Keep It Real: Everything You Need to Know About Researching and Writing Creative Nonfiction - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0393065618 ISBN 13: 9780393065619

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 2008

Synopsis

The one guide every creative nonfiction writer needs to turn to when being "creative."

Writers of memoir and narrative nonfiction are experiencing difficult days with the discovery that some well-known works in the genre contain exaggerations―or are partially fabricated. But what are the parameters of creative nonfiction? Keep It Real 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. A succinct but rich compendium of ideas, terms, and techniques, Keep It Real clarifies the ins and outs of writing creative nonfiction. Starting with acknowledgment of sources, running through fact-checking, metaphor, and navel gazing, and ending with writers' responsibilities to their subjects, this book provides all the information you need to write with verve while remaining true to your story.

About this title

About the Author

Lee Gutkind is the founder and editor of the literary journal Creative Nonfiction and a pioneer in the field of narrative nonfiction. Gutkind is also the editor of In Fact and Becoming a Doctor, the author of Almost Human, and has written books about baseball, health care, travel, and technology. A Distinguished Writer in Residence at Arizona State University, he lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and Tempe, Arizona.

Reviews

You would think a guide through the ethical thicket that awaits creative nonfiction writers would have clearer answers. But writer and editor Gutkind seems positively Swiss in his neutrality on the simmering issues that flared into open warfare during the James Frey debacle. “Listen, I can’t answer all these questions with rules and regulations,” he tells a college audience in an anecdote from the introduction. “I am not the creative nonfiction police!” Rather than indulging in what he calls “sanctimonious pronouncements about Truth in Art,” Gutkind and his essayists offer a sort of literary realpolitik, providing thoughtful but studiously noncommittal glosses on “checkbook journalism” (paying subjects for information), compression (combining multiple events and/or quotes for the sake of narrative flow), and using family members as characters (tempting but potentially fatal to household harmony). It’s fine as far as it goes, but you sympathize with the woman who stood up after Gutkind’s college declaration and said, “Someone has to be. And you are under arrest.” --Kevin Nance

Edition details

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 2008
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0393065618
• ISBN 13: 9780393065619
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 176
• Editor: Gutkind Lee