Techniques of Creative Nonfiction

Image
Approach and Point of View
Tone and Voice
Structure
Opening Methods
Rhetorical Techniques
Character
Setting
Scene
Story
Closing/Ending Methods
1 Image
Latin imago, a picture or portrayal

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 An image is a word or a series of words
that evokes one or more of the five senses.

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Sensory Details
If you write in words that evoke
the senses, you create a world
your reader can enter.

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My sharpest memory is of a single instant surrounded
by dark. I was seven, and our family doctor knelt
before me where I sat on a mattress on the bare floor.
He wore a yellow golf shirt unbuttoned so that sprouts
of hair showed in a V shape on his chest. I had never
seen him in anything but a white starched shirt and a
gray tie. The changed unnerved me. He was pulling at
the hem of my favorite nightgown---a pattern of Texas
bluebonnets bunched into nosegays tied with a ribbon
against a field of nappy white cotton. I had tucked my
knees under it to make a tent. He could easily have
yanked the thing over my head with one motion, but
something made him gentle.”Show me the marks,” he
said…
-from Mary Karr’s childhood memoir The Liar’s Club

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It is best to consider Look before you leap.
consequences before
proceeding.

It’s important you reassure

your offspring of your Have you hugged your child
affection. today?

I will do everything in my I will fall like an ocean on

power to overturn this that court! (Arthur Miller,
unjust verdict. The Crucible)

The situation is being Wag the dog.

manipulated by peripheral
interests.
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Abstractions: names of ideas or concepts,
which cannot in themselves be
experienced directly or through one or
more of our senses

Generalizations: can only be vaguely

visualized because they include too much
of a given group

Judgments: tells us what to think about

something instead of showing it
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Often, using the imagery of one sense will
suggest the other senses as well and will
resonate with the ideas, qualities, and
emotions that are not stated.

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The cellar smells strongly of mouse
droppings, a smell which wafts upward
through the whole building, getting
fainter as you go up, mingling with the
smell of of green Dustbane used to clean
the floors, and with other smells, the
floor polish and furniture wax and
formaldehyde and snakes.

-from Margaret Atwood’s Cat’s Eye

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Active verbs are images too.

Passive verbs, linking verbs, all forms of

verb to be, invite flat, generalized writing,
whereas active verbs jump-start the mind.

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Concrete,
Significant Details
The most successful pieces of creative
nonfiction are rich in details. Bare facts are
never enough. They need to be fleshed out and
humanized.

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Concrete: there is an image, something that
can be seen, heard, smelled, tasted, or
touched

Significant: the specific image also suggests

an abstraction, generalization,
or judgment

Detail there is a degree of focus and

specificity

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There is something uneasy in the Los Angeles air this
afternoon, some unnatural stillness, some tension. What it
means is that tonight a Santa Ana will begin to blow, a hot
wind from the northeast whining down through the Cajon
Pass, blowing up sandstorms out along Route 66, drying the
hills and the nerves to the flash point. For a few days now we
will see smoke back in the canyons, and hear sirens in the
night. I have neither heard nor read that a Santa Ana is due,
but I know it, and almost everyone I have seen today knows it
too. We know it because we feel it. The baby frets. The maid
sulks. I rekindle a waning argument with the telephone
company, then cut my losses and lie down, given over to
whatever is in the air. To live with the Santa Ana is to accept,
consciously or unconsciously, a deeply mechanistic view of
human behavior.

-from Joan Didion’s “Los Angeles Notebook”

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 Seven weeks have passed, yet the dim lavender
room with the striped window curtains has been kept
as Tonja kept it. Haphazardly positioned on top of the
white French Provincial style dresser are staples of
teenage life: Sure deodorant, Enjoli cologne, an
electric curling wand.
A white jewelry box opens to a ballerina dancing
before a mirror. Inside, among watches and bracelets,
is a gold Dudley High School ring with a softball player
etched into one side and a Panther on the other. Also
inside was a mimeographed reminder that a $9
balance must be paid in Mrs. Johnson’s room for the
1982 yearbook. The deadline was Jan. 15.

-from Greta Tilley’s “A Suicide at Age 16”

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The Depression was no financial shock for me. I didn’t
have any money to lose, but in common with millions I
did dislike hunger and cold. I had two assets. My father
owned a tiny three-room cottage in Pacific Grove in
California, and he let me live in it without rent. That
was the first safety. Pacific Grove is on the sea. That
was the second. People in inland cities in the closed
and shuttered industrial cemeteries had greater
problems than I. Given the sea a man must be very
stupid to starve. That great reservoir of food is always
available. I took a large part of my protein food from
the ocean.

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Firewood to keep warm floated on the beach daily,
needing only handsaw and ax. A small garden of
black soil came with the cottage. In northern
California you can raise vegetables of some kind all
year long. I never peeled a potato without planting
the skins. Kale, lettuce, chard, turnips, carrots and
onions rotated in the little garden. In the tide pools of
the bay mussels were available and crabs and
abalones and that shiny kelp called sea lettuce. With
a line and pole, blue cod, rock cod, perch, sea trout,
sculpin could be caught.

from John Steinbeck’s “A Primer of the Thirties”

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The wilds of Divisoria are represented here, and so are
the innards of customs, the sidewalks of Hong Kong, the
publishing houses of New York, the shoe villages of
Marikina, the printing presses of Quezon City and all
the countless small dingy rooms all over the city
wherever some budding businessman shrieks: May
gimmick tayong bago…! And so this diurnal torrent of
butingting---spirographs, lighters laminated with
wildflowers, shoelaces, flints, lighter fluids, nails, locks,
fake tarot cards, equally fake college rings molted from
melted bronze trophies and polished to the sheen of
yellow gold.

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(Sinong magsasabing P3.95 lang ‘yan kung suot ng disenteng
tao? HEP, bili-bili, HEP, bili-bili na kayooo!) Strollers, plastic
desk calculators, neckties, headlines (NORA’S HOUSE
HAUNTED? OPEC RAISES OIL PRICES AGAIN) lining the
sidewalk of a poor man’s carpet, an obstacle course of
colorful perishabilities. Nail files, erasers, rubber bands,
greeting cards that proclaim: LOVE NEVER GIVES UP!

Condoms, headbands, nothing discourages this march of

849 cliches because Love never gives up, lodging even in
the dim and narrow alleys between buildings to sell
lighters and mold keys, waiting patiently in the dark rooms
off Bustos to tell your fortune, humming to itself as it
practices the swing in that dancing school across the
street, peddling perfumes at the old Corona Bazaar...

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love turning round and round in miniature ferris wheels
mounted atop a department store deck and making
Christmas of the hottest summer day for restless retazo
along for the shopping trip.

-from Sylvia Mayuga’s “Love Never Gives Up” (1981)

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All writing involves selection.

Excessive commentary is intrusive overkill.

The overall impression created by the

selection constitutes the writer’s style,
meaning, or individual truth.

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Figures of Speech

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Cliché

E.g “windows of the soul,” “eyes like pools,”

“path of life,” “crazy as a bedbug,” “nose to
the grindstone”

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Activities (Homework) - Due on May 14, Monday

1. David Sedaris’s “Standing By” exposes bad-tempered

travelers visibly, audibly, and ultimately in one succint
image.

Read the essay once, fast, for content and

pleasure; then a second time consciously
aware of images and metaphors. What
effect do they have on you? How?
What technique(s) might you imitate, absorb,
try, borrow? (1/2 crosswise)

2. Read “Marikina” by Nick Joaquin. Do you know any

street or district which is associated with a particular
product (as Marikina is associated with shoemaking), or
associated with a festival? Do a little research and write
a short piece on the place, taking care to include as many
informative and evocative details as possible.
(at least 3 paragraphs, print on 1 page short bond paper,
Times New Roman 12, single space, provide title)
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References
Burroway, Janet. Imaginative Writing: The Elements of
Craft, 4th ed. New York: Pearson, 2014.

Hidalgo, Cristina P. Creative Nonfiction: A Manual for

Filipino Writers, 2nd ed. Quezon City: UP Press, 2005.

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Describe the image below as if it is a scene in an essay you are writing. Use all of the five senses.
What’s the color of the sky? What sounds do we hear? What smell predominates? How do the
children feel while walking on the flooded street? Attempt to create a mood or evoke an emotion
with the details you provide.

Larry Monserate Piojo.

July 27, 2017

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