Keep It Real: Everything You Need to Know About Researching and Writing Creative Nonfiction

by Lee Gutkind (Editor)

The one guide every creative nonfiction writer needs to turn to when being "creative." Writers of memoir and narrative nonfiction are experiencing difficult days with the discovery that some well-known works in the genre contain exaggerations―or are partially fabricated. But what are the parameters of creative nonfiction? Keep It Real begins by defining creative nonfiction. Then it explores the flexibility of the form―the liberties and the boundaries that allow writers to be as truthful, factual, and artful as possible. A succinct but rich compendium of ideas, terms, and techniques, Keep It Real clarifies the ins and outs of writing creative nonfiction. Starting with acknowledgment of sources, running through fact-checking, metaphor, and navel gazing, and ending with writers' responsibilities to their subjects, this book provides all the information you need to write with verve while remaining true to your story.

Genres: Writing, Nonfiction, Essays, College, Memoir, Reference, Journalism

167 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2008

About the author

Lee Gutkind has been recognized by Vanity Fair as “the godfather behind creative nonfiction.” A prolific writer, he has authored and edited over twenty-five books, and is the founder and editor of Creative Nonfiction, the first and largest literary magazine to publish only narrative nonfiction. Gutkind has received grants, honors, and awards from numerous organizations including the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Science Foundation. A man of many talents, Gutkind has been a motorcyclist, medical insider, sports expert, sailor, and college professor. He is currently distinguished writer in residence in the Consortium for Science, Policy, and Outcomes at Arizona State University and a professor in the Hugh Downs School of Human Communication.

Reviews

[Lena · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is a collection of short essays about the art and craft of writing creative nonfiction. It was born out of a special issue of Creative Nonfiction magazine titled "A Million Little Choices," published in the wake of the James Frey scandal, in which the editors wished to present guidelines for this often misunderstood form and offer food for thought for writers in the medium.

The 30-odd pieces include the historical underpinnings of creative nonfiction, discussions of objectivity, memory, and reconstruction of events, as well as pieces on techniques such as time compression and composite characters. Responsibility to subjects and liability are also covered, as is the writer’s responsibility to make it clear to the reader where fact ends and imagination takes over.

Though the book covers multiple forms of creative nonfiction from narrative journalism to personal essay, the sections on memoir were particularly interesting to me. In one entertaining piece, the authors highlight the distinction between the self-obsessed reality television style of memoir and the memoir that uses a personal story to access a universal truth.

Most of these essays are quite short, just two or three pages in length. Despite their brevity, they manage to clarify certain key points about the form and raise provocative questions about others. Very useful food for thought for anyone interested in writing creative nonfiction

[El · Rating 2 out of 5]

I picked this up from the library on campus where I work a while back while I was finishing up my application to the MFA program, and then I promptly refused to read it after submitting my application and writing material because I was sure that if I did, I would magically not get accepted into the program. I'm superstitious like that.

And it worked! Because I didn't read this book after submitting my application, I was accepted into the program. Magic! BOOM.

Now that I've been accepted and have a few months before starting the program, I'm doing a whole lot of "Omigod, what have I just done" and "Now I have to write stuff, holy shit" and otherwise feeling pathetic, unworthy, and like a big fat failure. Which is always great six months before you actually start something. Might as well start early.

I finally got around to reading this because, really, I could use all the tips and hints I can get. And Lee Gutkind is like the godfather of the creative nonfiction world.

This is a compilation of other people's writing, for what it's worth. People who have written from Creative Nonfiction, the literary journal. It's an ABCs of the writing world with some helpful bits and bobs, but otherwise just a nice little companion for someone who doesn't really know anything about writing creative nonfiction. I know a thing or two which of course doesn't make me an expert, and I did find this a helpful little book to read through if for no other reason than there are some great reminders in here about what not to do. Like, basically, don't be James Frey or Stephen Glass. Not that we need those reminders, but it certainly doesn't hurt.

A nice little how-to guide without giving too much how-to, if that makes sense. I'm trying to read whatever I can get my hands on to give myself as much content and context as possible because I take things to the extreme, so I'm not disappointed that I read this (and it was really so short that it barely made a blip on my reading time), but it wasn't quite what I had hoped it would be. I wouldn't be surprised if this winds up being required reading for some of my classes.

[Isabella · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read for class last year. Helpful for writers!

[Haili · Rating 3 out of 5]

A lot of useful information, especially for the neophyte. Written by a number of authors in collaboration, and edited by Lee Gutkind, also the editor of Creative Nonfiction . Covers a wide variety of topics, from the basic tenets of journalism to ethical dilemmas to elements of craft and technique. Clear, concise, levelheaded, and straightforward. A quick, easy, thought-provoking, and oftentimes inspiring read. A handy reference to keep on the shelf.

Might be a little intimidating to the beginning memoirist. The text is noticeably prejudiced toward research and reportage, and the sections on memoir warn against "navel gazing" and "self absorption" and seem to emphasize the "heavy hitters" over the "nobody narratives." While the advice is certainly valid, it's hard enough to get to a place where you feel like you're not self-absorbed and navel-gazing by writing a memoir in the first place — I don't know that it's helpful to have one's attention drawn again to the pitfalls, confirming again one's impulse to shy away from the often dirty work that is digging in... to the self and the memories that shape it. That said, this book will keep you honest, and maybe save you a lot of trouble thereby.

Reading list additions culled from the pages of Keep it Real
"Heavy hitters"(who've written memoirs): Johann Wolfgang van Goethe, Virginia Woolf, Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, E. B. White, Gertrude Stein, Ulysses S. Grant, Mahatma Gandhi, Bill Clinton, Gore Vidal, George Orwell, Leon Trotsky, Benjamin Franklin, Mark Twain, Maya Angelou, Frederick Douglass, Black Elk, Helen Keller, Carl Jung, Jean Paul Sartre, etc.

Others of interest (to me, at least): Stories of Scottsboro and Blackout, James E. Godman; Blood Done Sign My Name , Timothy B. Tyson; Alias Olympia, Eunice Lipton; Safekeeping, Abigail Thomas; Angelhead, Greg Bottom; The Only Girl in the Car, Kathy Dobie; Eduardo Galeano, Stuart Dybek, and Brian Doyle

[Lindsay Hickman · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is a great miniature anthology of some of the best advice and articles on Creative NonFiction. Many of the articles I’ve read before, but it was a great refresher and fun to read them in the order of the book. The chapters are extremely short but they each cover a very specific topic. I loved the variation of topics in the book from Writing About Your Family, Libel and Slander, to different types of essays.
Literally could have just read this book instead of taking a Creative NonFiction Craft class last year. Great read for anyone looking to get into CNF as a reader or writer.

[Anne Oftedahl · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read as source material for an assignment in my Creative Nonfiction module

[Uriel · Rating 2 out of 5]

Some of the essays were kind of interesting, but they are mostly surface level and don't offer a lot of insight for those interested in the craft.

[Sayantani Dasgupta · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great craft book. There are two reasons I cannot give it five stars: 1. One of the chapters incorrectly identifies Michael Ondaatje’s memoir Running in the Family as based in India. 2. For a book that came out in 2008, the list of contributors shows an appalling lack of diversity.

[Kater Cheek · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book reads like a series of guest lectures in an upper level creative writing class at a university. As the title says, it's "everything you need to know about researching adn writing creative nonfiction."

The subjects of the book range from the history of creative nonfiction to how to avoid getting sued by your subjects. Some of them felt too abstract to be either interesting or useful. Others drew from fascinating sources to pepper their essay. I'd say there were maybe 30% excellent essays, 50% pretty good essays, and 20% essays that felt like they were lifted from a not-terribly-exciting textbook.

I recommend this book for people who are interested in writing as a craft, or people who are interested in writing as a profession. If you are not a writer, or are not interested in becoming a writer, this isn't your book.

[John Carter McKnight · Rating 2 out of 5]

Assigned for the author's class. Superficial and terribly dated. Most of the examples and many of the professional dilemmas described date from the 1970s, and assume a privileged role for journalists long disappeared in an era where everyone's Facebook profile is an exercise in "creative nonfiction."

As a writing guide, it's more concerned with anecdote than technique, includes no exercises, and has the general tone of unwanted advice from a clueless, bloviating uncle.

A waste of time, but at 161 pages, not a waste of *much* time.

[Laurie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Need to read this every so often to remember what I'm trying to do.

[Vicki Nemeth · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good suggested example readings. I am interested in some of the nonfiction authors that this book suggests. I would have wanted to know who was the contributor of each essay, so I could keep reading more from the ones I got the most value from.

Some essays broke down patterns of artistic nuance to the different techniques... the benefits and considerations.

A little underwhelming in terms of hard knowledge. I wouldn't say it's, "Everything" you need to know about the subject. It's very surface-level. It told some heroic stories about how some authors got their stories, but this isn't realistic to the millions of stories out there. I liked some of the artsy knowledge it provides but no, it doesn't teach you much about research.

The wishy-washiness kind of reminds me of how much papers declined after this book's publication. A lot of people in this field did not seem to have a viable survival instinct. Somehow, I get a sense of that atmosphere in this book. So that part of it didn't age exceptionally well.

It also doesn't have much about digital safety, either of yourself or your subjects. I think that was already a concept by 2007 (this was published in 2008).

I value what I got out of it.

[Cornelia · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is so well written. And the chapters are all short and easy to understand but packed full of information. A lot of fiction writers, skilled in all the aspects of fiction which enables them to grab a reader and keep them turning pages are now writing nonfiction due to the call for ghostwriters from the general public, especially to ghostwrite memoirs. I recommend that any fiction writers considering that type of work as a freelancer reads this book.

[Marci · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is just a collection of short essays about the rules of writing nonfiction or other forays into ancillary topics. The reader isn't left with any real tips on how to actually write nonfiction, so the subtitle's claim that it is "everything you need to know about researching and writing creative nonfiction" is quite the misnomer. Hard pass.

[Jennifer · Rating 3 out of 5]

A slender volume of reflections on various themes relating to writing creative nonfiction. Generally good, though having just finished one of Gutkind’s longer books on the subject I was disappointed by a fair amount of redundancy between the two.

[Kimberly Patton · Rating 4 out of 5]

Although the title-ing of this was confusing and there were no author names and I didn’t get a grasp of what this compilation was right away, it was very good. Aimed mostly at journalism and memoir writing. I learned so much and felt like kin to much of the thoughts presented.

[Alexander K · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great short snippets of recommendations and points to consider when writing non-fiction.
I picked this up to help with business writing: plans, brand stories, proposals. I took away enough to say it was worth it.

[Debbie Mitchell · Rating 3 out of 5]

Quick read (I read the whole book in less than 3 hours) about some of the basics of creative nonfiction written by several different authors.

It was fine? Nothing new to me, but I’ve read several books on narrative/creative nonfiction.

[Gail Richmond · Rating 3 out of 5]

Solid writing guide; in fast-changing period of developing nonfiction field, Gutkind has more recent works that update his information that is available here.

[Linda · Rating 5 out of 5]

Interesting and to the point with lots of good advice and examples packed into a short text. The examples have given me a whole new list of writers, books, and essays to read!

[Steven Logan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Concise but plentiful.

[Libby King · Rating 4 out of 5]

A lot of good insight. A thoughtful read for anyone considering creative nonfiction.

[Luke · Rating 4 out of 5]

Honestly one of the best books for aspiring creative nonfiction writers

[Mathher Abbassi · Rating 2 out of 5]

I didn't get what I was expecting from this book as the title implied it.

[Peter Fox · Rating 4 out of 5]

After being introduced to creative nonfiction in my first year of university I found the genre was a lot broader than I first expected. From there I have engaged with the subject on a regular basis which includes reading these fascinating insights by authors who specialise in the art form.

If you want to understand the depth and breadth of creative nonfiction then this book is meant for you. If you want to become a creative nonfiction author then this book is will be critical aid on that journey.

A fascinating read in its own right, and as a guide into the world of creative nonfiction - it is a worthy extra to any collection.

[Wayne Groner · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is a compilation from twenty writers and presented as forty-one brief entries.

Lee Gutkind is considered by many to be the father of creative nonfiction. Basically, the term means using “literary craft in presenting nonfiction—that is, factually accurate prose about real people and events—in a compelling, vivid manner.” Gutkind cites some examples of creative nonfiction, though not initially called that, which have been around for many years: Down and Out in Paris and London (George Orwell), Notes of a Native Son (James Baldwin), Death in the Afternoon (Ernest Hemingway), and The Right Stuff (Tom Wolfe). These writers cover their topics as journalism, memoir, and information sharing, all perfectly acceptable forms of creative nonfiction.

Controversy flares from time to time over the misuse of creative nonfiction. Fictionalization sometimes takes a back seat to truth and accuracy, Gutkind says, as in the scandalous A Million Little Pieces, by James Frey. In the end, Gutkind says, creative nonfiction’s greatest asset is its “flexibility and freedom while adhering to the basic tenets of reportage.”

Gutkind says there are two major parts to the genre: Writing, which is the creative and fun part, and crafting, which includes “scene, dialogue, intimate detail, and other essentials.” Whether a simple beginning taken chronologically to a satisfying ending, or starting in the middle of events to draw readers in with suspense, focused themes and good storytelling work every time.

[Rebecca · Rating 4 out of 5]

I ended up choosing this book as the central craft text of the Essay Writing course I'm teaching. I like it for a few key reasons:
1. It's edited by Lee Gutkind of Creative Nonfiction, and it was written as a response to the James Frey scandal in an attempt to clearly define the genre of creative nonfiction. Gutkind and the other contributing authors successfully elucidate the boundaries (both legal and aesthetic) that one must be aware of, as well as the creative options one can tease out in the writing process.
2. Because it is incredibly short (with only 1-3 page chapters), it gives me the freedom to supplement this text with essays of my choice, such as Brevity craft essays and essay samples that may or may not have been mentioned in Keep it Real.
3. The explanations of various terms and concepts are clear and straightforward. My students and I will be working with the same vocabulary this semester, and after reading this text, they'll have a good grasp of the basic craft elements of the genre.
4. Overall, it gives a nice brief history of the emergence of the genre from a variety of sources (new journalism, poets/fiction writers who began to write about their lives, etc.).

There are a few places where I wanted the authors to go into more detail about certain concepts, and I felt that there were a few chapters missing on editing/revision/publication, but for my teaching purposes, this book is just right.

[Tasha · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've been thinking about/studying creative nonfiction for a number of years and no book or teacher has been able to answer my nagging questions like Keep It Real. Born out of a special edition issue of the magazine Creative Nonfiction called "A Million Little Choices," this book is basically like a panel discussion with the best editors and writers of creative nonfiction in the field answering questions about the ethics and the process of creative nonfiction. That particular issue of the magazine was, of course, in reaction to all the controversy surrounding that famously fictitious memoir of a similar title.

For anyone interested in creative nonfiction or memoir writing, I can't recommend this book enough.

[Lauren · Rating 3 out of 5]

While the book contained many useful and informative essays on the craft of creative nonfiction writing, the format was so distracting. Someone thought it would be a good idea (innovative? fun?) way to convey the information by alphabetizing each point - so, essays follow the ABCs. While a host of writers contributed to this book and are mentioned in the appendix, none of their individual works are credited - does this mean that 20+ professors and professional authors ACTUALLY wrote these essays together? Doubt it.

Aside from these issues, I took some good tips away from the book, particularly about style and perspective.

[Steph · Rating 3 out of 5]

p. 137

Reflection relates to focus; a writer must stay on point. And reflection is not merely an opportunity for writers to editorialize. It is not exactly the writer's opinion the reader is seeking; rather, the reader wants to be able to understand and appreciate the ramifications of the narrative and the information embedded in it. If the writer can then help readers think more about the substance of the story, thereby making it more universal, reflection will enrich the reading experience.