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One of the most popular literary genres today is one that had no name just a few decades ago: “creative nonfiction,” also sometimes called “literary nonfiction.”
So what’s “creative” about creative nonfiction? For one thing, the composition: that is to say, how it’s constructed.
My husband is an engineer, and when he was project manager on a sewage treatment plant some years ago, he took many photographs of the plant at various stages of its construction. The photos were sharp and clear. Taken together, they told a story. But you won’t find them hanging in an art gallery beside the works of, say, Ansel Adams.
What makes some photographs worthy of being called “art” and others mundane? What distinguishes the paintings of Picasso from those of Monet? Simply put, it’s what is left out, what is put in, and how those elements are arranged: composition.
Lee Gutkind, editor of the journal Creative Nonfiction, describes the structure of a literary essay like this: “. . . think about an essay—a block of text—as a building, say 10 stories tall. Each story or level contains a scene—a mini-story—that is part of the narrative and helps move it forward. . . . The scene is the thing.”
So a creative nonfiction essay is a composition composed of scenes that, taken together, give the reader an experience that is more than the sum of its parts – just as a building is more than just the sum of its individual bricks and beams.
The following is a link to an essay that appeared in the Spring 2002 issue of Literal Latté, I wanted to say something about family and about the passage of time. The scenes, or “mini-stories,” I chose to use were episodes that occurred in local restaurants. |
