Construct “closeup” scenes around images of ordinary household items – a fork, a shoe, a hanger – to give dark subtextual cues which eventually give rise to emotionally shattering conclusions. Avoid any usage of your own common vernacular / slang / accent in your writing voice. Write in present tense “I’m on a bus in Tel Aviv,” even though you’re actually at the library. Tips: Write about events to which you have strong emotional connections. CN generally seems closer to the truth of the narrator’s experience than other forms of nonfiction, as revealing the narrator’s experience / emotional consequence of the experience often seems the implicit “goal” of the work.ĬN sometimes ends up sounding “crafted” or “poetic” however (example: “In an instant, the city was back to its normal self, yawning in the dawn haze,”) to the point where it can be difficult not to question whether a work really reflects what the writer actually felt / experienced or if he/she is more just attempting to showcase a certain brand of writing skills. The defining characteristic of CN is the use of literary techniques to create a sense of artfulness in the language, character development, and story, all of which tends to drive the narrative “inward.” CN work also tends to focus on transformational events in the narrator’s or central character’s life. The label “creative nonfiction” can apply to various categories of writing, including food, travel, memoir, personal essay, and other hybridized forms. Submit to: your professor, the creative team for whatever marketing company you work for.

Study what motivates people to buy shit, and how this consumption expresses their personal brands. Tips: Devise ways to suggest things that seem to come from an omniscient as opposed to personal POV. Examples: signs advertising real estate saying “if you lived here you’d be home already,” or like “Cedar Ridge: Mountain Clusterhomes from the low 250s,” or comings attractions for kids’ movies that begin “From the magic within our hearts, to the adventure beyond the horizon, there is only one: Disney.” false,” creating a kind of vacuum around the subject, a universe unto itself where no other time or space or culture or even logic seems to exist except for that which is suggested to and potentially “consummated” by the reader. It’s often factual in only a nominal sense, and uses a variety of linguistic and psychological tactics to effectively remove the entire context of “true vs. Copywriting / “Advertorial” / Ad copyĬopywriting is nonfiction that uses rhetoric to persuade readers to consume products / ideas / viewpoints. Employ a “detached but friendly” 2nd person POV (example: “Or if you’re feeling a little south of the border, top it off with some cilantro and roasted red pepper,”) which allows you to effectively obfuscate your own reality, such as writing an article on “healthy relationships” while in the middle of an affair / divorce / custody battle over children. Avoid subjects in which you’re emotionally invested. how long it would take you to copy / paste and then remix text from a similar article. Factor in your approximate knowledge of the subject vs. Use the Google Keyword Tool to create article ideas around keywords searched by the biggest potential audience, but with the fewest websites targeting those same keywords (i.e. These are the articles where titles implore you to do things like “Dress Up that Turkey Sandwich!” while, on the same homepage, also promise to explain “Why You’re Not Losing Weight.” Advice ColumnsĪdvice columns range in truthfulness from extremely close to fact (such as most sex writing, which we’ll get to later) to the kinds of financial, lifestyle, parenting, gaming, social media, and other advice articles and blogs that seem to have, at best, only tangential relationships with the writer’s actual experience IRL. Below are notes and further explanations on different forms listed alphabetically. The above diagram is intended to be a kind of visual take on how this applies to typical forms of nonfiction.

Given this, an interesting way to delineate nonfiction forms is to look at them in terms of how accurately they reflect the writer’s experience, beliefs, and emotions in real life (IRL). withholding, distorting) of facts end up making a “factual” work less true. Implicit in this however are the varying degrees to which the writer’s subjective interpretation of facts, and/or selective presentation (i.e.

Nonfiction describes communicative work (typically written, but also including diagrams and photos) understood to be fact.

Nonfiction things to write about