Live Life Team
Factual accuracy and use of literary style and technique are the basis for creative non-fiction. Their purpose is to impart information and somehow read like fiction. It includes food writing, travel writing, personal essays, memoirs, literary journalism, biography, and other hybridised essays. According to reviewer Chris Anderson, this kind of writing can be understood as two subcategories: the personal essay and the journalistic essay.
‘The Art of Fact’ by literary professional Barbara Lounsberry proposes four constitutive descriptions of creative non-fiction. First, creative writing is a ‘Documentable subject matter selected from the real world as opposed to “invented” from the writer’s mind’. It means that the subjects and events tackled in the text exist in the natural world.
Second, creative non-fiction writing is an exhaustive research. It means allowing writers to use their novel point of view on their topics, and allows them to create the integrity of their work by verifying the references stated in their texts.
The third characteristic is the scene, which gives importance to describing and reviving the perspective of events, contrary to the usual journalistic style of reporting.
Fourth is ‘Fine writing: a literary prose style’. It is a definite topic and comprehensive research that assure the non-fiction part of literary non-fiction. The narrative structure and form reveal the artistry of a writer, and then, its refined language discloses literature as its goal.
Creative non-fiction may be in the form of the traditional fiction narratives, such as the story of love and loss entitled, ‘Geography of the Heart’ by Fenton Johnson, and ‘Rescuing Patty Hearst’ by Virginia Holman.
