Writing Narrative Nonfiction: Art and Craft of Writing

Art: the holistic process of creating prose that moves the reader in ways that can not be fully dissected through some sort of literary analysis. The fullness of the experience of reading a story, the parts of which might be broken out and inspected, but which would not yield the total involvement the reader has while engaged with the writing. Writers achieve this end by understanding the craft (writing techniques) of their chosen genre so well that the writing itself becomes invisible. It operates in service of some higher goal. Art moves souls. When writing moves a soul it has achieved that alchemy we call Art.

Craft: the writing techniques we use to achieve Art, the nuts and bolts of composition, first the basic stuff like punctuation and sentence structure that any serious writer must master, then the more sophisticated techniques that go into creating a story: voice, narrative arc, description, dialogue, setting, and the various ways a writer develops human complexity in a character so that character becomes more than just ink on a page, becomes so real the reader can't wait to get back to the story. All that is the craft of writing. Learning to use it as masterfully as a journeyman carpenter wields his tools will help you achieve the end I call Art.

Over the next weeks I'll be talking specifically about how you can use the art and craft of writing to create characters in Narrative Nonfiction.