CRAFT

NEW // The Fact Behind the Facts, or How You Can Get It All Right and Still Get It All Wrong
By Philip Gerard
I interviewed the fire fighters, the boy who had saved his girlfriend, the girlfriend herself, the guidance counselor. I got the license number of the car, wrote down its make a model and described the damage. I noted the shadow of the gym slanting across the tarmac, the temperature and clouds and the size of the crowd. My notes were copious and thorough. I typed up an account of the incident and it ran on the front page with a photo and a headline about boy-hero saving girl—my first front-page byline. My career was launched.

Some years later I was sitting at that same bar enjoying a beer when a stranger took the stool beside me. He said, “I know you,” and I was pleased to be recognized. “You wrote that story about the burning car,” he went on, and I admitted that yes, I had. “Well,” he said, “it was a great story. You got everything right except one thing.”

Advice to My Friend Beth's Undergraduate Creative Nonfiction Students
By Dustin Michael
But aside from the fun that comes from committing shameless acts of libel against your family and acquaintances, creative nonfiction is great because it lets you tell your own stories. I think it's just about the best way of letting others know who you are, and one of the most lasting.

Nonfiction is Translation
By Brian Goedde
Nonfiction is translation, a word that literally means to “carry across.” Where translators carry a text from one language into another, nonfiction writers carry the “texts” of the worlds around us and the worlds within us to the text of words on the page.

Of Nails, Nonfiction, and Various Adhesives
By Shane Borrowman
Writing creative nonfiction is all about carpentry, about nailing the pieces of narrative together with transitions, about spiking the past to the present to clarify both, about gluing surface events together to add strength and depth and meaning.

On Miniatures
By Lia Purpura
The miniature is mysterious. We wonder how all those parts work when they're so small. We wonder "are they real?" (It's a question never asked, of course, of giant things which are all too real.) It's why we always linger over an infant's fingers and toes, those astonishing replicas: we can't quite believe that they work.

Prose Poems, Paragraphs, Brief Lyric Nonfiction
By Peggy Shumaker
The compression of the brief form, completely familiar to poets and to those who read poetry, gains a fine elasticity in nonfiction. Tone can range from somber to whimsical, lament to praise. Anything writers can do with long forms has parallels in brief forms.

FRELECTION: The Transformative Power of Reflection in Nonfiction
By Rebecca McClanahan
In discussions about writing, we usually speak of reflection in rhetorical terms, as a mode of thought or a tone of voice. But what interests me more is the notion of reflection as a turning, convoluting, sometimes distorting but always transforming power.

A Riff on the [NONFICTIONOW] Writing Conference
By Rosemary Davis
What are your family secrets? Use a metaphor. Place moves and shapes us. It is a melody driving through our work. Learn the climate and terrain of yourself - the tiniest habits. What is your distraction? A vacuum cleaner? Write what you know and discover what you don’t.

Writing Brief: Notes on Past and Future Brevity Submissions
By Linda Norlen
Good ideas are common; so are interesting experiences. The challenge is to develop the germ of a piece into something that is complete and resolved, and to do it in very few words.

On the “Speedy Narrative”
By Jeff Gundy
The main risk of summary is that it can go dull through too much abstraction and generalization. Inversely, a main risk of scene is that it can go dull through too many specifics and get bogged down in too many non-essential details. The speedy narrative may be a way of navigating between those risks.

Copyediting. Vital. Do It or Have It Done.
By Diana Hume George
I evaluate manuscripts for several journals and presses, and it astonishes me how many people don’t take proofreading seriously. In my capacity as a screener, I automatically reject any book or essay that does not honor the conventions. It doesn’t matter how good the content is.

Innocence & Experience: Voice in Creative Nonfiction
By Sue William Silverman
My observation is that most writers employ two major voices in their work. I’ve defined these voices by re-imagining phrases originated by William Blake, labeling one a Song (or Voice) of Innocence, the other, a Song (or Voice) of Experience.

Laughing Through Life: Humor in Autobiographical Writing
By Tim Jackson
The world around us is often a frightening place. We can read a newspaper or watch the news on TV and be overwhelmed with morbid information. We need a laugh now and then. Humor really does tend to save us when things simply aren’t going our way.