Creative Nonfiction - An Introduction

Here's a quick overview of the genre of literature known as creative nonfiction.

For the longest time, literature proper (at times termed belles lettres) has been restricted to poetry, drama, and fiction. But it's become clear over time that much writing that falls outside of these kinds of imaginative writing still possesses qualities valued from the more traditional literature. In short, something need not be fictional to have aesthetic appeal. There is a refreshing variety of such literature.

The personal essay is the most prominent genre of creative nonfiction. But even it is part of a larger category which we might call life writing. That category includes not only the personal essay, but also autobiography and biography, as well as memoir.

Phillip Lopate's anthology, The Art of the Personal Essay, is a good starting place for exploring personal essays. In autobiography, one can go back to St. Augustine's Confessions or to The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, and contemporary examples include Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes or Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat, Pray, Love. A classic biography is Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson, and a well written contemporary biography is David McCullough's John Adams.


The raw materials of life writing, journal and diary writing make up their own genre. A famous example is Anne Frank's The Diary of a Young Girl. Another example is Virginia Woolf's A Writer's Diary. A student of mine, Rachel Rueckert, theorized about the genre of the diary and gave examples of her diary from her time in Ghana.

Finally, within life writing there is the genre of letters. One can read the letters of Jane Austen, of Ernest Hemingway, or of Mozart.

Each of these subgenres of life writing differ in important respects, but they have in common being based on the facts of someone's lived experience.

A cousin to life writing is history. Some historical writing -- though not all -- is literary. At a certain point the categorization depends upon a judgment call regarding a work's aesthetic or literary qualities. For example, a chronicle, a somewhat straightforward listing of events over time, is unlikely to be considered literary, whereas something like Churchill's History of English Speaking Peoples is composed of the same eloquent style that made the prime minister's speeches so memorable.

The speech is another variety of nonfiction. Speeches, public address, and oratory can all -- like history, be literary or not depending upon the author and the critic who makes a claim for a work's literary character. Speeches are often very easy to treat as literary since they contain rhetorical devices, which overlap or complement literary devices. An example of a literary speech would be Lincoln's Gettysburg Address or Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech.

King's civil rights speech echoes the patterns he perfected while preaching. The sermon is a type of speech that has had its own long and distinct history. Jonathan Edward's "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" is one such example, and a more humorous and very literary sermon can be found in Hugh Latimer's "Sermon on the Plough." Another example is Joseph Smith's King Follett Sermon, collected with others in an anthology of American Sermons. See also this example of a rhetorical analysis of a sermon (by Neal A. Maxwell).

A related religious genre is scripture, considered by believers to be sacred history -- nonfiction -- but sometimes rendered sacred through special language that we would call literary. A work like the King James Bible -- whose translators were trained rhetoricians from Shakespeare's day -- is extremely literary in its style (see Isaiah 53 for one example). For an example of literary scripture from the LDS tradition, see what has come to be known as the "Psalm of Nephi."

Another religious genre that is nonfiction is theology. While theology may merely be philosophical and not focused on aesthetic form, some theology is consciously literary. The informal theology of C. S. Lewis is filled with metaphors (see quotations from his Mere Christianity). Other theology is written very eloquently in almost a poetical style. See, for example, this excerpt from James E. Talmage's Jesus the Christ.

A cousin to theology is philosophy. Though philosophy may be writing oriented primarily to ideas, the form in which that philosophy is conveyed can be very literary -- whether we are talking about the dialogues of Socrates that Plato recorded, or the paradoxes penned by Pascal or Nietzsche.

And of course, the content of some philosophical writing is expressly about literature or art, and some literary criticism can itself be considered literary, such that written by Walter Pater. A related genre to literary criticism is the review. Once again, a review (of music, books, theater, food, or almost anything else) need not have any aesthetic or literary merit. But some reviews definitely do, such as the famous film reviews of Pauline Kael. These become crafted essays full of personality, bon mots, and satire.

This returns us to the essay, a prose form inaugurated by Michel de Montaigne as a kind of casual philosophizing. Montaigne gave us the term essay, after the French verb, essayer, meaning "to try" or "to test." Unlike the academic essays assigned today, the first essays were not intended to be structured arguments, but to be exploratory vehicles for musing upon almost anything. As authors did so, the personality of the essayist began to shine through, and this led gradually to what we now call the personal essay of today. Thus, the personal essay is a genre that owes its ancestry both to life writing and to philosophical prose.

But essays need not be personal to be literary. In fact, some of the best essays are more observational than personal, such as the nature writing of Rachel Carson or the science essays of Lewis Thomas or Oliver Sacks. Travel writing can be quite literary, whether of a more observational or a more personal nature. All such essayists use imagery, narrative -- the tools of fiction or poetry -- to communicate their general observations about nature, places, and people. This doesn't mean that such nonfictional writing is without passion. For example, sports writing is frequently dressed in metaphors and delivered with great panache. Essays that convey strong arguments are frequently literary. Like speeches or other persuasive communication, some polemical writing (in which parties argue publicly on public issues) is literary. John Milton's and others tracts written during the time of England's civil war are this kind of writing.

Nonfictional writings aimed at the public can be quite literary, and so within journalism can be noted writing of a highly refined nature. (Once again, not all journalism can be considered literary, but like history or philosophy, some such writing definitely is literary). The interview, a cousin to journalism proper, is another potentially literary genre in either content or form.

Journalists are not the only ones addressing the public today in nonfictional ways. Jack London, though known for his fiction, was a literary journalist of note. A more contemporary literary journalist would be Joan Didion.

Related to journalism but evolving its own ways is the modern blog or the singular blog post. These can be literary in nature, whether this comes from actually discussing literary things, or whether this is due to fine writing on any topic. I will not attempt here to break down the many types of blogs now starting to differentiate themselves into separate genres.

What other kinds of nonfiction writing is there that can be considered creative, or that has the artistic properties that we associate with literature? What examples of these genres have you read and enjoyed?