Creative Nonfiction...

...can mean a lot of different things. There's people like Kean's Professor Connor who write books about historical figures. That's Creative Nonfiction. There's people like myself who write features for our newspaper, The Tower, and that's Creative Nonfiction too. There's blogs like this, and people who write journals. The underlying similarity is that all these things contain information which is supposed to be mostly true and supposed to be entertaining. Unfortunately, that doesn't seem like a very good definition.

Creative Nonfiction isn't as much of a genre as it is a process- a particularly humanizing one at that. Encyclopedias & budget reports & policy manuals are full of nonfictional information, but they don't contain information that's interesting to people. They're cold and systematic- the types of things few people are willing to read and even fewer find themselves enjoying.

The human concern, however, is the most important aspect of any writing endeavor. Creative Nonfiction, as I would like to define it, is a truth-telling process that presents factual information as it is relevant and sympathetic to human concerns. It's a presentation of the "real" world, sympathetic to the real concerns of the people who really go through it.