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Mary Anne's been telling me about creative nonfiction for a while now, but I misunderstood what the term meant for a long time.

Which isn't too surprising, as there's a lot of confusion over it out there, and a lot of different definitions. The most common thread I'm seeing in definitions I find online is that creative nonfiction (also known by a host of other names, such as Literary Nonfiction and the New Journalism and Narrative Nonfiction) is nonfiction written using literary techniques. My first reaction on reading that was to think, Isn't that what almost all nonfiction is? So I started looking for information on what isn't creative nonfiction.

Dan Roche's What Is Creative Nonfiction Anyway? gives the clearest answer I've found to that:

So let’s start by eliminating what is not creative nonfiction: pretty much anything in Time magazine; cookbooks (although MFK Fisher, Angelo Pelligrini and others have managed to write some wonderful books about cooking, even ones which include recipes, that I’d toss into the creative nonfiction stew); computer manuals, definitely; textbooks; astrology charts; Europe on $50 a Day; the front page of the Washington Post. Rarely is there anything in a newspaper that one could call creative nonfiction.

If I'm understanding him and others right, I would make caveats and exceptions regarding several of his categories. There are computer books that have strong voices and include personal comments from the author (though not many, certainly); there are certainly travel guides that do that; and it seems to me that that kind of thing appears quite often in newspapers, usually in the form of columns, op-ed pieces, and human-interest stories. (But even writers of regular plain old news stories have been known to write compellingly and interestingly; some of the web pages I've seen about creative nonfiction go out of their way to put down newspaper reporting, which seems a little unfair to me. Roche's handling of the question is a little more complex than I'm making it sound, though.)

But those quibbles aside, I think I now have a better sense of the vague boundaries of what people do and don't mean when they talk about creative nonfiction.

Here are a couple other sources of definitions and anti-definitions:

• Course description for a class on creative writing about Italy and students' experiences there, at the Umbra Institute
• Course description for a Creative Nonfiction class at Linfield College (may be a little hard to read on a Mac); especially worth reading is the paragraph, about 7 paragraphs into the course description, that starts "So how to move beyond anecdote, gossip, and confession into something that matters to the larger world?"
• "What Is Creative Nonfiction?" by CB Bassity

There are other pages that go into more detail about some of the techniques used in creative nonfiction:

• In "Are Good Writers Born or Made?" Chip Scanlan at Poynter Online (a site for journalists, btw) quotes Robert L. Root, Jr.'s essay "Collage, Montage, Mosaic, Vignette, Episode, Segment" about "choosing an extra-literary design" to organize an essay—using tarot cards, for example, or rooms in a house.
• In a different article, Scanlan also says some good things about fabrication and the ethics of reconstruction.
• Thinking About Writing Creative Nonfiction talks about some standard fiction techniques; I mention it primarily because in addition to the Three Kinds Of Conflict I was taught about in school (Man Vs. Man; Man Vs. Nature; Man Vs. Himself) it mentions three others: "Man against society, Man against the god, Man against machine."

Finally, I gather that one of the big debates in literary nonfiction these days is over how much that isn't absolutely strictly truthful is okay to include. There's an excellent and wide-ranging discussion of this question in a Faultline entry from a year ago titled "Dillard's Cat," about a passage written by Annie Dillard, presented as true, that turns out to have happened not to her but to someone else. The extensive comments from readers are also fascinating; among other things, one of those comments mentions lemmings, and reminds us that the idea that lemmings regularly rush to the sea and hurl themselves into it was made up by Disney Studios. Chrs Clarke provides an interesting piece, "Nature by Design," about Disney's handling of nature and environmental issues.