Creative nonfiction combines techniques of fiction and journalistic writing. It uses artistic techniques like poetic language and exploration of self to recount true experiences. Unlike strict journalism, creative nonfiction allows reconstructing dialogue and purposefully changing minor details to better reflect the subjective experience or create composite characters. The genre focuses on personal reflection and capturing the essence of truth through the author's perspective and narrative voice rather than stating just facts or remaining strictly unbiased. It aims to convey the larger meaning gleaned from events rather than strict accuracy.

1. What is Creative Non Fiction?

2. “There is no autobiography, only art and lies” Jeanette Winterson

3. Essay << >> Essaito try

4. What Montaigne tells us about himself is peculiarly, charmingly specific and daily: he is on the short side, has a loud, abrasive voice, suffers from painful kidney stones, scratches his ears a lot (the insides itch), loves sauces, is not sure radishes agree with him, does his best thinking on horseback, prefers glass to metal cups, moves his bowels regularly in the morning, and so on. It is as if the self were a new continent, and Montaigne its first explorer. Phillip Lopate, The Art of the Personal Essay

5. Characteristics PERSONAL Exploration Confusion Focus on style Poetic language Reflection Artful truth “Just the facts, Ma’am” Information Thesis Tries to be unbiased Third person Truth Creative Non Fiction NOT Creative Non Fiction

6. Author as Narrator

7. Tension

8. Details not remembered exactly TRUTH Reconstructing Dialogue Purposefully changing a detail Creating a composite character Making stuff up LIES

9. Perhaps, it never did snow that August in Vermont; perhaps there never were flurries in the night wind, and maybe no one else felt the ground hardening and summer already dead even as we pretended to bask in it, but that was how it felt to me, and it might as well have snowed, could have snowed, did snow. Joan Didion, “On Reading a Notebook”

10. What happened to the writer is not what matters; what matters is the larger sense that the writer is able to make of what happened. For that the power of a writing imagination is required. Vivian Gomick “Why Memoir Now”