What Is Creative Nonfiction?

For the sake of starting out and establishing a shared language of understanding, here’s my humble attempt at defining this multifaceted type of writing:

Creative nonfiction is writing that uses the tools of storytelling to tell true stories.

Pretty simple.

If you’re still shaking your head, confused by story and truth sharing the same sentence, then perhaps we’d better focus on defining the genre in reverse, by listing all of the things that creative nonfiction isn’t.

Creative nonfiction isn’t:

An academic essay
A how-to manual for your Roomba
A piece of factual reporting in the newspaper
A biography of a famous human
A history book about the invention of the book
A marriage license
A to-do list
The essay you wrote in response to a prompt in your chemistry course

Creative nonfiction doesn’t just convey information. It’s not interested in showing you how to build an Ikea bookcase, learn the history of Rome, or record your soccer scores. While all of this information may appear in a work of creative nonfiction, the goal isn’t just the presentation of this data, but rather the language, craft, and artistry that you use to tell your true story. Creative nonfiction gets to use the beauty of poetry and the excitement of fiction to describe the world around us, our lives, histories, adventures, experiences, and dreams.

Creative nonfiction gives us the opportunity to share our lives with others. By reading creative nonfiction we can, as the saying goes, walk a mile in someone else’s shoes. That’s creative nonfiction’s superpower, and I hope you are as excited as I am to begin our journey into this amazing genre.

Genre Terms

Language is important, right? We are writers after all. Understanding the definitions of these terms will allow us to communicate using the same language. Many of these words have different meanings when applied to, say, a short story or an academic essay.

Below are terms that I’ll be using when I provide feedback for you, describe examples, and compose instruction text. I encourage you to begin to incorporate these terms into your responses and feedback as well.

There is certainly a part of writing that is magical and avoids all reason and definition, but the more we can learn from the parts that can be pinned down, the better we’ll be able to understand how our writing, and the writing of others, creates that magic on the page.

Character: You and all of the people in your story. Yes, you. You are a character in your own memoir. We all, as Walt Whitman wrote, contain multitudes—but as you compose your nonfiction story you’ll have to make choices about how you appear in the text. We do this every day. The character that you present to your grandmother is different than the character you present on a dating app.

We are always revising and reworking our characters. And just as you’ll have to decide which details of yourself to bring to your creative nonfiction, you’ll also have to choose how you describe the characters of the people around you. Does the reader need to know about your neighbor’s sports car she keeps hidden in her barn? Maybe. Does the reader need to know that your mother buys lottery tickets but hides them from your father? Maybe. These are all choices of character description, choices that you’ll have to make to render the real people who populate your life into characters on the page.
Dialogue: Unless you are working from interviews, videos, or other forms of transcription, dialogue in a memoir is reimagined by the writer. You may remember very clearly what you or someone else said, or you might be taking an educated guess.
External: The external world is everything that occurs outside of the writer’s head. These are details of the setting, actions of other people, dialogue, and plot.
Figurative Language: Figurative language is abstract language. Metaphors and similes are examples of figurative language. Instead of stating exactly what the thing is, figurative language describes it through comparison. If you are describing a woman with a long neck as having a “neck like a giraffe,” that is figurative language.
Internal: What happens inside your head. Memories, dreams, thoughts, flashbacks, that nagging inner voice—those are all aspects of internal action.
Length: The word count of a piece of writing. In creative nonfiction, book length is usually around 65,000 words. Shorter works may be called personal essays (1,000–10,000 words), or flash nonfiction (300–1,000 words).
Narrator: That’s you! Sort of. The narrator in your creative nonfiction is a highly crafted aspect of your own voice. It might be you as a young child in which case your voice would be more naive.

For instance, I have written three books of creative nonfiction, and nowhere do these details about me, the narrator, appear: I listen to a lot of Beyoncé, I tend to interrupt people, and I make up songs that I sing to my dogs. Why haven’t these details appeared? Because I’ve crafted a narrator for each of my books and none of these details were important to developing that narrator’s character.
Perspective: How you choose to approach the story. You can think of this as the camera in a movie. How close does it get to its subject? Can it zoom out or is it stuck close to the action? Perspective in a memoir refers to how immediate the story appears. Is it in the past tense or present tense? Is the narrator popping in and offering context or is the story unfolding with each page?
Plot: The events and actions in your story. The plot is movement, tension, and conflict. It's a fight at a restaurant or a quest for self-discovery. Overall, the plot can be described as having a beginning, middle, and end, peppered with moments of climax and resolution. The plot of your book considers all of the events that take place from start to finish, whereas the plot of an individual chapter might be much smaller in scope.
Objective Language: The opposite of figurative language. Objective language is the language of fact. It describes things in measurable, literal ways. Unlike figurative language, which can sometimes be vague, creative, or open to interpretation, objective language is universal, clear, and factual. We want a mix of both types of language in our memoir writing; the formula will change depending on your narrator and approach.
Scope: The scope of creative nonfiction is how much ground it will cover. Are you writing a “cradle-to-present” memoir that covers all of the time from your birth to the present day? Or are you focusing on an important year in your life? Are you only examining specific types of interactions? Perhaps you are writing about the influence of horses in your life and thus the scope of the memoir is all of your memories that involve horses. The scope can be adjusted as you begin writing, or you may find it important to develop early on in the drafting process.
Sensory Details: What you can smell, taste, hear, touch, and see. If you’d like, you can add the sixth sense too, what you pick up from the world around you, ghosts or otherwise. Sensory details help a reader feel what you felt.
Setting: The space in which the story is set. The setting is much more than the stage in a play. It describes the time period, morals, quirks, sensory details, and history of a place. Vividly written settings allow the reader to imagine themselves in places they might have never been. Settings also allow writers to quickly describe cultural and social tensions and historical shifts, as well as create atmospheric moods.
Structure: The shape of your story. Structure in creative nonfiction refers to how you choose to organize your writing. A structure can be formal, informal, collaged, braided, or borrowed. The way in which you choose to structure your story can influence its impact and meaning.