The Art of Creative Nonfiction: Writing and Selling the Literature of Reality (Wiley Books for Writers Series)

Lee Gutkind did justice to this book. Almost every advice you would need to help you write good essays, books articles,etc. My writing skills have tremendously improved after i read this book.The Art of Creative Nonfiction: Writing and Selling the Literature of Reality (Wiley Books for Writers Series)

I am using this book for a class on literary journalism. To be frank, there aren't a lot of choices out there for this class--there's a lot of the other kind of 'creative nonfiction' stuff--memoir, personal writing, etc. I like that stuff too, but I'm trying to draw the Journalistic Line, here. This book is one of the few choices there are for my purposes, but I can see why--who could write a book much better than this? This is the Gold Standard as far as I'm concerned.

The book has a teeny-tiny reader in it (unlike most CNF books which are about 50 pages of 'craft' and 200 of 'reader') which leaves plenty of room for one to explore one's own taste. Don't have taste yet? Gutkind gives a (slightly dated but not much) list in the book of great places to start. If you grab this book and any of the good anthologies of creative nonfiction or literary journalism (I use _Art of Fact_) you'll soon figure out what you like or dislike. His reader is useful because he refers to it throughout the text part, and it gives a chance to see the stuff in action.

He covers everything from how to choose a topic, ethics of the genre, the position of the self (echoing my opinion that in LJ, it's not about *you*!) and form. It's amazing that a book that covers so much could be so cheap! I've seen $90 doorstop-texts with less content. And though it has no exercises in the book, per se, it's easy enough to use it as a follow along guide that will be a companion through many years of writing.

If you're just interested in the genre, or need the scoop from the Disciple of Creative Nonfiction (he edits a journal of the same name, as well as a new, yearly anthology), and words from a man who practices what he preaches, this is a wonderful book.

A clown for Ringling Brothers, an assistant in liver and heart transplantation surgeries, a baseball umpire, a motorcyclist and a participant in psychotherapy: When it comes to having the experience necessary to write interesting essays, Lee Gutkind is ahead of the game. In his textbook "The Art of Creative Nonfiction : Writing and Selling the Literature of Reality," Gutkind uses his passion for the written word and the experiences that inspire it to assist beginning creative nonfiction writers in their quest to share life through writing.


Covered in the book's outline-reminiscent chapters are instructions on interviewing, fact checking, finding ideas, creating dialogue and keeping story files. Straying from the norm of "interesting... [and] accurate," Gutkind stresses that the most important requirement of a creative nonfiction writer is passion- "A passion for the written word, a passion for the search and discovery of knowledge, and a passion for... understand[ing] intimately how things in this world work." In the following chapters, he offers advice on what creative nonfiction is (the relation experiences, often subjective) and is not (encyclopedia truth) in a concise yet affable manner.


Peppered with brief works from other writers used as illustrations of his suggestions, "The Art of Creative Nonfiction" is a solid, friendly text for beginning writers and an excellent stepping stone into the world of writing for a career.

This book reads like an outline of a book on Creative Nonfiction. A beginner might find some chapters useful or inspiring, but anyone with writing experience is likely to find it too shallow. The chapter on Immersion--one of the key methods of reporting a highly detailed, creative story--is only 8 pages long, gives a few anecdotes, but provides next to no useful information to a writer contemplating this technique. The following chapter, on interviewing, is 10 pages long and more than half of it is composed of long excerpts from other stories. You might see the _results_ of doing a good interview, but not much beyond the obvious in actually carrying out a good interview.

This book doesn't stand out for me among the large number of mediocre books aimed at beginning to intermediate nonfiction writers.

Initially I was afraid to invest hard cash on this book because I want my nonfiction to be totally factual. However, my fears were unfounded. This book was well worth the investment and I recommend it to all aspiring writers of nonfiction. The book is a tremendous eye-opener. It blows the myth that nonfiction writing has to be dull. Dull does not sell. If you are writing nonfiction, you need to read this book. For one thing, the author teaches that the words "creative" and "fiction" are not synonymous. You CAN write creative nonfiction.