Rejecting a request for accepting it & material to discuss with students of a university. By Prof Dr Sohail ansari

 “Shake hands, for this will dispel rancour, and exchange gifts and love one another, for this will dispel hatred.” [Narrated by Maalik in al-Muwatta (1413)]

A logical twist

·       One man requested me, ‘never ever believe what I say’ and then said, ‘do not believe me’ I said that I had no intention of not believing him.

Quote:

“Reality is a cliché from which we escape by metaphor.”
― Wallace Stevens, The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination

Creative nonfiction (also known as literary nonfiction or narrative nonfiction) is a genre of writing that uses literary styles and techniques to create factually accurate narratives.

Genre : a style or category of art, music, or literature

What is Creative Nonfiction?

Lee Gutkind

The banner of the magazine I’m proud to have founded and I continue to edit, Creative Nonfiction, defines the genre simply, succinctly, and accurately as “true stories well told.” And that, in essence, is what creative nonfiction is all about.

In some ways, creative nonfiction is like jazz—it’s a rich mix of flavors, ideas, and techniques, some of which are newly invented and others as old as writing itself. Creative nonfiction can be an essay, a journal article, a research paper, a memoir, or a poem; it can be personal or not, or it can be all of these.

The words “creative” and “nonfiction” describe the form. The word “creative” refers to the use of literary craft, the techniques fiction writers, playwrights, and poets employ to present nonfiction—factually accurate prose about real people and events—in a compelling, vivid, dramatic manner. The goal is to make nonfiction stories read like fiction so that your readers are as enthralled by fact as they are by fantasy.

The word “creative” has been criticized in this context because some people have maintained that being creative means that you pretend or exaggerate or make up facts and embellish details. This is completely incorrect. It is possible to be honest and straightforward and brilliant and creative at the same time.

"Creative” doesn’t mean inventing what didn’t happen, reporting and describing what wasn’t there. It doesn’t mean that the writer has a license to lie. The cardinal rule is clear—and cannot be violated. This is the pledge the writer makes to the reader—the maxim we live by, the anchor of creative nonfiction: “You can’t make this stuff up!” 

The Fastest-Growing Genre

Creative nonfiction has become the most popular genre in the literary and publishing communities. These days the biggest publishers—HarperCollins, Random House, Norton, and others—are seeking creative nonfiction titles more vigorously than literary fiction and poetry. Recent creative nonfiction titles from major publishers on the best-seller lists include Laura Hillenbrand’s Unbroken, Dave Eggers’s Zeitoun, Rebecca Skloot’s The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, and Jeannette Walls’s The Glass Castle.

Even small and academic (university) presses that previously would have published only books of regional interest, along with criticism and poetry, are actively seeking creative nonfiction titles these days. In the academic community generally, creative nonfiction has become the popular way to write.

Through creative writing programs, students can earn undergraduate degrees, MFA degrees, and PhDs in creative nonfiction—not only in the United States but in Australia, New Zealand, and throughout the world. Creative nonfiction is the dominant form in publications like The New Yorker, Esquire, and Vanity Fair. You will even find creative nonfiction stories featured on the front page of The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal.

Literary Journalism

Memoir is the personal side of creative nonfiction but there’s a public side as well, often referred to as narrative or literary journalism—or “big idea” stories. Michael Pollan (The Botany of Desire) captures big ideas, for example, as does Oliver Sacks (The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat) through creative nonfiction.

One distinction between the personal and the public creative nonfiction is that the memoir is the writer’s particular story, nobody else’s. The writer owns it. In contrast, the public side of creative nonfiction is mostly somebody else’s story; anybody, potentially, owns it, anybody who wants to go to the time and trouble to write about it. These pieces, although narrative, focus on fact, leading to a bigger and more universal concept.

In every issue, Creative Nonfiction publishes “big idea/fact pieces”—creative nonfiction about virtually any subject—from baseball gloves to brain surgery to dog walking to immortality or pig roasting. There are no limits to the subject matter as long as it is expressed in a story-oriented narrative way. These are stories almost anyone could research and write.

Because they’re so personal, memoirs have a limited audience, while the public kind of creative nonfiction—when authors write about something other than themselves—has a larger audience. These “big idea/factual essays” are more sought after by editors and agents and will more likely lead to publication.

The Building Blocks of Creative Nonfiction 

Scenes and stories are the building blocks of creative nonfiction, the foundation and anchoring elements of what we do. The idea of scenes as building blocks is an easy concept to understand, but it’s not easy to put into practice. The stories or scenes not only have to be factual and true (You can’t make them up!), they have to make a point or communicate information, as I have said, and they have to fit into the overall structure of the essay or chapter or book. It is often a daunting task. But it’s essential.

Writing in scenes represents the difference between showing and telling. The lazy, uninspired writer will tell the reader about a subject, place, or personality, but the creative nonfiction writer will show that subject, place, or personality, vividly, memorably—and in action.

—Lee Gutkind 

Literary Journalism

Literary journalism is sometimes called “immersion journalism” because it requires a closer, more active relationship to the subject and to the people the literary journalist is exploring. Like journalistic writing, the literary journalism piece should be well-researched, focus on a brief period of time, and concentrate on what is happening outside of the writer’s small circle of personal experience and feelings.

An Example and Discussion of a Literary Journalism

The following excerpt from George Orwell is a good example of literary journalism. Orwell wrote about the colonial regime in Marrakech. His father was a colonial officer, so Orwell was confronted with the reality of empire from an early age, and that experience is reflected in his literary journalism piece, Marrakech:

It is only because of this that the starved countries of Asia and Africa are accepted as tourist resorts. No one would think of running cheap trips to the Distressed Areas. But where the human beings have brown skins their poverty is simply not noticed. What does Morocco mean to a Frenchman? An orange-grove or a job in Government service.

Orwell isn’t writing a reflective, personal essay about his travels through Marrakech. Neither is he writing a memoir about what it was like to be the son of a colonial officer, and how that experience shaped his adult life. He writes in a descriptive way about the Jewish quarters in Marrakech, about the invisibility of the “natives,” and about the way citizenship doesn’t ensure equality under a colonial regime.

Creative Nonfiction

by Richard Nordquist

Updated April 19, 2017

Creative nonfiction is a branch of writing that employs the literary techniques usually associated with fiction or poetry to report on actual persons, places, or events.

The genre of creative nonfiction (also known as literary nonfiction) is broad enough to include travel writing, nature writing, science writing, sports writing, biography, autobiography, memoir, the interview, and both the familiar and personal essay.

What Is Nonfiction

by Richard Nordquist

Updated April 20, 2017

Nonfiction is a blanket term for prose accounts of real people, places, objects, or events. Types of nonfiction include articles, autobiographies, biographies, essays, memoirs, nature writing, profiles, reports, sports writing, and travel writing.

OBSERVATIONS

• "I see no reason why the word [artist] should always be confined to writers of fiction and poetry while the rest of us are lumped together under that despicable term 'Nonfiction'--as if we were some sort of remainder. I do not feel like a Non-something; I feel quite specific. I wish I could think of a name in place of 'Nonfiction.' In the hope of finding an antonym, I looked up 'Fiction' in Webster and found it defined as opposed to 'Fact, Truth, and Reality.' I thought for a while of adopting FTR, standing for Fact, Truth, and Reality, as my new term."(Barbara Tuchman, "The Historian as Artist," 1966)
• "It's always seemed odd to me that nonfiction is defined, not by what it is, but by what it is not. It is not fiction. But then again, it is also not poetry, or technical writing or libretto. It's like defining classical music as nonjazz."
  (Philip Gerard, Creative Nonfiction. Story Press, 1996)

• "Many writers and editors add 'creative' to 'nonfiction' to mollify this sense of being strange and other, and to remind readers that creative nonfiction writers are more than recorders or appliers of reason and objectivity. Certainly, many readers and writers of creative nonfiction recognize that the genre can share many elements of fiction."(Jocelyn Bartkevicius, "The Landscape of Creative Nonfiction," 1999)

• "If nonfiction is where you do your best writing or your best teaching of writing, don't be buffaloed into the idea that it's an inferior species. The only important distinction is between good writing and bad writing."
  (William Zinsser, On Writing Well, 2006)

Fiction

Literature in the form of prose, especially novels, that describes imaginary events and people.

Synonyms:

Novels, stories, creative writing, imaginative writing, works of the imagination, prose literature, narration, story telling;  fable