Nathan Bransford - The Forums

Hello, my name is Bill, I am 64 years of age from Cincinnati Ohio and I am writing a memoir. I keep reading articles and other info about the topic and the more I read the more confused I get.

Bill

Welcome, psnoopydog,

The Bransforum braintrust doesn't have as deep a backfield in creative nonfiction writers as for fiction writers. No matter, we have a few. Besides, creative nonfiction writing is much like fiction's, only creative nonfiction assumes a fact-based expression of truth or true account. Fiction, though invented, still seeks truth. Note that story qualities are otherwise identical in either form.

Memoir is a creative nonfiction genre closely related to personal essay. Memoir genre lost some of its marketplace appeal in the later twentieth century due to politicians and celebrities labeling their emotionally empty, dramatically lackluster, and impersonal autobiographical histories as memoirs. Literary agents and publishers developed a reluctance to consider memoirs for representation and publication. Personal essay became a more acceptable term for the core of memoir as a literature genre.

Anyway, a creative nonfiction text that might begin to clear up some of the confusion is Writing Life Stories by Bill Roorbach. The book has been re-released over the years in updated and revised editions. 2008 is the most recent.

For a reader text full of model creative nonfiction stories, Phillip Lopate's The Art of the Personal Essay is a treasure trove spanning two millennia's best of and includes analysis of creative nonfiction structure and aesthetics and narrative theory.

thank you