Creative Nonfiction: Friend or Foe

            Taking Creative Nonfiction this semester has been an enormous eye-opener for me as a writer. There have been many works that we read that have shown me how to use strategies that I have never thought of using before. When trying to apply these new strategies, I discovered that my work has more potential than I originally thought at the beginning of the course. 

            I had a few concerns at the beginning of the course. Up until now, I had only taken fiction writing classes. In those, I chose to either create new fictional stories and characters or try to loosely base my work on real events with changes that disguised it enough that hopefully nobody would notice. Now, I feel more comfortable in my writing because I know that there is a genre in which I can tell my story without having to change any details if I do not want to just fit the genre. A concern that I would not be able to create enough emotional distance between myself and my readers was one that stressed me out immediately. I eventually realized that a little vulnerability is a good thing; I don’t always have to hide the truth of the story.

            Now that I have a few new skills that I can put into practice, writing creative nonfiction has come a bit more easily to me. When it comes to the work I need to continue to put in, I know one area for sure that needs improvement. I am working on not revising as I write a first draft. I put that into practice in one of our recent assignments and realized that revising as I go has hindered some of my creativity in my works. When I think of myself as a writer in general, I think trying to not edit on the spot will help me see my thought processes more clearly than before.

            A strength that I did not realize I had was the ability to try new strategies and writing styles. Over the length of the course, I have tried to experiment with new writing styles and strategies that we have seen in the works we read. One of my favorite new skills is writing flash fiction. I have thoroughly enjoyed trying new strategies in this course because it has helped me develop as a writer in all different kinds of writing.

This class has inspired me to try to cross certain boundaries that I had previously set for myself regarding how much information and emotion I put into my pieces. I believe that as a writer, I should try to be more vulnerable. As a reader, I appreciate the hard topics in works that I read, and I want to be able to influence others just as I have been influenced by authors and their works. This course is one that will forever remain in my memory because it showed me how to try new things as a writer instead of sticking to one style and never experimenting.