How To Write A Clever And Creative Non-Fiction Article

If you love to write articles but don’t want to have your articles to come off as boring and mundane, you should consider then trying to write what is called a creative non-fiction article. This is telling a story that is true but making it sound as if it were fiction. This you do by using scenes, changing viewpoints, different dialogue and good prose. Good examples of creative non-fiction would be books like Black Hawk Down and All the President’s Men.
The first thing you need to do in order to start your creative non-fiction article or story is to make sure that you have a well researched story that you know to be true. From here is where you will begin and work your story around all of the research that you have gathered.
You will need to create some sort of plot that includes your research. Remember a fiction story has a plot structure that is suppose to hold the attention of the reader. So, a creative non-fiction story needs to have this same kind of structure. For example, the main character in the story needs to be shown living a regular life and then something has to happen that pulls him away from that regular life. There needs to be an object, person, or obstacle that is placed in their path that gets in their way or involved in their life. You also need to include moments where they are feeling lost, a moment of resolution and a time when things go back to normal if possible.
Even though your characters are real they still may come off as a little boring and even unappealing when you write about them. With creative non-fiction it’s OK to fancy them up a little bit, add a little bit more flare or color to your non-fiction characters to make them more interesting to the reader. You need to be able to show their personalities and who they are, what motivates them, what tempts them, what leads them astray, etc.
You also need a setting for your story and it needs to be a real place. You need to be able to take the reader there so they can see it, so it needs to be very descriptive, you need to be able to help the reader to see, hear and smell what is going on wherever you take them.
After you have done all of this you need to figure out what the point of view here is going to be. What character of your story is going to be the one telling the story, who is going to tell their side or are you going to combine it and have it expressing more than one person’s point of view? How much will each character know and how much will each character be willing to give up? You also need to decide if you want a narrator or not.
You can also consider adding some literary touches like a theme, style, will there be irony in the story will there be symbolism? These things add interest to your story and could leave the reader thinking after they have finished reading it.
Once you have finished writing your story you need to review it to make sure that it still remains holding the truth and that you have not taken any of the truth away by the creative touches that you put in it to make it more readable. Don’t add characters that really don’t exist and never add dialogue or events that probably didn’t happen. If you do this, then you have moved into fiction and out of creative non-fiction.