You've Got a Story To Tell: Introduction to Creative Nonfiction

“Some things are hard to write about. After something happens to you, you go to write it down, and either you overdramatize it or underplay it, exaggerate the wrong parts or ignore the important ones. At any rate, you never write it quite the way you want to. I’ve just got to put down what happened to me this afternoon. . . . No matter how it comes out, I have to write it.”  

                                      ~ Sylvia Plath, The Journals of Sylvia Plath

What Sylvia Plath describes above may be something you’ve experienced: the need to put your experiences into writing, but also a sense of inadequacy around that very impulse.

• Can you capture the experience in a way that feels “true”?
• Can you assign words that will translate something lived into something readers can experience along with you?
• Can you “dramatize” the experience correctly to highlight the importance of what occurred?
• Can you assign meaning that achieves a sense of resolution for you and your readers?
  
  

In this introductory course on creative nonfiction, these are just a few of the questions we will explore.

You've Got a Story to Tell

In creative nonfiction, personal history and memory provide the basis for creative work. The subject of your writing is your life and your own stories. Thus, every life forms the foundation of a writer’s life; it’s just a matter of finding the right stories to tell.

In this course, I will introduce new techniques and approaches to help you find and refine creative nonfiction essays rooted in your experience. This type of writing, often called memoir, is based in personal narrative but takes on other elements of great storytelling, from the descriptive quality of the writing to the shape of the narrative structure. You will learn the craft elements of narrative that will help you write compelling nonfiction.

If you’ve been looking for an opportunity to reflect on the stories of your life, this course will provide the structure, along with multiple prompts, to help you mine your history for the gems lurking within your memories. Along the way, you will produce six different personal narratives, developing at least one into a full-length essay.

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To explore a sample of creative nonfiction, visit the Substack page for Mining for Meaning: The Writer’s Life. This publication is a free newsletter with one goal: to share human stories! You can subscribe and invite others to join. As you move through this course, you may generate writing you'd like to publish there, too!