Annotated Bibliography of Creative Writing Resources

When it comes to style and writing books that discuss the finer points of writing with style (not to mention proper grammar and tone) I generally look elsewhere. What this book offers is a new way of thinking about writing fiction, drama, poetry, or creative non-fiction because it offers several revelations about what is important to the reader. The author is an agent and has experience in publishing selling books but spent years as an editor and has seen the common mistakes that even seasoned creative writers make. Instead of treating issues such as writer personality or vision as separate elements to writing, she combines them and presents the writer and his or her writing together—the combination produced by a series of influences. This is an inspiriting book when I feel that I have nothing important to say because it demonstrates how all writers have a unique voice and helps me find interesting ways to uncover my voice and see how it is valid.

This provides one of the most basic but helpful definitions of what creative non-fiction is and what skills it requires to successfully combine. Although the emphasis of this particular article is one telling a story for a general audience in a journalistic/reporting setting, the definition provides a framework for seeing creative non-fiction as essential to writing almost anything. It stresses importance of retaining truth in the process, thus complimenting several other pieces in this bibliography that discuss some of the more focused ethical implications of writing non-fiction.
McDonell, Jennifer. “Transgression, Diplomacy and the Art of Writing Fiction.” Meanjin 57.4 (1998), 712-727.
This article deals with transgressions and sensitivities in fiction and how authors approach sensitive topics, political, emotional, moral, and make sense of them. This is one of the more complicated articles on fiction writing that I forced myself to stumble through. To be quite honest, the first time I read it, my initial thought was “but fiction writing is not a political art or science and reducing it to such a science takes away from the creative merit.” However, as I continued through it on a crucial second pass, I decided that politics are inevitable as we write—we are constantly seeking for ways to transgress because that is what art should do. It should inspire thought, invoke emotion, take our breath away. I understand now that part of what makes good fiction is the author’s ability and willingness (maybe bravery and ability to cast aside notions of what the reader might think of them personally) to make subtle and overt transgressions on politeness, political correctness, our moral and ethical sensibilities. I see through this article that transgressions in fiction are what enable the reader to experience a life that he or she could never know and probably should not ever know as a matter of course.

This article was read, completely by chance, in conjunction with the one below by Claudia Mills and also examines the ethical implications of writing fiction. Until I encountered these two articles at roughly the same time, I had little idea about the problems that one should consider when applying the “write what you know” maxim. As Miller (and Mills) point out, writing about real people, even if it seems that they have been sufficiently masked in your story, is a dangerous path to embark upon. Interestingly, instead of offering answers about how to avoid complications stemming from this intentional or unintentional act (the reasons behind it, your motivations, do not seem to matter to Miller) the author simply suggests that there are a number of things to consider first. In other words, this source goes hand in hand with the source by Claudia Mills—this one by Miller does a great job of introducing the fiction writer to the pervasiveness of this quandary while Mills talks about the more specific repercussions and ethical problems in depth.

When writing fiction, one of the issues that rarely emerge; especially for a beginning writer, is what ethical issues are at the heart of one’s fiction.  So often writers are told to “write what you know” but this creates some unexpected complications. This article examines how writing what you know leads to taking liberties with real-life events and despite the legal end of claiming that “resemblances are merely coincidental” as fiction usually states, there are natural complexities to using characters and places from our memories or present lives. This is especially true in the context of writing fiction about someone who actually does exist. More importantly, this article takes issue with the fact that fiction writers are rarely held up to any ethical scrutiny and it only happens if someone is “caught” manipulating the facts of a case or event. When writing this will give me pause as  I question where my ideas are coming from and how these ideas might have some otherwise overlooked ethical implications.