How on Earth Do ‘Creative’ and ‘Nonfiction’ Go Together?

The fastest growing writing genre explained

Photo by Tim Arterbury on Unsplash

I bumped into my friend at the supermarket the other day and she asked how my writing’s going. I told her I’d started a Creative Nonfiction Academy. She lifted her eyebrows, paused for a second, and then gave a response that might be similar to what you’re thinking:

“How on earth do ‘creative’ and ‘nonfiction’ go together?”

We all know about creative writing: we learnt about it in school and most of us have written a short fiction piece at some point. We also know about nonfiction — the how-to’s, instruction manuals, biographies, and magazine articles. But how can we combine the two? How do we take something true and write about it creatively? Won’t that make it less…well, true?

Creative Nonfiction Magazine defines the genre simply as ‘true stories well told’

“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…