Talk:Creative nonfiction

Merge with New Journalism
It's been suggested on the New Journalism talk page that it should be merged with Creative Nonfiction, as there is quite an overlap with NJ, CN and other terms such as Literary Journalism. I think that a small subsection on this page explaining the origin of the term and perhaps the book of the same name might be appropriate. (I know that there's an exhortation to be bold, but I'm fairly new and not quite bold enough to merge them myself without others commenting). Liquidindian 06:13, 13 March 2006 (UTC)

Do it do it do it. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 206.78.90.158 (talk • contribs)

Creative nonfiction has almost nothing to do with New Journalism. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 201.42.197.76 (talk • contribs)


 * How so? I'd say that New Journalism is more of a fashionable term for a particular group of writers than exclusively describing a writing style.--Liquidindian 00:12, 8 May 2006 (UTC)

I'd say leave them as two different articles. Creative Nonfiction book authors don't necessarily think of themselves as new journalists (unless they are working for newspapers or magazines). 69.182.145.113 18:40, 21 May 2006 (UTC)CD
 * Agreed. "New Journalism" was more of a period WITHIN Creative Nonfiction (see Wolfe, Capote, Didion and others) than a synonym for the genre. The articles should stay seperate. --Felldestroyed 03:16, 23 May 2006 (UTC)

New journalism is a completely separate entity to both creative nonfiction and traditional journalism. It may have been fed by older - and then informed newer - creative nonfiction, but creative nonfiction itself is a broad, hifilutin term that really doesn't describe anything. Let new journalism have its own wing, as it's actually influenced creative nonfiction, not just come under it. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.230.180.159 (talk • contribs)


 * There's alot of fairly obscure articles on here, and New Journalism is probably a more important movement than many of those which have been given their own articles. I think the link of 'related articles' is enough for people looking at either to check out the connections. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 138.130.24.10 (talk • contribs)

☼ Being immersed in new journalism directly (I am a journalist that is called a New Games Journalist, but we use most, if not all, of the "new journalism" techniques), I believe no change should be made to this title or category. --K —Preceding unsigned comment added by KristinNcarpenter (talk • contribs)

>>I think the overarching major genre is "Creative Nonfiction" with "New Journalism" being a style of Creative Nonfiction, similar to nature writing or travel writing. I wouldn't want to see this well said article reduced, but inclusion under CNF seems fine to me. Rick —Preceding unsigned comment added by 68.234.112.69 (talk • contribs)


 * Do not merge, otherwise the article on New Games Journalism falls apart as well Romanista 11:03, 18 July 2006 (UTC)

I've just discovered this topic, but from the evidence I have (people's comments on this page, length/notability/links connected to the article in question, Google test), I'd have to say Do not merge. Based on the vote and the aforementioned evidence, I'm removing the suggestion to merge. In the future: Please sign your comments by using for tildes (~) as such ~  and also, When arguing over a merge or delete suggestion, bold your opinion. Thanks. 66.229.160.94 04:02, 2 August 2006 (UTC)


 * Do not merge, concur that "New Journalism" is a subgenre within "Creative Nonfiction." Freerangelibrarian 14:06, 14 October 2007 (UTC)

Creative Nonfiction vs. Literary Journalism
It's my understanding that Literary Journalism is in fact a particular TYPE of Creative Nonfiction. I don't think it's accurate to say "Creative Nonfiction, also called Literary Journalism..." You could just as (in)accurately say "Creative Nonfiction, also called memoir..." or "Creative Nonfiction, also called personal essay..." Anyone else have an opinion on this? Hyperjoy7 03:31, 21 November 2006 (UTC)

I'm not sure how to post a question, but here goes. I am in a Creative Nonfiction class. We have been asked to find out publication outlets for short forms of Creative Nonfiction, essay length. Please advise.

Hyperjoy7, you are correct, literary journalism (also called reportage) is a form of creative nonfiction. The whole notion that CNF is a subgenre within journalism is irksome and reinforces my determination to write a history of the genre. Freerangelibrarian 21:39, 22 October 2007 (UTC)

Expanding and correcting this article
It's a good start but some of the contentions are questionable. Mailer as a pioneer of CNF? The list of representative authors had been very skewed toward New Journalism, which could explain the discussion above. I question some of the choices but preferred to take an additive approach. This article could use a section on form similar to the one for fiction, which would also provide a place to discuss the many literary journals where much of this writing is published. Freerangelibrarian 14:06, 14 October 2007 (UTC)

research nonfiction; structure of this article
I've never heard such a phrase. I admit that it's hard to describe "uncreative" nonfiction. Also, is it a convention to list practitioners so high in an article? I would think a discussion of form would go higher (and would incorporate that side discussion about poem/prose, which is given too much weight where it is now). A brief discussion of the confusing terms might help... e.g. "nonfiction novel" versus "narrative nonfiction" versus "literary nonfiction," etc. (For that matter I'd like to rewrite this page so it read better anyway.) Freerangelibrarian 11:12, 16 October 2007 (UTC)

needs history section
Truly my next goal is to write a history of creative nonfiction. I feel dissatisfied by the litany of authors and also believe this article would be better served by a history of the genre, from Montaigne's essays through Woolf and E.B. White and on through the present day. Freerangelibrarian 21:37, 22 October 2007 (UTC)

thx for this post
Oh, and did not know about it. Thanks for the information ... —Preceding unsigned comment added by 78.83.251.141 (talk) 17:58, 19 December 2007 (UTC)

I give up
The latest edits to this page are written so poorly that I really must disassociate myself with this project. I can't babysit this 24x7, and I returned to this page intending to show it to a friend only to find it riddled with the passive voice, academic jargon, and dubious statements out of touch with mainstream thinking in this genre. Y'all have fun with this, but I give up. freerangelibrarian  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 206.224.220.60 (talk) 14:04, 11 March 2008 (UTC)

Copy edit
I've cleaned up this article a bit. Cheers! Wassupwestcoast (talk) 14:43, 14 April 2008 (UTC)
 * Thanks for your efforts.
 * You've removed a lot of material from the article, though, in many cases simply with the comment that it is "unsourced." Fair enough: add a Fact tag to it, and give some time for other people to work on it.  Much of what you've removed is, as far as I can tell, correct and valuable in the article -- for example, the list of creative nonfiction practitioners, and the paragraph about the different ways in which creative nonfiction can be structured.  (Structure is a tremendously important aspect of nonfiction writing; I'm a former student of John McPhee's and I can tell you that he emphasizes structure above almost everything else.)  While removing so much seemingly worthwhile material, you added in a section about a creative writing program for law students at Hamline University??  I appreciate your efforts to improve the article but I'd encourage you to reinsert some of the big sections you took out and give other people a chance to debate/work on them.  I'd rather not do it myself because it's hard to sort back through all of these 27 edits you've made in quick succession.  Terence7 (talk) 15:06, 14 April 2008 (UTC)
 * Upon further inspection, it appears that you didn't add in the stuff about Hamline University after all. Again, it's really hard to tell what exactly you did because you made so many edits in a row.  Terence7 (talk) 15:10, 14 April 2008 (UTC)


 * Yup, I just tried to clean up a bit of a mess. So much was unsourced, it is easier - and permissable - to simply delete the text. I'll hand the article to you to build up what could be an interesting and well sourced article. Remember though that verifiability is not an option but a policy. If it isn't sourced, it can't be here. Cheers! Wassupwestcoast (talk) 15:15, 14 April 2008 (UTC)


 * Gee, thanks for "handing it to me" though it was equally "mine" to begin with... I guess I will try to sort through all of those edits, then.
 * I'm creating a category for creative nonfiction writers and will try to fill it with the list of the authors you removed from the article. A category is probably a better container for that list.
 * I've also restored the section about the structure of creative nonfiction; you can put a Fact tag on there if you feel it necessary, but let's not delete it so hastily. I'm trying to see if there's anything else that seems worthy of reinstatement. Terence7 (talk) 15:34, 14 April 2008 (UTC)


 * Sorry, I misunderstood! I thought you were interested in working up this page. I wouldn't be so hasty in reverting / replacing unsourced text. It is pointless. Why not source it? Someone else is just going to delete it or it'll end up at AfD. Cheers! Wassupwestcoast (talk) 15:48, 14 April 2008 (UTC)


 * Right, I'm just trying to avoid seeing this article needlessly gutted. Wikipedia "policy" aside, I think it's silly to delete huge swaths of mostly good and correct text for no better reason than it doesn't have a citation. Why not request a citation and give it some time?
 * And I am also suggesting that it is not the best editing practice to make such a large number of consective edits to different parts of the article, making it difficult to see what was actually done (even when you look at all of the revisions at once). Terence7 (talk) 16:40, 14 April 2008 (UTC)


 * I agree with you and I disagree with you! I agree that I too do not want to see the article either gutted or deleted. I agree also that it can be hard to track edits if a lot of work is done. I disgree with leaving unsourced text up because it harms the project (i.e. the reputation of Wikipedia as a reliable source of info). As for tracking edits, there ought to be a better tool to compare revisions. However, I don't spend hours planning an optimum revision 'path'. I edit when I see a problem. It's messy and it is real. Most of my edits were MoS and policy / guideline related. Cheers! Wassupwestcoast (talk) 23:21, 14 April 2008 (UTC)
 * I'd also rather see a polite request for more citations rather than just deleting stuff. That's not a very constructive or cooperative approach.Callivert (talk) 06:12, 13 November 2010 (UTC)

Literary Journalism Needs Its Own Page
Literary journalism and "creative nonfiction" are not the same thing. Literary journalism is a specific type of creative nonfiction, which also serves as an umbrella for all sorts of other prose such as memoir, autobiography, essay, history, etc. The words "literary" and "journalism" have specific referents: journalism indicates that acts of reporting are an integral component of the work, and literary indicates that the style of writing borrows rhetorical elements from literature. Here is the definition I use in my dissertation: "Literary journalism is a type of nonfiction writing that adheres to all of the reportorial and truth-telling covenants of traditional journalism, while employing rhetorical and storytelling techniques more commonly associated with fiction. In short, it is journalism as literature." As you can see, this is much more specific than the broad category of "Creative Nonfiction."

Additionally, New Journalism is an era in literary journalism history and not a synonym for the form.

Moreover, there is an international academic organization devoted to the study of literary journalism: International Association for Literary Journalism Studies (IALJS). This association holds a scholarly conference once a year and puts out a peer-reviewed journal twice a year. And I can tell you that it has been mentioned several times at these conferences how unfortunate and misguided the Wikipedia redirect is for literary journalism.

Finally, the list of references in this section is woeful. It indicates to anyone with any knowledge about literary journalism that the writers and editors of this page do not understand the history or significance of the genre. Although it is a useful and interesting collection of stories, there is more to the form (and much more to the scholarship) that Kerrane + Yagoda's The Art of Fact. For scholarship on literary journalism history please see:

Norman Sims, ed. The Literary Journalists Ballantine 1984 Norman Sims, ed. Literary Journalism in the Twentieth Century Ballantine 1990 (republished in 2008 by Northwestern University Press) Thomas B. Connery, ed. A Sourcebook of American Literary Journalism Greenwood Press 1992 Norman Sims + Mark Kramer, eds. Literary Journalism Ballantine 1995 John Hartsock, A History of American Literary Journalism University of Massachusetts Press 2000 Norman Sims, True Stories: A Century of Literary Journalism Northwestern University Press 2007 Kathy Forde Roberts, Literary Journalism on Trial: Masson v. The New Yorker University of Massachusetts Press 2008 John Bak + Bill Reynolds, Literary Journalism Across the Globe University of Massachusetts Press 2011

And those are just the ones with LJ in the title, off the top of my head.

I'm not sure what is needed for Literary Journalism to have its own page, but there is absolutely no dispute that it needs one, that it is different from "creative nonfiction" and that there is an entire community of scholars across the globe who studied and write about this distinct form of writing.

Feel free to contact me directly. I'll write the damn page. jmr197@case.edu — Preceding unsigned comment added by 192.5.109.34 (talk) 20:56, 28 June 2011 (UTC)

Micharacterization in Ethics subhead
The article says: "Although there have been instances of traditional and literary journalists falsifying their stories, the ethics applied to creative nonfiction are the same as those that apply to journalism."

This despite the fact that the history of the Talk page demonstrates a concensus that CNF is not under the purview of literary journalism. That, if the two concepts are related at all, then it is that CNF describes an overarching genre, ie poetry, fiction, drama, and literary journalism is a subcategorization. I have not read D'Agata's Lifespan of a Fact, but another of his works, About a Mountain, plays with fact fluidly and does not hold to the ethics of journalism. The fundamental disconnect here is that CNF is about structure and narrative and creativity, while journalism purports to be a public good, ie Fourth Estate, whose credibility is founded on fact-based reporting. Nonfiction describes both practices because CNF is clearly not fiction in that the world of the story is very much our own, invention limits itself to a few changes of fact (in ethical instances), similarly journalism writes of our "real" world. This is why I think it would be better to revise that conclusion entirely to say that "Narrative is the moral compass by which Creative Nonfiction sets its course, facts merely tools." Spinfuzz (talk) 02:20, 28 August 2013 (UTC)

Capote missing
Where's Capote's In Cold Blood now? It's really famous. Even if it's an example of a subgenre it ought to be mentioned. --96.233.83.186 (talk) 14:08, 17 October 2013 (UTC)

Umm, this article is very loving (perhaps even adulatory) but says very little. There's little that conveys import or understanding to the layman. I mean, "the genre leads itself to grand experimentation". Attention by self-critical folk knowledgeable in the field is definitely required. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 173.29.20.235 (talk) 07:07, 20 May 2016 (UTC)

External links modified
Hello fellow Wikipedians,

I have just modified 3 external links on Creative nonfiction. Please take a moment to review my edit. If you have any questions, or need the bot to ignore the links, or the page altogether, please visit this simple FaQ for additional information. I made the following changes:
 * Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20101013010011/http://www.usm.maine.edu/stonecoastmfa/faculty/nonfiction.html to http://www.usm.maine.edu/stonecoastmfa/faculty/nonfiction.html
 * Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20060106195952/http://www.creativenonfiction.org/thejournal/sound/gutkind/cnfis/cnfis1.ram to http://www.creativenonfiction.org/thejournal/sound/gutkind/cnfis/cnfis1.ram
 * Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20060106201549/http://www.creativenonfiction.org/thejournal/sound/gutkind/cnfexamples/cnfexamples.ram to http://www.creativenonfiction.org/thejournal/sound/gutkind/cnfexamples/cnfexamples.ram

When you have finished reviewing my changes, you may follow the instructions on the template below to fix any issues with the URLs.

Cheers.— InternetArchiveBot  (Report bug) 08:31, 14 August 2017 (UTC)

Merge with Narrative history
I believe this concept should be called Narrative nonfiction and that this page wikipedia's "Narrative history" and "Non-fiction novel" pages should be merged.

A few Google searches seem to show that "Narrative nonfiction" is the most popular term.

Writersandeditors.com has a good definition:

Narrative nonfiction goes under many names, including creative nonfiction, literary journalism, and fact-based storytelling.

(Whether it's called narrative nonfiction, literary nonfiction, long-form journalism, creative nonfiction, or narrative journalism — true stories, well-written and compelling)

"Creative nonfiction" is misleading in that it implies the facts can be made up. You stick to the truth--the storytelling is fact-based--but you adapt some of the features of fiction (creating a narrative persona, setting scenes, presenting interesting characters, creating the look and feel of a setting, telling a story) to the purposes of journalism.