Strategies of Creative Nonfiction

The strategies of creative nonfiction are very much like the strategies of fiction. Gutkind stresses that the basic objective of creative nonfiction is to teach (he refers to it as “the mission of the genre”), but the point is to do it in such a manner ‘that the most resistant reader will be interested in learning more” (1997, 2).

To use a term borrowed from traditional journalism, the point is to handle the subject – whatever it might be – as a “human interest” story.

What this means is simply that a good piece of creative nonfiction has a personal voice, a clearly defined point of view, which will reveal itself in the tone, and be presented through scene, summary and description, as it is in friction. All its strategies are designed to reach out to the readers and draw them in – again, as in friction – without losing track of the facts.

These strategies are the following

• approach
• point of view
• tone
• voice
• structure
• a strong beginning
• rhetorical techniques
• character
• concrete and evocative details
• scene
• a convincing ending

One way of looking at what happens in a work of creative nonfiction is this: it is a personal account of a quest. The point is the discovery, the triumph of the quest. It is this discovery, this insight, which the reader looks for when he agrees to participate in the adventure. Presenting it as a quest – an exciting exploration – and not just as a bare listing of events or facts or steps or developments or trends – this is the challenge faced by the writer of creative non-fiction.

- from Creative Nonfiction: Manual for Filipino Writers by Cristina Pantoja Hidalgo, UP Press