Types of Creative Nonfiction

What are the types of creative nonfiction?

The term “creative nonfiction” covers quite a large field. At one end of the spectrum would be literary journalism (what used to be called “new journalism”) – writing in a personal way about the facts in a news event – which is still close to traditional reportage. And at the other end is the literary memoir, what Annie Dillard referred to when she said that “works of nonfiction can be coherent and crafted works of literature” (1995, 56).

The writer of creative nonfiction “may not alter facts in the interest of improving his story,” which is particularly important in literary journalism, would not need to be strictly applied to a literary memoir or a travel essay, where it might be useful to, say, invent a traveling companion who would serve as foil to the narrator by presenting entirely different impressions of the places described.

Between those two poles would fall a whole range of other types of writing:

• the magazine feature article
• the newspaper column as cultural commentary
• the review
• the interview story
• the character sketch
• the biographical sketch or profile
• the personal (or familiar essay)
• the autobiographical sketch

It would be futile to try to determine strict differences among the various types.

Essay and article are often used interchangeably. But the term “article” usually refers to a “feature” in a magazine or newspaper or e-zine.

It thus tends to address a specific type of reader (the particular market of the periodical or website) in which it appears. It represents a certain set of constraints. Of course essays, when they are also written for publication in magazines or journals, must sometimes accommodate themselves to other types of constraints.

A profile is an in-depth article that concentrates on one person or place.

Literary journalism or new journalism is writing in a personal way about the facts in a news event.

Personal narratives, or “life stories” as they are now called may be divided into: autobiographical narratives (e.g., memoirs, travel narratives, journals, etc.); and biographical narratives (e.g., character sketches, interview stories, etc.)

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