Lynda - Congratulations on your book!  It's exciting to hear that there are others like me out there :)  Many of you sound like you've struggled with similar shifts from journalism to personal essay/memoir to fiction.  Thank goodness we don't...

Maybe what we need on here is a "recovering journalist" group:)

Great post, Nora! I'm another journalist turned debut novelist.  I even have an MFA in Creative Nonfiction, get that, thinking I wanted to become the next Joan Didion, already doing it in my nonfiction as well.   Instead, the literature side kept...

I took a class in creative nonfiction at Western Washington University last summer, and it was fascinating. It's essay (or you could say memoir) writing with a lot of emphasis on details, place, scene setting, etc. There are even genres within...

I've never seen creative non-fiction as a genre, but I think they need to make it one.  What I do with my novel writing is take a real story or incident, and then embroider on it and rework it so that it no longer resembles the original and becomes...

Congratulations on the novel, and I'm going to work that writng prompt! Oh and I'd like to read your book.

Thank you all so much for your comments and support!  I'm so glad that some of you found the post helpful.  I do think the whole creative nonfiction thing has to allow for subjectivity, but it's implicit, right?  In terms of the fiction vs....

Best of luck on the success of your novel, Nora. I enjoyed your post -- in fact, it feels as though it was written for me. I've authored personal essays for over 8 years and I've been struggling to make the move to fiction. Funny how we think we're...

I'm wondering...when my children were in their teens and I was writing magazine stories about our sailing adventures, I would often read my day's work at the dinner table. More often than not one, or the other, or both would say to me "mom, that's...

Nora, Starting to write a novel 2.5 years ago and already seeing on the shelves, that's a mature feat, congratulations!