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Awesome Essays: What is Creative About Creative Nonfiction?

Instead of talking about an essay today I want to share a video from the nonfiction blog Brevity that somehow manages to sum up my entire education on essays in a two minute xtranormal video. That is, how important is "truth" in creative nonfiction. Obviously when an author labels something as nonfiction he or she is implying that there is some truthiness to what he or she is saying, but there is also an understanding that in its creativity it is shaped by an author to appear a certain way. I know I emphasize certain parts of myself depending on what I am try to show in an essay-- the person I am on the page is a version of who I am in real life, but not my entire self. This is true for characters in fiction too, we're only getting a part of who that person is and we can never get a completely whole picture of a character because no narrator can be entirely objective.

How important is truth to you in nonfiction? For those of you who don't read a lot of nonfiction, are these things that you think about when you do encounter it?

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Awesome Essays: What is Creative About Creative Nonfiction? + Video