Keep It Real: Everything You Need to Know About Researching and Writing Creative Nonfiction
Lee Gutkind
Language: English
Pages: 160
ISBN: 0393330982
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
The one guide every creative nonfiction writer needs to turn to when being "creative."
Writers of memoir and narrative nonfiction are experiencing difficult days with the discovery that some well-known works in the genre contain exaggerations--or are partially fabricated. But what are the parameters of creative nonfiction? Keep It Real begins by defining creative nonfiction. Then it explores the flexibility of the form--the liberties and the boundaries that allow writers to be as truthful, factual, and artful as possible. A succinct but rich compendium of ideas, terms, and techniques, Keep It Real clarifies the ins and outs of writing creative nonfiction. Starting with acknowledgment of sources, running through fact-checking, metaphor, and navel gazing, and responsibilities to their subjects, this book provides all the information you need to write with verve while remaining true to your story.
made, in both researching and reconstructing the story. In a foreword or afterword, a writer can try to shape the way the work will be read. The author’s note that opens Schindler’s List, Thomas Keneally’s best-selling 1982 volume, offers a model of a masterful foreword. Keneally describes how he stumbled onto Oskar Schindler’s story during a 1980 visit to a Beverly Hills luggage store. There he met one of the twelve hundred Jews Schindler had rescued from the ghettos and transports of the Nazi
cigarette smoke. The Mexicans gathered at the table are desperate, poor, and about to risk all they have to cross the border into the United States. Ted Conover tells this story in his book Coyotes: A Journey through the Secret World of America’s Illegal Aliens. To research this book, Conover posed as an immigrant for a year, crossing the U.S.-Mexican border four times and traveling through various states with migrant workers, picking lemons and oranges alongside them. Conover used a technique
opinion; writers have to reach out to readers in a number of different and compelling ways. This reaching out is essential if a writer hopes to find an audience. Creative Nonfiction receives approximately three hundred unsolicited essays a month. The vast majority of these submissions are rejected, and one common reason is an overwhelming egocentrism. In other words, writers write too much about themselves and what they think without seeking a universal focus so that readers are properly and
revered 1932 tome on the sport. Hemingway implicates himself by admitting that he finds the goring of horses humorous. His confession allows him and the reader to get to the heart of the bullfighting ritual. “This is the sort of thing you should not admit,” Hemingway writes. “[B]ut it is because such things have never been admitted that the bullfight has never been explained.” Hemingway’s willingness to explore his own reactions to the spectacle and to present himself as a sort of antihero helps
Essays by Italian-American Writers Rage and Reconciliation: Inspiring a Health Care Revolution On Nature: Great Writers on the Great Outdoors Healing: Twenty Prominent Authors Write About Inspirational Moments of Achieving Health and Gaining Insight Lessons in Persuasion Connecting: Twenty Prominent Authors Write About the Relationships That Shape Our Lives The Essayist at Work: Profiles of Creative Nonfiction Writers Surviving Crisis: Twenty Prominent Authors Write About Events That