Comments on: Narrative Nonfiction: Kicking Ass at Last

By: bamauthor

bamauthor — Sun, 12 May 2013 13:58:19 +0000

Yea, for non fiction, I have just begun writing a children’s non fiction picture book series using a funny character as narrator who visits historical places. My idea is to making learning facts fun. In view of the emphasis on the core curriculum in the US placing more emphasis on using non fiction in the classroom, I thought this approach is needed.

By: Mary

Mary — Wed, 01 May 2013 16:31:34 +0000

I meant: TV writing has taught me a lot about narrative nonfiction.

By: Mary

Mary — Wed, 01 May 2013 16:30:19 +0000

Thanks for a wonderfully narrative article on nonfiction, Elizabeth! I am a great fan of your work, my favorites being Woodie Guthrie and Dorthea Lange–wonderful books which I have studied as examples in crafting my own writing. Being a TV news reporter, the shift to longer nonfiction has been daunting. But despite the fact one might consider TV news fiction…:) it has actually taught me a lot about narrative.

By: Sharat B.

Sharat B. — Wed, 24 Apr 2013 18:40:33 +0000

I’ll admit I am not published and my education in it is from a college’s English undergraduate course in creative/literary nonfiction, so my viewpoint may be very different from a lot of people here, but there is a distinction to be made. The name of our genre “nonfiction” has sadly been equated with “fact, or truth” whereas “nonfiction” is very literally anything that is “not fiction.” Dreams, visions, postmodern subjectivity/complexity is all not literally true, but not made up either. So since this post is in the spirit of not boxing nonfiction writers in, I’d love to see children’s narrative nonfiction that engages the complexities of living in the 21st century on their level: money in politics, insidious racism, the hidden class system in America. That is written in other words with the understanding that we moved past objectively knowing the truth, in terms of drawing meaning in a narrative, back in the 60s.