WRITING CREATIVE NONFICTION
Edited by Carolyn Forché and Philip Gerard
Story Press, 2001
I got this book as a Christmas gift, but only recently began thumbing through it. I enjoy reading about other writer’s and how they work, especially when I am immersed in work myself. I particularly enjoy mention of those places where another writer struggles. For example, in her essay The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Writer, Robin Hemley says: One of the greatest difficulties for the writer of longer nonfiction is figuring out the structure of the book. For me, this has been one of my major hurdles, why I seem to stew about a book for a year or so before coming to an understanding of what I’m writing about and how to go about writing it.
Well, then, I am in good shape. Structure I’ve got. An opening chapter? Not so much. But I’ve settled on a nice structure, I think, and that’s something. At least to me … and Robin Hemley.
Here are some other gems from the early pages of WRITING CREATIVE NONFICTION:
… above all else write about something to which you feel some emotional or psychological tie.
Alan Cheuse in his essay Finding a Story, or Using the Whole Pig
I write because you can play on the page like a child left alone in sand.
Terry Tempest Williams in his essay Why I Write
Every writer ought to have to read her narrative to an audience of three hundred people and learn, by the shuffling of their feet, where the storytelling flags.
Philip Furia, in his essay As Time Goes By: Creating Biography