What is it? When did it happen? Does the term apply to texts written before the coining of the phrase? Is it basically a license to lie? Is it, like "prose-poetry," an ill-defined grey area which won't actually reveal any form upon examination?
I'm looking for readers' and writers' opinions, rather than simply scanning the Wikipedia page.
I'm not sure exactly but I'm thinking something like Hunter S. Thompson used to do, Robert Penn Warren. Factual stories but written from a unique perspective and done creatively, maybe? You have to be factual if you present it as non fiction. Remember the trouble the author of A Million Little Pieces got in to?
Truman Capote did that with In Cold Blood (I think that was the technique; I could be thinking of something else). The events of the book were all true and the story was factual, but still Capote went into the heads of the "characters" and provided scenes of dialogue between people. It reads like a novel, making it hard to classify as fiction or non-fiction. Most people categorize it as just that, "creative non-fiction."
In an advanced composition course in college I was asked to write two chapters of my life's memoirs, an introductory to those chapters, and something after them. Don't remember what that was called. 20 pages total. I wanted to punch my teacher in the face for the assignment. I hate writing about me. I write fiction. I hide “me” behind more interesting characters.
All that said,
Everything I wrote was true. Everything I wrote was about me. I let people who didn't know me read it and they liked it. Not because I'm interesting. But because I am creative. I took the things I like and enjoy that are also universally liked and enjoyed, like watching movies or coffee or dating. I didn't tell it how I would tell it talking to you in person, but I didn't fabricate either. I just turned myself into a "character" and then made that character interesting. Nothing was false about it. Maybe I wouldn't speak the way he did, But I write the way he did, so I used my wordplay or whatnot to enhance the character of “me.” Since I like movies I used movie terms and functions of a video player to tell the story. Fade to black. Pause. Fast forward. Along with coffee terms when I used to serve it, to describe typical RomCom type highschool relationship stuff, Like I said I was young. Also I used the fact that I liked to write and my exploration as a writer/slam-poetry perfomrer(breif stint) to drive that character.
That’s my only experience with creative non-fiction. Well that and some essays I wrote about film in college where I used the style of the narrative of the film to dissect it. I guess that is an example as well, though I didn’t execute it well.
See I never put myself in my fiction, at least beyond the everyman who is trying to get these weirdos to go away. Something alonge the lines of, "I understand that there are zombies after you. That sucks, I feel for you. Now fill out the forms properly and I'll get you something to stab them in the head with."
James Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson (1791) is often considered the first creative non-fiction according to the Head of the English Department at Towson University, Dr. H. George Hahn. I believe it to be using exceptional rhetoric with the sparkle of poetry about a person or event in history.
I've got him again for another class starting on the second for the Winter-break. If you want I will ask him. He loves, lives for, and will most likely sit me down in his office for hours so he can just hear himself talk about what he devoted his life to.
I think the term is sort of a catch-all for non-fiction that isn't scholarly. It's like the difference between biographies and memoirs -- very shaded and subjective.
In my opinion, memoirs and The Working Poor are creative non-fiction and biographies and sociology textbooks are non-fiction. Creative non-fiction can be a narrative formed on the basis of life events, like true crime books (Anne Rule is a good example of this -- she doesn't "invent" passages in lives, but she intersperses narrative with interview like she's telling a story and then letting the people who told it to her have a voice) or those books you find under non-fiction that are studies. Like The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down. It's a book about a Hmong family and their experience with Western medicine.
I categorize memoirs as creative non-fiction because they take liberties. Dialogue is more often in those than in biographies, because it's impossible to remember exact wording and memoirs are marketed as true, honest, sincere representations of what happened, with a creative slant. Biographies read more like, "This happened. We did this to combat it. How did that work? It worked like this." Memoirs are, "When this happened, we all felt this."
I thought a memoir was about something you did, and a autobiography was about everything you did.
Yeah, everyone I ask has a different definition of a memoir, but that's as good as any. Though I still see more of a creative slant in memoirs. I haven't read a biography I liked because they all seem dry to me.
The memoir/biography comparison makes sense. You read the memoir knowing it may not be so objective in its telling of events. And as Courtney says, non-fiction is often pretty dry, especially real-deal history and such. The more facts you put in, the story told by those facts will become more obscure.
I just wonder what the appeal is. It's admittedly not all true, but ostensibly kinda true. Then why read it? Is the reader meant to be able to distinguish what's real and what's not? If the real doesn't actually matter, why not just read some fiction? Why would a magazine specifically ask for "Creative Non-fiction?"
I'm weird, though; it probably makes perfect sense and I'm just picky about terms.
I don't know how to answer this:
Why would a magazine specifically ask for "Creative Non-fiction?"
But the rest of it I would just say that I like to watch movies that are "based on true stories" I know full well that the majority of the film will be fictionalized and I don't go saying that I watched a documentry. (some documentries are good but I find most of them boring.) I can't say that the fact that the fiction was somehow rooted in reality is what draws me to those films but I do enjoy alot of them for some reason or another.
So I suppose it could be the same with creative non-fiction.
^ That makes enough sense. I am satisfied.
But the rest of it I would just say that I like to watch movies that are "based on true stories" I know full well that the majority of the film will be fictionalized and I don't go saying that I watched a documentry. (some documentries are good but I find most of them boring.)
I got on such a die-hard documentary kick that I was going to watch a fictional movie and then thought, "What's the fucking point? It doesn't matter, it's fucking fiction, I need to go watch a documentary."
I corrected myself, but what I think matters about that thought is my response to this question:
Why would a magazine specifically ask for "Creative Non-fiction?"
To continue with my thought from above: it matters because it shows a certain type of mind-set. It means that sometimes, people crave true stories. Not because they need to hear a happy story that they can believe in (most of the documentaries I watched were cynical or pessimistic or ended badly) or because they want to hear about tragedy (even the cynical ones were usually ended on a note of, "This can get better,") or because they want to know how to fix things (even the ones who said "This can get better" didn't usually offer a solid solution), but simply because we crave human experience and want to know about other people.
It's the reason being alone for too long can make us go mad, or the reason that even the saddest stories still have hope in real-life: fiction can never cross into real-life, like my diatribe in the Dialogue thread stated. It's because people can never truly represent real-life in fiction, because it's too unbelievable or extravagent to translate to the page without seeming exaggerated (see: Augusten Burroughs.) We want to hear the most incredible, crazy stories possible and know that, somehow, they're true.
In my drunk opinion, at least.
That read like a Steven King afterward.
Is... is that a compliment? I honestly don't know if it is or not.
Lisey's Story has a afterward in which King address some of the difference between life in fiction. In a early version of a book a child regained a lost pet in a very unlikely way, but his editor wanted him to change it because it seemed unrealistic. He'd gotton the idea from one of those dog finds owners who moved 1,000 miles away. His point was that in real life you have a 1,000 things happen everyday that seems unbeliveable, both good and bad, but to make that good reading is hard.
Exactly! I've never been a huge King reader, but I love his non-fiction musings.
It's an oxymoron. And maybe if people stop clapping for it, it will stop existing.
I like your hat.
@Liana - What are you refering too?
Creative non-fiction (I thought)
Just checking.
