Although demanding, creative nonfiction is rich territory for writers. It’s attractive to journalists and fiction writers alike, a place to exercise strengths – like the research skills of a reporter or the dramatic technique of a novelist – and build skills you don’t currently have.
Or, if you’re willing to do the work, you just make creative nonfiction your thing from the start by taking classes, attending workshops, or pursuing an appropriate MFA.
Creative nonfiction is a broad category, chock full of an array of subcategories. Memoir and essays, of course, but also (it’s a long list) writing about things like food, travel, crime, music, and history. A subgenre can be broken down further. For example, under travel/adventure, you can find disaster nonfiction: think Into Thin Air, Jon Krakauer’s terrifyingly vivid, detailed journalism from the top of Mount Everest.
The controversy long dogging creative nonfiction (a.k.a. literary nonfiction, narrative nonfiction, narrative journalism, etc.) is in its defining properties. As Lee Gutkind, founding editor of Creative Nonfiction magazine, described in his 2012 book, You Can’t Make This Stuff Up: The Complete Guide to Creative Nonfiction – From Memoir to Literary Journalism and Everything In Between, one of the chief complaints about the term “creative nonfiction” is that the word “creative” must suggest that “making things up” is OK.
Gutkind succinctly argues that the “creative” in creative nonfiction refers to literary craft, not yarn-spinning fabrication.
“In some ways, creative
