Christina Boufis - The Complete Idiots Guide to Writing Nonfiction: Essential information on researching, organizing, and writing narrative nonfiction

by Christina Boufis

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Copyright 2012 by Christina Boufis

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ISBN: 978-1-61564-298-4
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2012939812

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Take one true story. Add real-life characters. Stir in an interesting plot. Sprinkle in compelling dialogue. Leaven with vivid description and introspection. Add fascinating information and detail. And then leave the reader hungry for more. Thats the recipe for narrative nonfiction: true tales told in a captivating way to move, inform, stir, entertain, or educate your reader. As a nonfiction writer, you combine reportorial skills with a personal voice and a literary love for language.

Do you love learning new things? Do you have a passion to com-municate information? Have you lived through an extraordinary event or time and have a good story to tell? Are you curious and passionate about the world around you? Do you love reading and language? If you answered yes to many of these questions, you have the makings of a nonfiction writer.

The good news is that now is the time to be a nonfiction writer. The beginning of the twenty-first century has experienced an explosion of the form in books, magazines, blogs, and journals.

Like probably many of you, Ive wanted to be a writer ever since I could spell. I always thought Id write fiction, however, as that seemed to be what most writers did. When I began writing nonfiction several decades ago, I didnt know much about the genre. I only knew it felt like I had found my form. I was teaching women prisoners at the county jail, and I didnt think fiction was the right way to tell their story and mine. The nonfiction form was there all along just waiting for me to discover it, or thats what it felt like. Ive never looked back. But it took me several years to figure out just what nonfiction was as a genre and how to write it. I hope to save you that time in this book.

In The Complete Idiots Guide to Writing Nonfiction, youll find the tools you need to be a nonfiction writer, which I hope will motivate, inspire, and keep you writing your entire life. Theres no shortage of raw material to write about in nonfiction; its all around you. And its never too late to be a writer in general and a nonfiction writer in particular. Indeed, one form, the personal essay, frequently presents a middle-aged point of view, writes Phillip Lopate in his Introduction in The Art of the Personal Essay, An Anthology from the Classical Era to the Present. This is good news for those of us coming to writing later in life.

Its been said that you get to live twice as a writer: when you first have an experience and then again when you tell the tale. What greater gift could there be? This book will give you the tools to be a nonfiction writer. Youll be able to tell if you have a story, and youll learn how to conduct research, interview sources, and turn your tale into something that reads like fictionin that captivating, cant-wait-to-turn-the-pages wayexcept your story is real. It has real people for characters, real scenes, and factual descriptions and dialogue, and it is the truth as best you know it whether told from memory or reported. Thats nonfiction writing.