KEEP IT REAL:
Everything You Need to Know About Researching and Writing Creative Nonfiction
Edited by Lee Gutkind and Hattie Fletcher
Norton, 2008
I am a very instinctual writer. The choices I make in my manuscripts are not based on academic training in the language arts, which I’ve never had, but rather a lifetime of immersion in well-told stories … and the resulting sense of what works and what doesn’t. With each book I create, however, I sink a little deeper into the technical side of the writing process. I find myself wondering how one choice worked and why this other choice didn’t. I analyze the creative nonfiction of writers I admire and try to reason out their choices. With my latest project, a book on citizen science, I’ve even found myself wondering about the legal implications of my authorial choices.
What is creative nonfiction? According to the authors of KEEP IT REAL:
The word “creative” refers simply to the use of literary craft in presenting nonfiction–that is, factually accurate prose about real people and events–in a compelling, vivid manner.
It is a form distinct from journalism, textbook writing, and other more straightforward reportage of facts. Its practitioners, according to the book “have a complicated obligation to their readers: to entertain like novelists but to educate like journalists.” There are dilemmas that arise when one is attempting to fulfill this obligation, and the collection of essays in KEEP IT REAL examines them. From acknowledgment of sources to compression to fact-checking to frame, readers get a concise overview of the artistic, ethical, and sometimes even legal implications of the choices creative nonfiction writers make.
I don’t know if KEEP IT REAL truly contains everything one needs to know in order to research and write creative nonfiction, but there is enough good stuff there for me to wholeheartedly recommend the book to others in the genre. It’s the sort of book I will turn to again and again as I puzzle through my writing projects. In fact, I plan to puzzle through the issue of compression with you here later in the week …