Creative Nonfiction vs Journalism vs Blogging
Image by Art Lasovsky on Unsplash
I’ve worn a lot of different hats over the course of my writing career. While I’ve never been a full-time journalist, I’ve written for a number of different newspapers as well as organizational news sites where I’ve had to adhere to a journalistic style. I’ve also written a crap load of blog posts, both for myself and for other people/companies/organizations.
And then there’s creative nonfiction or CNF, which I’ve dabbled in over the years and towards which I still feel a strong calling, but I currently don’t get to do nearly enough.
To be sure, there’s a lot of overlap between these three categories of writing. Creative nonfiction is also sometimes referred to as “literary journalism” and is often synonymous with the New Journalism that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s. Traditional journalism has a lot in common with blogging in its functionalism and pithiness, but blogging can also easily more resemble creative nonfiction in its narrative flavour—it just tends to be shorter in form and perhaps less meticulously crafted.
Over the course of my writing career, I’ve moved across the creative nonfiction/journalism/blogging landscape, doing more of one than another at any given time. In my earliest days as a writer, when I was based in Tokyo and was writing primarily travel pieces (including articles for airline in-flight magazines, which at the time paid handsomely), I was mostly doing literary nonfiction. That all changed when I entered the communications world, and I started doing a lot of news releases and newsletter-type articles. These days I do a ton of blogging—mostly for other people.
All of these domains of writing are fun yet challenging in their own way, and I like to keep a nice balance. With that in mind, I think I need more creative nonfiction in my life, as it’s the one I currently do the least of.
Should Journalistic Writing Be Taught in High School?
Of these three domains of writing, traditional journalistic writing is the most counterintuitive when coming from the traditional academic background. In high school, we all learned that an essay—that thing we all wrote lots of—consists of the following elements:
An introduction, hopefully with a catchy first sentence to reel in the reader
A thesis statement, typically at the end of the introduction
Body text of whatever length is necessary
A conclusion that ties everything up in a bow
As a former humanities student, I cannot count the number of essays I wrote in this format. As a result, this is how I wrote when I first busted loose from academia and became a freelance writer. As it happened, this style of writing suited the type of travel writing I was doing just fine. However, when I got my first communications job and was tasked with writing news releases, I basically had to completely relearn how to write.
Anyone who’s been through journalism school or a postsecondary program in communications (which I eventually did) will be familiar with the “inverted pyramid” style of writing. For those unfamiliar with it, this is the format in which the vast majority of news stories and pretty much all news releases are written. In contrast to the essay format, the inverted pyramid style takes the following form:
Statement of the bare-bones essential facts of the situation or event being described, such that if you read nothing else, you’d get the gist of it
Secondary but still important facts
Usually a quote from a VIP at this point
Supporting information
Possibly a second quote from somebody secondary in importance
Call to action (for news releases, and sometimes in news articles)
Fluffy boilerplate stuff about the organization or company putting out the release (news releases)
I’ve often thought that it would be beneficial to introduce the inverted pyramid style of writing as early as high school, alongside the traditional essay format. While I’m personally glad I learned how to craft a good essay, I know I’m the exception in that I’m occasionally called upon to write one. If I were an HVAC contractor or an HR manager at a bank, I would probably write very few essays, but be fairly regularly called upon to write a tidbit for a newsletter or perhaps a news release. It’s useful stuff to know.
Admittedly, this traditional journalistic style is, at least for me, the least fun of these three styles of writing, as it’s more restrictive than the others and offers less leeway for creative flourish. It’s also the least ego-gratifying, as by definition the writer is invisible and typically uncredited. But it is its own art form with a process that I enjoy, and a writer who can crank out solid news releases is always going to find work.
The Purpose of Blogging
In a Venn diagram of the three writing forms I discuss in this post, blogging would occupy the centre, with elements of overlap with both journalistic writing and creative nonfiction. Blogging is an art form that incorporates aspects of both of these forms while also possessing its own rules specific to its digital niche.
In terms of format, blogging somewhat resembles creative nonfiction, at least on the surface. This post, for example, has an introduction, several sections of body text, and a conclusion, in contrast to a news story, which would follow the inverted pyramid format. But if you look carefully at my first two paragraphs, you’ll see they’re packed with keywords that I’m hoping Google will notice. This sort of front-loading of the story is more akin to journalism and quite unlike most creative nonfiction.
The main difference I see between blogging and creative nonfiction is one of reader expectations. When I read an article in the New Yorker or the New Statesman, I’m basically committing to reading the whole thing, however long that takes, while fully absorbing its content. When I’m reading a blog post, however, I’m typically skimming. If it’s truly absorbing, I’ll read the whole thing, but in most cases, I’ll read a bit and move on to something else. For better or for worse, blogging caters to our society’s much-diminished attention span.
In this sense, blogging more closely resembles traditional journalism, which is designed to be skimmed for the essential facts and only read end to end in cases where a story really matters to you personally. But blogging also permits a degree of creative latitude that journalistic writing doesn’t, which puts it more in the same league as creative nonfiction. And then there are elements that differentiate it from both, from the liberal use of numbered or bulleted lists to the frequent subheadings. It is very much its own thing.
The death of blogging has been proclaimed by various pundits for basically as long as blogging has been a thing. In fact, most experts in the field seem to agree that blogs are actually flourishing at the moment. I think it’s the ability to easily skim blog posts that has prevented video from subsuming the medium, as many had predicted would happen. It’s hard to skim a video for the important tidbits you’re looking for. With a blog post, this is easily accomplished.
I have my own reasons for maintaining a weekly blog. These are:
It’s fun.
It lets me explore topics I might not otherwise get to explore.
It helps me keep my writing chops up, like a musician practicing scales and arpeggios.
It’s good for my website’s search engine optimization (SEO) to be continuously creating new content.
It helps remind people in my network that I exist and (hopefully) keeps me top of mind when people need to hire a writer.
It serves as a breeding ground for ideas that could germinate into creative nonfiction essays.
It serves my ego as I get to have my own name on this stuff, as opposed to most of the blogging I do, which is under other people’s names.
If you’ve made it this far in the blog post, then congratulate yourself on having a far greater attention span than the average 21st century human. If you’ve simply skipped ahead to this point, no worries—that’s what this medium is designed for.
The Allure of Creative Nonfiction
If blogging and CNF can be compared to ice cream, blogging is the equivalent of Dairy Queen soft serve. It’s quick, easy, perfectly delicious, and generally exactly what you expect—and for me at least it’s exactly what I’m looking for when I’m craving ice cream out in the world. CNF, by contrast, is a gourmet banana split with chocolate sauce, brownie bits, and perhaps a sparkler on top—enchanting, enticing, and definitely something you want to give your undivided attention, and not an all-the-time thing.
As I mentioned earlier, there once was a time when I wrote a lot of CNF. In fact, the one big literary prize I’ve been nominated for, the Pushcart Prize, was for a CNF essay I wrote in 2006 for the Japan-based English language literary nonfiction magazine Kyoto Journal. Entitled “A Pyrrhic Victory: Religion and Suppression in 1930s Japan,” it’s a historical essay that I based entirely on research I did for my master’s thesis at the University of British Columbia, and one that I someday hope to turn into a graphic novel.
Looking back at that piece now, I still think it’s pretty good but that it could have been better. At the time I wrote it, I was still fresh out of academia and the tone of the writing I think reflects this. My writing has evolved a lot since 2006 and I carry a lot less academic baggage than I once did. I’ve evolved much as a reader since then, moving away from the ivory tower world and towards the colourful candor of essayists like Christopher Hitchens and Joan Didion and the transgressive fiction of Hubert Selby Jr. and J.G. Ballard, in the hopes that some of these influences will rub off on me.
In the years since the Kyoto Journal piece, I’ve dabbled a bit in CNF here and there, mostly on my Medium channel. This stuff currently sits as orphaned material, not quite polished enough for the really good CNF publications but ambitious beyond a mere blog post. I have yet to decide what to do with this stuff. Some of it, I think, has the potential to be repurposed as legit essays that could be published in “serious” magazines, but they’re definitely going to need some work.
Achieving a balance between the three domains of writing I discuss here while also grappling with the many other forms of writing I’m tasked with—technical writing, web copywriting, social media content etc.—requires a level of self-discipline I think I have yet to achieve. As a result, creative nonfiction, that most alluring of genres, has fallen by the wayside, a fact I hope to correct. Satisfying all these creative itches while also cranking out the occasional poem and whatnot requires that I be doing a hell of a lot of writing all the time. Thank God I enjoy what I do!
What I Do (And Hope to Do More Of)
I’m a professional writer who is always on the lookout for new and interesting opportunities to use my craft to make the world a slightly better place. If you like what you read here, I encourage you to reach out to me, even if you don’t have immediate plans to hire a writer. I always love hearing from readers and getting suggestions on what might be good topics to explore on this blog.
If you happen to be an editor of a creative nonfiction publication or anything of that nature, I encourage you to check out the “Essays” section of my portfolio for a taste of some of the topics I’ve enjoyed exploring. If any of it appeals to you, I’d love to hear about it. And if by some chance you’re an illustrator who noted with interest my desire to turn my MA research into a graphic novel, I would definitely love to hear from you. I’ve had this on my mind for years and would love to move forward with it.
Happy writing and reading to you all!
