Creative Writing

CHAPTER15

The Realities of Nonfiction and Memoir

In This Chapter

• Background study
• Data and honesty
• Remembering
• Writerly intervention

Nonfiction writers and memoirists often take advantage of novel-writing techniques to enhance their prose and develop their books. They create scenes and characters, use dialogue and description, and as much as possible, they try to show rather than tell.

These are all excellent ways to bring books to life, but in fact, there’s more to glean from fiction than scene, description, and dialogue. The strategies behind good storytelling are numerous, and many additional techniques are available for nonfiction writers ...