A Creative Nonfiction ABC
August 25, 2017 § 27 Comments
By Karen Zey
Avoid adverbs assiduously.
Befriend brevity.
Capture sensory details: creamy, crackling or crisp.
Devise dialogue that sounds like real talk. Drop the tags.
Em dash your way to emphasis—and limit those exclamation points!
Flash your essay. Or pen your theme in long form.
Grasp the grammar rules. Ain’t no problem bending ’em on purpose.
Heed your inner muse, but write beyond the self.
Imagine the reader imagining your experience. Read your work aloud.
Juxtapose tender and tough to add depth.
Keep studying your craft—writing is arduous.
Lay down heartfelt moments with lyricism.
Merge metaphors and memories for prisms of meaning.
Narrate with a compelling arc: sweeping tale or braided strands of thought.
Open with a strong hook that hints of more to come.
Punch up your ending with a powerful thought that lingers.
Question every word choice. Quell your penchant for purple prose.
Revise, obsess; revise, lose sleep; revise and sweat; revise, get it right.
Slant your story: angled insights yield creative nonfiction.
Tell the truth; show it with beauty. Take time before you write about hurt.
Understand the importance of the universal. Frame recognizable truths.
Venture for strong voice and narrator vulnerability.
Weave words and ideas into stunning sentences.
X out any clutter that doesn’t serve the story.
Yes, I can. Make this your mantra as you huddle over the keyboard.
Zero in on rhythm and flow until your paragraphs sing.
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Karen Zey is a Canadian writer and Pushcart nominee, who spent three decades reading ABC books to students in Quebec schools. She now pursues the writing life in Pointe-Claire, Quebec. Her essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Burningwood Literary Journal, Crack the Spine, Hippocampus Magazine, Prick of the Spindle, River Teeth’s “Beautiful Things” and other places.
BREVITY's Nonfiction Blog 
Very lovely information. Very Glad to have such kind of bloggers.
Brilliant alphabetic injunctions- horribly and insistently apposite. Oh God, I’d better scrub and start over..
Inspirational!
Thank you for this information. Nifty idea to alphabetize the list. Thank you.
Thanks very much. But “Devise dialogue that sounds like real talk”? Shouldn’t everything within quotation marks have been actually said? In nonfiction, shouldn’t quotes be genuine?
Yes, of course, to the very best ability of the CNF writer. But memory is flawed and sometimes we can only grasp for the gist of a remembered conversation. I take devise here to mean re-create, put down on the page the words that sound just like they were, as best as possible.
Yes, I agree – in memoir that kind of dialogue re-creation is necessary and expected because memory is fallible. But in other forms of creative nonfiction, what goes between the quote should be authentic.
Agreed!
Nice. tongue-in-cheek pedantry
Love! 🙂 I am priting this for my reference book.
Beautifully written and such brilliant advice!
Fabulous! Works well for fiction, too! 🙂
Up on the bulletin board it goes!
Creative! Fabulous!
Great guidelines, Karen. And such a fun read! It’s as if you’ve tucked in a bonus tip along with the 26 in your list: have fun when you write.
A CNF primer in 26 lines – fantastic! Plus, a fine example of “writing what you know” – after 30 years of reading ABC books to kids, you’ve put that experience to good use for your adult readers. I’m going to reblog at irisgraville.com.
Reblogged this on Iris Graville and commented:
Some days, writing is tough, seems beyond my skills, makes me wonder if I’ll ever master the craft of creative nonfiction. As I prepare for the launch of my memoir, “Hiking Naked: A Quaker Woman’s Search for Balance,” I’m much more focused on my calendar, press releases, and book orders than generating new work. I know I’ll return to it, and when I do, I’ll have Karen Zey’s ABCs to guide me. I suggest the same guidance fits for fiction writers, too.
Thanks, Iris for your generous words.
[…] Source: A Creative Nonfiction ABC […]
Wow – this is beautifully written inspiration. Thanks.
Fun and helpful–thank you Karen!
Charming! This is going on my corkboard along with other writers’ insights.
This is terrific. I emailed into my 17 yr old (he is working on an essay). But there’s one thing I don’t quite understand:
—Flash your essay. Or pen your theme in long form.
Don’t get what “flash” my essay means or how you do that? Do you mean put use Flash in the computer programming sense? Or? And what does it mean in opposition to “pen your theme in long form?”
“You are remarkably clever. Oops. An adverb. But seriously you are utterly delightfully creative to utilize the alphabet so fabulously. I really enjoyed reading it and will reread it when I need some lessons on properly writing. Good job,” Lisa says as she is trying to be clever herself. It’s hard to do it well and humorously. Keep it up!!!!! Ha
Sticking this on the fridge!
Reblogged this on Notes from An Alien and commented:
Like all sets of writing “rules” or “advice”, take what works for you and avoid the rest — Multiple Award Winning author, C. J. Cherryh said:
“NO RULE SHOULD BE FOLLOWED OFF A CLIFF.” 🙂
Thank you for baking brief and simple.