What IS Creative Nonfiction?

Now that I’ve finished one semester of an MFA program in creative nonfiction, I ought to be able to give you a definition. When people have asked what I’m studying, their responses to the term “creative nonfiction” tend to sound a bit like this:

“Isn’t that an oxy-moron?”
“I tell creative nonfiction stories every day.”
“Oh, like that James Frey guy?”
“How is that a genre?”

Before I started the Creative Nonfiction (CNF) program at the University of Pittsburgh, I thought that CNF was simply memoir-like writing—real story. My story. Or stories.

Apparently, memoirs are only one branch of CNF. CNF originally branched out of journalism, not autobiography. Major “new journalist” CNF writers are writers like John McPhee, Gay Talese, Tracy Kidder, or Joan Didion. These writers pick an interesting subject, immerse themselves in the subject world for awhile, and then write an article about it using a nonfiction narrative (real story) to convey the information—but it reads more like a novel. So, to paraphrase Mary Poppins, the story makes the information go down.

So: a simple definition of CNF might read like this: Creative Nonfiction is a genre that uses a real story in order to convey information. It has a frame and a focus. Usually the focus is a “greater truth” that applies to people universally. The “greater truth” is what makes a subject like robots apply to nearly every reader.

My own definition of CNF tends to combine a bit of the life experience with the research. It’s somewhere between memoir and immersion journalism. Like Annie Dillard.

That said: my original ideas of writing my own stories have been a bit discouraged this semester. My professor says that people in their twenties are too young to be writing memoirs—unless they have had some killer experiences. I wouldn’t consider my experiences to be killer—but I wouldn’t consider them to be dull either. However, I am still too close (time-wise) to my Bolivia experiences to really write that book. I think. We’ve definitely been encouraged to do more of the immersion-style of CNF.

By the end of my program, I need to have written 200 pages of CNF. We’ll see what comes of it.

Until then, here are some of my favorite CNF books:
An American Childhood, by Annie Dillard (the setting is Pittsburgh!)
Reading Lolita in Tehran, by Azar Nafisi
Eat, Pray, Love, by Elizabeth Gilbert (except the end)
Ex Libris, by Anne Fadiman
Dakota, by Kathleen Norris