revised presentation for Techniques of CNF, spring 2015

1. As a form of Creative Nonfiction
“Good memoirs are a careful act of
construction.” —William Zinsser

2.  Real Life
 Reflection
 Research
 Reading
 “Riting”
Adapted from Lee Gutkind, editor of Creative
Non-Fiction magazine

3.  Immersion into and with actual events,
locations, people
 Scenes (showing) versus telling stories from
real life that draw in the reader
 Description from real life of people and places

4.  What is the meaning behind the real experience
or story the writer is telling?
 Is there a message that extends beyond the
author’s own reaction, a larger meaning?
 Reflection means asking yourself questions
about your story, whether it’s a personal
experience or a story outside yourself.

5.  The mission of nonfiction, in part, is to inform
and educate.
 Even a personal story requires research in
order to provide significant details.
 The research connects the personal story to a
larger intellectual context.

6.  Even people writing about their own lives
often extend outside themselves
 To verify
 To add context
 For example…

7.  Expanding your knowledge and ideas by
DEVOURING the works of other writers.
 Not just other creative nonfiction writers, but
other artists and fiction writers and scientists
and musicians and on and on. The more you
know, the more context you have for your own
discovery

8.  The rough-draft writing of inspiration and
exercises
 The revision writing of cleaning up grammar,
sentence structure, word choice and,
sometimes, the complete structural redrafting
of pieces.

9. In Night of the Gun, David Carr writes:
“Memoir is a very personal form of creation
myth.”
In Tell It Slant, the authors write: “Memory itself
could be called its own bit of creative
nonfiction.”
How do you interpret these statements?

10.  Narrative means, in the simplest terms, how
we tell the story, or how we “frame” the story.
 Is it chronological? Ordered by the importance
of the events? Circular, coming back to the
beginning of the piece? Are there sections that
each begin with a uniform element?
 Narrative construction in writing is how we
make transform memories/ ideas into...art

11.  “A metaphor is a way of getting at a truth that
exists beyond the literal.”
 Metaphor is a common device or “technique”
in poetry. How might it work in creative
nonfiction, based on our reading this week?

12.  “Excavation” by Wendy Ortiz
 “The Answer to the Riddle is Me” by David Stuart
MacLean
 Voice
 Description
 Scene
 Theme
 What other writing elements do you note in these
excerpts that correspond to the sensory chapters in
Tell It Slant that we read: smell, taste, hearing,
touch, sight

13. “I think the worst thing that can happen to a
writer is a clear diagnosis. Diagnoses winnow
away possibility and eliminate any data that
doesn’t correspond to the diagnosis. A good
non-fiction writer allows the play between
experience and diagnosed condition. It’s the
data that doesn’t fit the diagnosis that makes
the writer idiosyncratic.”
—David Stuart MacLean

14. Pick one event from your life that was
meaningfully and that raised questions for
you—that has potential for a short memoir.
Write the event as a scene, make it as detailed as
you can.
You should try to choose a memory that is at least
several years old.
Just plunge in: 20 minutes

15.  Revise or continue working on today’s freewriting
exercise for a 2-4 page first draft, due next week
 Use one of the exercises from Tell It Slant, pages
12-16 and write something new for a 2-4 page first
draft
 Or...write something different based on an idea/
inspiration for a 2-4 page first memoir draft
 Four copies due next week for distribution for our
first workshop the following week