Thinking are an study in grief and memory.
Memoirs tell the story of someone’s life, whether all or part of it, through emotive writing, life lessons, and introspection. Borrowing descriptive language and narrative tecniques from fiction, they have the power to truly compel a reader and have them reflecting on their own lives.
Personal Essays
If a memoir is a collection of essays and stories surrounding a central theme, a personal essay narrowly focuses in on a specific moment or topic. They are much shorter than memoirs. A few pages rather than a whole book.
Personal Essays are the answer to college entrance exams and English essays: Who inspires me most? What moment changed me as a person? Where were you when you got the news?
These kinds of essays are deeply personal, while allowing the writer to weave in life lessons and observations on society from their perspective. The resulting essay from anyone of the above questions will be subjective and varied, showing the diversity of our own experiences.
An essay can take root from something small and relatively mundane, such as Annie Dillard seeing a weasel in the forest and using it to study instinctual living in Living Like Weasels. It can also be much broader. Joan Didion wrote about the lessons years of writing in notebooks taught her in On Keeping A Notebook (a must read for any writer). James Baldwin examined race through the lens of his father’s death in Notes of a Native Son.
Given their length and specific focus, personal essays are a great place to start for anyone who wants to try their at hand at creative non-fiction.
Narrative History
You may remember history textbooks from your school days and how - ahem - uninspiring they were. Filled with dates and names, and giving nothing to really connect you to what you were reading about. (That's coming from someone who studied history at university!)
Narrative History, another sub-genre of creative non-fiction can be so much more accessible and compelling than those old, well-worn textbooks.
For one, they often dive deeper into who was behind what we are reading about. They offer accounts from survivors or witnesses, and use narrative techniques to relay the past in a compelling way.
The Devil In The White City is a popular example of narrative history being accessible to the public. This non-fiction book about a serial killer during Chicago’s World Fair has been widely read and appears all over BookTok.
Other examples are Anne Applebaum's Pulitzer winning Gulag and Stephen Ambrose's Band of Brothers. Both write emotively about the experiences of figures and events that can seem remote, making them accessible to us as readers.
Literary Journalism
Literary Journalism is a sub genre of creative non-fiction and can loosely be described as anything you'd find in an edition of The New Yorker.
Where a personal essay will be highly personal and subjective, literary journalism, like all journalism, should stay objective. It should also layer in narration, the writer’s experience and personal insights. Techniques such as the extended metaphor may also be used throughout.
One of the best examples is Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem, an investigative journaling piece from the 60s on the Summer of Love, Haight-Ashbury and drug use. In the most emotional moment, Didion recalls seeing a child high on crack on the famous San Francisco street.
Travel Writing
The final sub-genre we will look at is travel writing, combining two of my favourite things.
Travel writing could come in the form of guides to a specific destination, a travel diary, the do’s and don’t’s of a location. The possibilities really are endless.
Like the memoir and personal essay, travel writing has more scope to show your unique style and voice, while writing about really places.
Bill Bryson’s books are great examples of these, such as The Lost Continent and A Walk In The Woods. He combines his dry and witty narrative voice with the stories of the places he has visited, and commentary on the everything from the economic climate of middle America to murders on the Appalachian Trail.
Travel writing allows you to reflect on where you’ve been and what you’ve seen, while highlighting personal transformation.
Quick Tips for Creative Non-Fiction
Research well
Tell the truth, tell the truth, tell the truth
Layer in personal insights and life lessons
Use literary techniques such as narration and the extended metaphor
A few prompts to get started
Think of a moment you were taught a life lesson. What was it and how did it come about?
Who is a historical figure that fascinates you? Spend sometime doing research on this person, and write a short essay on their life with some narrative techniques.
Tell me about your favourite travel destination. What can you feel with your senses when there? How does it make you feel?
Write about a hobby that you love and share your insights, personal experiences, and how it has shaped your life.
Have a read of your local newspaper, or the main page of a tabloid such as the Daily Mail. Take a story from there and rewrite it in a more literary style, for example using an extended metaphor throughout, or writing as if you are seeing it from an omnipresent position.
I hope you found this guide to creative non-fiction useful, and inspired you to try your hand at this form of writing yourself.
