The one issue with Creative NonFiction is that, because it is nonfiction, it has to be believable. If you’re writing about your own life, you shouldn’t talk about slaying a dragon, unless it’s metaphorical of course. After reading the different nonfiction stories that were assigned for class, I think about what aspects of the stories are believable and not. For instance, the only story that would definitely be unbelievable, if you didn’t know what context the author was writing in, would be “Celebrity Dreaming” by Wayne Koestenbaum.  For the normal person, meeting celebrities isn’t common. Koestenbaum kept a dream journal of all the dreams he had that featured celebrities. Not knowing that they were all dreams, most people would have a hard time believing that he really met all these celebrities and did the majority of the activities that happened in those dreams.

One of the hardest parts of writing Creative NonFiction would be writing your self in as a character. Fiction writers make up character sheets: details about each character explaining why they react to certain instances, how they look, their relationships between all the other characters, etc. Making a character sheet for a person who is in reality could work because it would be easier for you to see the character on the page. It would help with conversations, because we don’t remember every detail of every conversation we have. Even a conversation I have today, I could forget exactly what was said and who said what by tomorrow.  But if you know each person in your story really well, it will be easier to find the words they might have said at that moment. In a way, Lott’s list is a character sheet. You can list every detail about yourself in order to make it easier to write about you.

Another thing about dialogue is that it’s rarely seen in Creative NonFiction. Each story is mostly narration with little dialogue, which makes it stick closer to the truth than making up a bunch of dialogue that was never said.

So in some aspects Creative NonFiction and Fiction are very similar, even in writing them. It doesn’t mean that you have to follow either forms of writing, but it may be easier for a writer, especially if you are going from writing fiction to writing nonfiction. I have been writing fiction for years and have a certain way that I write it. I feel that since there are aspects of Creative Nonfiction are similar to fiction it may be easier to write it. It may not. We will have to wait a find out.