Customer Reviews

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

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

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.

Gutkind's advice covers aspects of writing others neglect. He tells how to access your strengths, lists grant funding sources, and provides detailed illustrations of how to organize for a productive career. Learn vital tips for keeping current with your market, for assessing your competition, for deciding what voice your article or book requires, as well as, how truth figures into nonfiction writing. Gutkind includes a sample book proposal to guide your efforts, discusses pros and cons of getting a M.F.A. degree, and nuts and bolts like interviewing, researching, specializing, and focusing your writing. This book is less about selling and more about writing something that will sell

How often has a piece of nonfiction writing left you bored to tears with its rambling of fact after fact, a completely limp, motionless piece? Well, Gutkind has developed a structured teaching method for this genre: frame, focus and scene. Once you understand his "yellow test," your writing will vastly improve, bursting with energy and radiating the essence of life, that is, the truth with a capital "T." He lifts your head, redirecting you from gazing into your own belly button, and unveils the techniques of capturing and presenting universal themes--a focus that touches us all. This book not only shows you how to write, more importantly, it show you how to think. Buy it today--he's the godfather of the genre, creative nonfiction, and the editor and founder of the only journal devoted exclusively to the genre.

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.

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 is a complete waste of money. The book i read the day before i read this was phenomenal: Writing Life Stories: How to make memories into memoirs, ideas into essays, and life into literature. It really is the best craft book i've ever come across, no contest. The excersies in it are creative, fun and (most of all) extremely helpful when it comes to figuring out what your weakness is AND THEN how to overcome them. You will get none of that in AoCN. There is little 'warning' about what can derail your writing. And there is, seriously, NOTHING that takes that next step and teaches you to overcome something you may realize you are not good at.

There is simply not enough valuable content in Gutkind's book to warrent a full reading. I had to force myself to finish it, hoping that I would learn something new. That did not happen.

What bothered me most was that this author spends WAY too much time explaining the books and essays he has written. He threw in an incredibly long excerpt from one of his books, and then gives about three paragraphs of information of why reading his excerpt should have taught me something. I couldn't believe this guy threw in a section about ego in the midst of this nearly shameless advertising of his own works. This book comes off as a guy bragging about his own work. This book does not encourage the reader to do much of anything, whereas the other book i referenced above makes you want to dive in and do the excersises for months on end because the book gets you so fired up to write, on top of that, it gets you fired up to practice getting better on your flaws as a writer--it gets you fired up to continue learning, not simply 'wow, I want to get down to writing my memoir this second!'

I'm a lucky guy, in that i can afford to 'miss' with some of the books I buy, but there are just too many other books out there that destroy this one. What I'm angry about losing the most is the aderal I wasted by taking it before i read this book, and that may have been the only reason I was able to finish it.

What I really liked about this book was how the author takes you inside the daily life of a writer, and shows the working process, whether it's behind the keyboard or travel. He allows the reader to learn the pros and cons of the publishing world and the writing life, and gives nuts and bolts advice on how to thrive as a writer.

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.

This book has some interesting points about writing creative nonfiction, but I found it difficult to get through because I found the author's voice grating. He always seems to be boasting about things he's written. I've been reading Jack Hart's Storycraft, which I found more useful than this book. Hart also talks about his accomplishments, but the way he does it is more palatable than here.

I think the most useful thing I got from this book is Gutkind's advice to highlight those sections in a creative nonfiction work that are scenes with specific settings and people interacting. Although I haven't actually used a highlighter, I've kept it in mind and found it to be useful. Gutkind suggests that, when writing creative nonfiction, as much as possible should be written in scenes, as it is more gripping. He compares it to writing a screenplay.

The book provides a model book proposal Gutkind wrote when Reagan was president. Seriously. I suspect that a few things have changed with book proposals since then.

There is a useful list of excellent creative nonfiction books at the back, along with organizations and resources. Still, there are better books out there on the topic if you're interested.

I found this to be a good introductory book about the ins and outs of creative non-fiction writing and beyond. It covers many areas, from description, dialog, and framing all the way to research, immersion and interviews. I did get the feeling at times that this book was really written for beginners (even though I am one) to the point where it was a bit too simple and vague in several chapters.

Also, it seemed to focus more on essays and literary journalism and less on memoir and travel writing, which I could have used. I found Tell it Slant: Writing and Shaping Creative Non-fiction to be much more helpful for my needs. I did like the chapter called "The Elusive Truth" which focused on where the boundaries of truth might be for creative non-fiction writers.

That topic is of particular interest to me, since much of the writing I am doing takes place over 10 years ago, and some of it is a bit foggy in my memory. A good portion of the book has readings (many of them, unsurprisingly from Gutkind's books) as well, although there were few writing exercises.