User:Conattrj/real

Keep It Real: Everything You Need to Know About Researching and Writing Creative Nonfiction (edited by Lee Gutkind) provides writers with the working parameters of the creative nonfiction genre, in a the form of glossary of concise entries that define and explain the anchoring elements of the genre.

This guide begins by defining creative nonfiction. Then it explores the flexibility of the form — the liberties and the boundaries that allow writers to be as truthful, factual, and artful as possible. Starting with the acknowledgment of sources, then running through fact-checking, metaphor, and navel gazing, and ending with writers’ responsibilities to their subjects, this book provides all the information writers need to write with verve while remaining true to their story.

Much of the content in this text was first published in the now-out-of-print Issue 29 of Creative Nonfiction. However the content in Keep it Real has been updated and expanded thanks to the work of the Creative Nonfiction Foundation.

The ABC's of Creative Nonfiction
The main component of Keep it Real is the "ABC's of Creative Nonfiction." This guide helps to quickly explain many of the often complicated and overlooked elements of creative nonfiction. Lee Gutkind and a team of writers and editors teamed up to deconstruct and explain exactly what it is that makes up nonfiction writing.

Acknowledgment of Sources

Backdoor Access

Checkbook Journalism

Composite Characters

Compression

Defamation and Libel

Evolution of the Genre

Facts

Fact-checking

Family Members as Characters

Forewords and Afterwords

Frame

Getting Inside Characters' Heads

Guiding the Reader

Gunkholing: Finding a Story

History into Nonfiction Narrative

The "I"

Immersion

Influencing Readers

Keeping It Brief

Legal Responsibilities of Publishers

The Lyric Essay

The Memoir Craze

Metaphor

Montage Writing

The Narrative Impulse

Navel-gazing

Point of View

Psychoanalyzing Characters

Quotation Marks

Reconstruction of Events

Reflection

The Roots of Memoir

Scenes

Subjectivity

Tape Recording

Truth

Use of Imagination

The Vagaries of Memory

Whose Story to Tell

Writers' Responsibility to Subjects

Contributing Writers
Robert S. Boynton

Kristen Cosby

Taha Ebrahimi

Hattie Fletcher

Lee Gutkind

Meredith Hall

Donna Hogarty

Kristen Iverson

Lori Jakiela

Barbra Lounsberry

Brenda Miller

Dinty W. Moore

Paul Morris

Dennis Palumbo

Lori Pfeiffer

Mimi Schwartz

Bryant Simon

Kathleen Tarr

Sarah Z. Wexler

Susan Yohe

The CNF Foundation
The Creative Nonfiction Foundation pursues educational and publishing initiatives in the genre of literary nonfiction. Its objectives are to provide a venue, the journal Creative Nonfiction, for high quality nonfiction prose (memoir, literary journalism, personal essay); to serve as the singular strongest voice of the genre, defining the ethics and parameters of the field; and to broaden the genre's impact in the literary arena by providing an array of educational services and publishing activities.

The Creative Nonfiction Foundation was incorporated in 1994 and is a private not-for-profit 501(c)(3) organization. The Creative Nonfiction Foundation is supported by public and private funds contributed by the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, the Juliet Lea Hillman Simonds Foundation, the Vira I. Heinz Endowment, and the Jewish Healthcare Foundation, as well as by individual donors.