In their book, Writing True: The Art and Craft of Creative Nonfiction, writers and writing professors Sondra Perl and Mimi Schwartz offer a straightforward, encouraging look at how any of us can write our own moving and insightful accounts of life experiences. In addition, they include an anthology of creative nonfiction and offer tips on how to read the selections for learning increased skill with the craft.

They divide the work they have included into memoir, personal essay, portrait, essay of place, literary journalism, stories of craft and short shorts, divisions that educate readers on the diversity of the creative nonfiction genre. The term “creative nonfiction” is, they explain, “a new name for an old impulse: to write about the real world with grace, power, and personal commitment.”

Before the current name for this genre (first used in the early 1980s by the National Endowment for the Arts) took off into a “full-scale movement,” terms like belles letters, literary nonfiction and New Journalism were in vogue, they remind us. Today, the result is ever-expanding interest creative nonfiction and “permission to write creatively about the nonfiction world as they [writers] experience it.”

The two professors saw an artificial “rift” in university teaching between “straight nonfiction” and “creative nonfiction.” This book puts the two back together again so that students of writing could learn “how fact and point of view, research and voice work in tandem to produce strong nonfiction writing.”

 The result of their dedication and experience as writers and teachers of writing is a book that focuses on ideas for getting started, the use of a writer’s journal, exercises for developing drafts, exercises for shaping drafts into polished work, ways into finding the voice or voices necessary for authenticity, and strategies for working effectively in writer’s groups, using humor, and engaging research.

Sheila
What prompted the actual project of writing the book?

Sondra
The exact moment when we decided to write the book occurred at a writing conference. We were walking through the halls commenting to each other that sound practice in the teaching of writing isn’t based on gimmicks, that what works doesn’t vary much from year to year, and that after many years of teaching, we each had arrived at what we consider to be “the truths” that lead to good practice. Not surprisingly, these truths tended to be the same for us: doing a lot of writing, sharing it with a receptive audience, learning how to listen for voice — the bare bones of good writing workshops. So we thought we’d try putting these ideas down in a small book.

Mimi We both believe that nonfiction writing should have voice, commitment, and engage the reader—but neither of us, as teachers, had a book we liked using: one that combined good discussions, exercises, models, and included an anthology, all for a reasonable price. So we wrote one.

Sheila
What made you think of a making the writing a collaborative effort?

Mimi
We decided to write it together because a) we shared key ideas—that good nonfiction writing is more than passing on information, that it is an act of discovery for writer and reader—and b) our expertise to make this happen complimented each other. Sondra comes from a composition pedagogy; I come from a creative writing pedagogy. Together, we bring the best of both worlds.

Sondra
We are both big proponents of collaborative work. We’ve collaborated with colleagues and both enjoy the interplay of ideas that happens when composing with others.

Sheila
What do you think you were able to address that is not often dealt with in texts about writing creative nonfiction?

Mimi
Our book is “Writer to Writer” avoiding the paternalistic tone of many writing books. We wanted to avoid the traditional “You” the student approach, as if “You” have problems that “We” don’t share.

Sondra
We use “we” often in our book’s discussions. We wanted to avoid the traditional “You should…” tone that many books use when talking to students, as in “You” have problems that “We” don’t share. We believe that all writers — no matter who skilled or sophisticated — must deal with the same challenges: how to tell our story in a way that is true, compelling, informative, well researched, and important enough to matter. As a result, we tried to create a writing style that was inclusive.

Sheila
What are your favorite parts of the book?

Sondra
Given the recent hullabaloo about truth in nonfiction, thanks to James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces, we’d say that our chapter on ethics clears up much of the controversy he created. It lays out what, ethically, you can and can’t do in nonfiction.

Mimi
The chapter on voice is also unique–and at the heart of the genre, and the chapter on workshopping, our reviewers called, “the best one ever written.” Here, we spend a fair amount of time on something we think is crucial to make writing groups work: the skill of active listening.

Sheila
I, too, was quite taken with your application of the art of active listening to members’ responses in writing groups. I enjoyed the example response you share:

Reader: I am really with you here as you are sitting on the plane and wondering what awaits you when you get to California. I can feel your annoyance with all the announcements and the small TV screen in front of you that has boring shows on cooking But when you deplane, I don’t quite see the scene. I know you are looking for your friends and you are worried that they won’t show up–when you wipe the sweat from your neck. I can feel your anxiety–but I can’t tell exactly where you are as you say this. I feel lost. Are you waking through the terminal Are you at the luggage area?

You go on to show examples of I-based comments. These really help as they demonstrate what the reader needs without condemning the writing: ” I am lost here” and “I can’t picture the scene” are on your list. It is a very big help to writers when readers tell them what is happening for them when they are reading, not telling the writer what to do, but what is wished for.

Another favorite part of your book for me was when you share your own writing as examples. On pages 110-113 the discussion turns to methods of writing and revising. Here Sondra is dubbed an “overwriter” and Mimi an “underwriter.” Readers learn what these approaches to drafting mean to the revision process:

With the permission of your publisher, the college division of Houghton Mifflin Company, I am excerpting a portion of that discussion from pages 110-113 of Writing True: The Art and Craft of Creative Nonfiction.

Some writers think a lot before they start, revising before they’ve written one word. They try out lines and paragraphs in their heads, they talk to friends, they read magazines and books, they may even lift weights r clean closets, waiting for good ideas and a structure to announce themselves before they begin. Others write first, knowing they will discover what is good later on. Like James Michener, they count on revision to create something worthwhile out of the messiness of an early draft.

Those who write first rarely have writer’s block because they set the initial bar of expectations low: just write. Those who raise the bar at the outset may have less uncertainty in revision, but more angst getting started. Both approaches can produce fine finished work if writers now their styles and how to raise or lower the bar as needed.

Once the first words appear, styles again differ. Some writers put down everything that comes to mind; the more language that flows out, the better. For them, revision will mean deciding what’s best of what’s there. Others hold back, looking for structure and shape. Revision, for them, will mean filling in what has only been sketched.

Sondra is the first kind of writer, what we call an overwriter. Her first drafts tend to be too full, ideas going off in many directions. Revision is where she cuts back and finds more focus, as you can see in what happened to the first paragraph of her me memoir about teaching in Austria:

Early draft — opening paragraph:

When the phone rings one January morning in 1996, I have no inkling that the invitation I am about to accept will change my lie. I have not even the faintest idea that agreeing to teach a group of Austrian teachers will be the beginning of an odyssey, one that becomes me toward an uncertain future and pulls me back into a painful past. On the at Monday m morning, I hear only a voice at the o other end of the line proposing a fascinating piece of work. Nothing more. Initially I am elated and even faltered.

Final draft:

When the phone rings one January morning in 1996, I have no inkling that the invitation I am about to accept will be the beginning of an odyssey. I hear only a voice at the other end of the line proposing a compelling piece of work.

—On Austrian Soil: Teaching Those I Was Taught to Hate

Sondra says she made these changes because the phrase “will change my life” seemed too dramatic for an opening. So did “beckons me toward an uncertain future and pulls me back to an uncertain past.” It’s not that these sentiments weren’t true. They were. But Sonda felt, “The entire paragraph told too much too soon. Why should anyone care if I’m elated or flattered? The reader doesn’t even know me yet.”

Mimi on the other hand, is the second kind of writer, the underwriter. Her first drafts tend to be skimpy, but once down on paper, she fleshes them out. See how she turned a skeletal opening into a full one for her essay, “Sultan and the Red Honda”:

Early draft of paragraph one:

When I was a child I rode black stallions to be brave. Each Saturday I took the Metropolitan Avenue bus over to Forest Park in my jodhpurs and boots to gallop through the trails, hoping the picnickers and old men and women on their daily walk would look up and say, “Look at her go!” I didn’t like it as much when the horse reared once at the stable door and threw me on my face scratching it and skinning my knees so badly that the blood when it dried caked around the rip in my jodhpurs. When I limped onto the bus to go home that day, those old men and ladies looked at me and probably said, “Poor Girl” I didn’t like that at all.

Final draft:

Once upon a time I rented horses to be free. I’d climb on the Queens Metropolitan Avenue bus every Monday, Wednesday and Saturday and head for Stanley’s Stables twenty minutes away. There Stanley or his brother Jake would give me Sultan or Rajah or Calamity Max to ride–not around the ring like the other kids, but into Forest Park, alone.

They knew I could sit a horse, they said. So I’d prance across Union Turnpike (even if the light were red) and gallop down trails, where I’d hope picnickers and old men and women on walks would look up and say, “Look at her go!” Up in that saddle, racing through the woods, I wasn’t the shy, slouch-shouldered kid who everyone was always telling to stand up straight and smile. I was Roy Rogers, Elizabeth Taylor and the Lone Ranger all in one; a hero, a winner, a star.

Of course there were off days, like the time when Sultan, whom I loved best because he was wild and liked my carrots, bucked at the stable door and threw me face down into the gravelly dirt. As I limped onto the bus to go home that day, blood caked at the knees of my ripped jodhpurs, everyone stared and shook their heads as if to say, “Poor girl!”

I didn’t like that at all….

The small word changes in the first line–“rode” to “rented” and “brave” to “free”–were a creative trigger, says Mimi. “They led me to wonder what riding that rented stallion had to do with buying a red Honda thirty years later. I wrote the essay to find out.”

The authors tell us that:

Overwriters and underwriters can both produce great writing–if the writer knows what do to do next. The first revises by asking: What’s the story here? What, of all I’ve written, is essential? What can I get rid of? The second must ask: Where can I say more? Where do I need detail or dialogue to make the story come alive? Of course, these questions are asked by all revisers, but depending on style, successful writers know which ones they need to ask more often.

Thank you so much, Mimi and Sondra, for writing an instructional book that teaches by showing. I always believe we learn more by seeing drafts and revisions than by being told the rules of effective writing. Overhearing authors making choices helps us realize the choices we have when we are working on our own revisions.