Lecture Notes: Writing Non-Fiction, Memoirs, Essays, and Journalism

Formative Assignment Reminder

  • Due Wednesday, Week 10.
  • Submit 1,000 words as a draft of the final assessment.
  • Opportunity to receive feedback from your tutor before the final submission.

Final Assessment Piece

  • 2,000 words long.
  • Can be an essay or a creative piece with a critical commentary.
  • Creative piece + critical commentary = 2,000 words.
  • Include a participation appendix (evidence of engagement throughout the term).
  • The participation appendix is 20% of the final mark.

Draft Writing Submission Details

  • Due Wednesday, Week 10 (April 2 before 4:00 PM).
  • Feedback from tutors will be provided a couple of weeks later.
  • Tutors providing feedback: Rachel, Kat, and others.

Unit Focus: Writing Non-Fiction

  • Different types of non-fiction writing:
    • Journalism
    • Essays
    • Life writing (memoirs, biographies, autobiographies).
  • Non-fiction is often assumed to simply represent reality or the truth.
  • Good non-fiction prioritizes truthfulness.

Truthfulness in Non-Fiction

  • Journalists:
    • Verify facts carefully.
    • Acknowledge unknown details.
  • Biographers:
    • Conduct thorough research (official documents, archives, interviews).
    • Cross-reference information with documentary evidence.
  • Memoirists:
    • Write about subjective memories.
    • Need to be cautious about fact-checking potential claims.

"Misery Memoirs" and James Frey's "A Million Little Pieces"

  • Early 2000s: Boom in "misery memoirs" (stories of extreme trauma).
  • "A Million Little Pieces" by James Frey:
    • Described harrowing experiences of alcohol and drug addiction.
    • Claims of criminal record and girlfriend who died of addiction.
    • Investigations cast doubt on claims; Frey admitted to fabrication.
  • Oprah Winfrey confronted Frey; readers claimed refunds due to fraud.
  • Frey later became a fiction writer.

Expectations of Non-Fiction

  • Expectation of faithfulness to facts.
  • Non-fiction valued for framing stories as illustrations of larger issues.
  • Truth is considered in terms of accuracy and in a broader, more general sense.
  • Fiction can also convey truths effectively.

George Floyd's Killing as an Example

  • Killing of George Floyd in 2020 sparked protests & soul-searching.
  • Writers concerned with specific facts of the event.
  • Also addressed broader issues of racial injustice and police brutality.
  • Floyd's murder became a symbol of wider problems in American society and worldwide.

Creative Non-Fiction

  • May be too simplistic to regard any text as an objective copy of reality.
  • Creative and imaginative choices are always being made.
  • Creative non-fiction:
    • Texts that experiment with language, imagery, voice, and narrative structure.
    • All tell a story and are creative and interpretive, versus recording facts objectively.

E.M. Forster on Story vs. Plot

  • Story: "The king died, and then the queen died."
  • Plot: "The king died, and then the queen died of grief."
  • Plot with mystery: "The queen died; no one knew why until it was discovered that it was through grief at the death of the king."
  • Attributing cause interprets events and weaves a causal narrative.
  • Causation is complex, but narratives try to overcome complexity, creating an impression of one thing causing another.
  • Narratives find meaning in events by making sense of chaotic experiences.

Storytelling and Interpretation

  • Compelling narratives may tease and withhold meaning to create suspense.
  • Real events lead to a search for answers, inferences, and deeper meanings.
  • Creating a story requires choices, selections of details, emphasis, and marginalization.
  • Multiple biographies of prominent individuals exist because each tells a different story, picking out different details and interpretations.

Jeanette Winterson on Truth in Memoir

  • Passage from Jeanette Winterson's memoir, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?
  • Truth is complex; what is left out is as important as what is included.
  • Photograph frames the shot; writers frame their world.
  • Her mother objected to what Winterson put in Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit.
  • What was left out was the story's silent twin because some things are too painful to say.
  • Stories compensate for the unfair, unjust, unknowable, and out-of-control world.

Discussion: Truth and Realism

  • Truthfulness vs. realism.
  • In non-fiction, why is truth complex, more than just factual?
  • Libel law: unexpected influence on journalism and non-fiction.
    • Defamation of character can lead to lawsuits.
    • UK libel laws are strong, potentially restrictive for journalism.
    • US libel laws require proving falsity, making it harder to win cases.
  • Readers want controversy, so measures are developed to protect objectivity and carefulness.
  • Modern fiction emerged partly to disguise scandalous things and to avoid defamation lawsuits.

Perspective and Objectivity

  • There are always different sides to a story.
  • There is no pure objectivity; representation is perspectival and subjective.
  • Ideological judgments are made about what to emphasize, marginalize, or leave out.
  • Example: News report of a team's actions omitting key context.

Mimetic Fallacy

  • Stories are constructs, not mirrors of reality.
  • They offer a certain representation, but other representations are possible.
  • There is no single, transcendental construction that is just "true".

Narratives as a Search for Meaning

  • Creating narratives as an attempt to find order in life and the world.
  • Stories compensate for unfairness by bringing things into focus.
  • Winterson's concept of the "story's silent twin": there may not be one story to be told.
  • A story’s aspiration to the truth may be impossible to fulfill.
  • Writing can reflect on its own shortcomings and question itself.

Defining Truth

  • Truth is a deceptive term with many different meanings and uses.
  • Philosophers have different ideas of what they mean by truth.
  • Truth could be internally coherent or cohere with the external world.
  • Factuality/realism involves external verification.

Winterson's Memoir: Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

  • The way to stand at a distance from her experiences to analyze/dissect them.
  • Autobiography may differ from what is expected.
  • Memoir/autobiography should consider voice and perspective.
  • Do not assume those can be taken for granted.
  • Choices can be made to make things clear or unclear.

Winterson's Writing Style

  • Mother described using fairy tale and grotesque imagery.
  • How is this not objective and factual?
  • Mother seemed huge/towering to the young Jeanette Winterson.
  • Impossible to fact-check the impressions something made on someone as a child.
  • Working in interpretive mode, reading things into events and seeing them as symbols.
  • Invoking fairy tales means escaping from reality.
  • The life experiences were bizarre and unworldly, as if her childhood was a grotesque fairy tale.

Connecting Concepts to Formal Choices

  • Details to think about
  • These concepts should be linked to the formal choices that are being made; how one writes & the techniques one uses.
  • Many potential choices that could be made there and able to write about the real world, the ability to tell the truth in any way and no feeling of being straight jacketed by this.
  • Great example of non-fiction being creative.

Journalism and Facts

  • Journalism cares about facts.
  • News reports tend to be built around the questions of who, what, where, when, why, and how.
  • They avoid speaking in the first person or offering an opinion.
  • Instead, they often report that someone else has praised or criticized something or someone because then that's a fact that this person has made a statement about it.
  • They'll often quote people verbatim to clarify that it's not it's not the the journalist point of view, but it's the the view of the person who's being reported on.

Features and Essays

  • Features and essays can be more exploratory and more personal.
  • They deal with real people and factual events.
  • But it is interested in again, finding bigger meanings in them and interpreting them and using them as vehicles to explore larger issues and themes.
  • Legendary essayist Joan Didion wrote The White Album.
  • Opened the book with a statement, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.”
  • The actual book is about Joan feeling the stories that she used had crumbled.
  • Mental health problems not taken as personal pathologies.
  • Her struggles are symptoms of the U.S. losing its balance, no longer understanding itself.
  • Joan Didion used stories of individuals of events to reflect on larger themes and issues.

Reality vs. Fiction

  • Constructing a narrative involves an element of fiction.
  • Constructing a narrative to give a sense of order and meaning.
  • Journalism is associated by, journalism presents disembodied voice to show factual information.
  • Texts as realistic, factual, and objective when they have plain, unshowy language and when the narrative voice doesn’t foreground itself.
  • This comes from the work of journalism.
  • Talks about journalistic objectivity as a strategic ritual.

Public Sphere

  • Journalism empowers the reader to make decisions for themselves by sharing information of the world.
  • Constant flow of information through journalism that allows you to be involved and be a responsible citizen to keep yourselves informed about it.
  • Sociologist Juergen Habermas called this the public sphere.
  • We all have private lives that include personal feelings, personal experiences, relationships; we also see ourselves as part of this larger public life.
  • Journalism is important for these public sphere interactions.

Propaganda vs. Journalism

  • The ideal of democracy is tied to the ideal of journalistic objectivity.
  • Critical of journalism, it is sensationalist, and stir us emotions versus sharing facts in a neutral way.
  • Journalism claims to represent the reasonable canter grand as a power move to define their reasonable center ground with the facts that matter.
  • Implications are more important than ever with social media and algorithms.
  • Journalism objective to present current affairs.

Imaginary Community of Readers

  • Journalism does not just claim to represent the world objectively in a text, and it also constructs an imaginary community of readers and addresses itself to that community, claims to represent them.
  • Imaginary reader that it also invites its part as invited as part of imagine community.
  • They make you wonder who should they see be represented versus who the person is with the prominent person.
  • In order to believe in democracy that has some common belief and values.
  • Journalism represents as offering facts to make up in their minds.
  • Journalism as the voice of the community who are is invited to identify with.

Fictitious Speaker Example

  • The critic, Walker Gibson, invented a useful term for talking about this phenomenon, and the term was the mock reader.
  • Example of election posters 2005 from the Conservative Party that says “are you thinking what we’re thinking about?”
  • Another example with the Queen’s death newspapers from the Daily Mail one with the headline that says “our hearts are broken.”
  • It uses the collective to mean including the reader.
  • But also telling you and not how to feel.

Journalistic Writing in Features

  • Explores more kind freer way/ features like essays.
  • More free and varied in form and a bold summary of the material facts, they might start with some kind of striking detail or and anecdote before then revealing how a lot of this is part of a wide issue.
  • Journalist times called this the delayed drop.

Article Example

  • Quote: When Can We Really Rest by Nadia Drost.
  • Explore/ has huge delayed drop until Drost actually spells out with the big issue is here, which is that more people than every single Crossing through this very dangerous area known as the Darien Gap through Central America that get to the ESA.

Personal vs. Impersonal

  • Delineates the two types of writings, of how they go to represent
  • There are many experiences where individuals can see them.
  • And by small number of individuals treating like they are characters in a novel or something this piece of writing, this enables to empathize with, put ourselves in their shoes in images that this must be like can be studies that are done and in those kinds more factual information and also sort of kind of got this expert insurance and is like what is not what is the sub check it aside.

Representation Themes

  • They are being presented as more specific that they take.
  • What’ their personal belongings are like there going it, you know, in that type plastic park that holes together or is it sort or them there be no that, and so not spelling the high stakes here or they can die in this remote place that is inferred is what happens.
  • There’d be the importance of how the story is to be with this, kind or with the church has chosen a route.

True Story Examples

  • A film based on journal who wrote article from The New York Times.
  • He combined several stories together to get people involved in the issue of child soldiers in Africa and put them on a front cover image.
  • This is to bring awareness to the situation by telling the greater troop and those people were saying how is this happening the way that and if it is it is it that what they say when you write a story because you can make others know how it happens in fiction to go above.

General Summary Points

  • That poetry was superior to history because he can talk about stuff the could and how we should value them.
  • The truth is more terrible more days especially.
  • Luxury is valid, not so simple, and show the ability to change their own certain circumstances.
  • She has, know, should they just had the ability to work because that were desperate situation figure saying it they all have together them and all get people excited about the hope.
  • You'd be looking for some, know, to get somebody rally around that, that also offers some hope and say there any number and you all get excited.

Article: A moment that Changed Me

  • Example of humorous and playful writing instead serious and topical.
  • Journalist Xing Cheng about her feet appearing on a kink website.
  • It states how there’s no “particularly Intimate Relationship” between her feet, she looks at her feet as Par with elbows.
  • She stumbled across a quick King, where people vote about people’s celebrity fees pictures.
  • Journalists are not focused with foot people unless if they wear an Essie daughter.
  • People start raiding you that just about how you were.
  • This causes a shift in her mind to post more and to be ready to make those views available again online.
  • After Instagram, the rank went up and people, users tag with very creative comments, then she get more comfortable about and about them being on websites.

Analysis of General Themes

*General the overall the, The themes that and the audience that and the general and of public life being blurred and people being used and being sexualized or objectified what is it like for that to have you as a woman in the public life is what makes that very aware and unique/ those topics used to be used that are being dealt in such a playful light.

  • Conversational field with certain amount casual and informally creates them.
  • The value in journalism is thinking wide on how it can be relevant to others.

Review and Reviewing Points

*Journalistic species can ex can review to an expression or opinion is and a review such as if is it that this is a good kind of rear they.

  • In form blog writings using the informal and use all kinds of little technical skills/ the more skills of non fiction and auto biographies.
  • Consider creativity it used with what were used is the link to bring those normal aspects.

Summary Task

  • To write A piece of non fiction or journalism that tells that story.
  • You might tell you to link what they have done so far show wider issue.
  • express A through the the product and the variability.
  • How the writing can reply in margin, who knows and the truth to it everything. (All things that has gone through).
  • Task for next week write a piece of fictional journalism. (Non fiction) to tell non fiction.