Transcription
Creative non-fiction is a combination, as I said to you, of style and substance, information and ideas presented in a story-oriented way. to the absolute beginning of the world of creative non-fiction. People, and I mean, creative non-fiction or narrative non-fiction has been around for a long, long time, but, um, but right now, but people are beginning to take it really seriously as a genre.
The, um, the New Journalists began dealing with creative non-fiction or with this narrative non-fiction in the 1960s and the 1970s, and it was Tom Wolfe who first said, um, that that we creative non-fiction writers, or in this case, we New Journalism writers, write in scenes. And that's the first thing to always try to remember that we are doing. And I will say this to you again and again and again. And in all of the 25 or 15 pieces that we will deal with today, I am going to show you scene after scene after scene after scene because the building blocks of creative non-fiction are scenes.
The classic structure of a creative non-fiction essay is kind of like a a rhythm between style and information. Style or scene and information. Scene and information. As we go through all of these pieces I have given you, you will see what happens. You will see how this works. That a writer will begin to tell a story. Okay, a writer will begin to tell a story, and in fact, tell a story. And once the reader is involved in the story, remember what the whole idea about creative non-fiction is. It's not to be cool. It's not necessarily to write a story. It's not necessarily to be the narrative king. The whole idea about creative non-fiction is to try to teach your readers something through story, using the story, using the narrative to make the information as compelling and interesting and entertaining as possible.
We have the, we, the world readers, have a tendency to not want to work too hard to learn. Okay? We resist being taught stuff unless we're really, really interested in what it is we're being taught. And so the idea is to be able to make it all much more palatable by using story. And so there's kind of a rhythm and a dance in the classic structure of creative non-fiction, essay, chapter, or book. Story. Once you get the reader involved in the story, you teach them something. You give them some information. Once you sense that they've had enough information teaching element, you go back to story. Once you know you have them back involved in whatever it is that you're talking about, you begin to teach them a little bit more. You have this idea, this thing that you want them to learn, and you don't just throw it at them. You gradually fit them in, fit in this information in a series of stories or in a longer narrative. You try also not so not only do you embed information between stories, but you try also as often as possible to embed information inside the story. It's a great dance. It's an it's a style and substance dance. You're teaching your reader. You're providing information to your reader, and you're not giving it to them too much because you're going to bore them to death.
Every piece of creative non-fiction is not only built in blocks of scene, but is also put together. You just can't take a thousand blocks of scene or five or six different scenes. The scenes have got to mesh. They've got to work together. So, every piece of creative non-fiction is framed in an overall story. We call that the story structure. So, your essays, your articles, your books have blocks of yellow or different scenes, but they're all part of one larger story. Okay? So in that veterinary piece, you can look at it later. There are about seven different interactions between the veterinarian and animals, each of which is a scene, but it is framed in the day and the life of a veterinarian. This is why I'm presenting these to you repeatedly so that you understand that the stories are different, but the structure is very, very similar. And so a essay of creative non-fiction may have four or five or six scenes, and they will be framed in an overall story or story structure. Okay. And a book of creative non-fiction will have chapters that are framed just the way essays are. But the book will also be framed in an overall story.
But remember, the story captures the reader. The story always keeps the reader, not the information, but the story. So the more stories that you have, especially in a bigger piece, the more reason the reader has to stay with what you're writing. And so we establish, try to establish parallel two, three, or four narratives at the same time. So you have an overall narrative that kind of frames your essay, chapter, or book, and then you have other narratives. If your reader is not interested in A, then maybe your reader will be interested in B or C. Everything you can do to connect to your reader, you do.