Creative Nonfiction
Creative nonfiction is my personal favorite genre to write from, although I feel that it’s a genre that is overlooked by many. When I write nonfiction, I almost feel as though I am baring part of my soul to the world since what I’m writing about are things that have actually happened in my life. Nonfiction allows the writer to pull from their own experiences as well as write about things they find interesting about the world. There is only one rule when it comes to nonfiction, it has to be true, but just because you are writing about true events doesn’t mean you can’t be creative about it. There are endless ways to be creative with nonfiction, you just need to be willing experiment a little.
One of the things I like to do when writing essays is change the point of view. You may be writing about something that happened to you in the past, but that does not mean you have to keep it in first person. Try writing the story in third person, or maybe even second person if you feel daring. Changing the perspective of an essay can sometimes change the whole tone of the piece.
Another way to change up nonfiction is to play with the form. One way you could do this is write in little sections that all come together into one piece. For example, for an essay I wrote about place from my childhood I started each section with a different age and wrote what I remembered about the place from different ages. Then I started each of my sections with the same phrase “When I was (insert age here)”, then I put all of those phrases in bold font. This is just one example, there are so many different way to format an essay, so be creative with it!
These are just a couple ideas to get you started. When writing nonfiction you have the ability to make it as creative as you want it. Don’t let the fact that nonfiction has to be true stop your creativity, let it enhance it.
