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Your Creative Nonfiction Cravings Explained
Narrative isn’t just a thing — it’s a competency
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“I type inquiry into a search engine. In 0.36 seconds, I receive nearly 290 million results.”
These are the words of Professor Tom Liam Lynch in a punchy piece titled “Inquiry in an Age of Query,” but I could have written them myself, and you probably could have, too. Many of us have an almost identical experience daily — perhaps many times a day.
But this isn’t just an exploration of our interactions with search engines; it’s also about writing.
Few ambitions can be more impenetrable than a successful transition from nonfiction to creative nonfiction, which is basically nonfiction that reads like fiction: truthful yet cinematic, uncompromising on facts yet engrossing like your favorite novel. The difference between a cold, dead lobster and Lobster Thermidor.
Recently, two different editors produced divergent reactions to an article I thought was ready to see the light of day: one said the narrative was strong; the other said there was no narrative.
Something I thought I understood well was suddenly inscrutable.
