| 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. |