Nonfiction as 'creative writing'

I’m reading Tracy Kidder’s Among Schoolchildren at the moment – one of the finest examples I know of nonfiction plus great writing. In the UK we surge away from our island to become fine travel writers, we have a great bevy of biographers who often manage bracing first chapters then become ponderous, and we have memoirists, but nonfiction in America is generally more wide-ranging … with the likes of Kidder and John McPhee reaching outside that strict life-writing framework.

I’ve been reviewing the field while setting up a new Nonfiction stream to the MA Creative Writing program at City University in London. It’s pending final authorization just now, looking to be up and running this Autumn, complementing the Novel Writing and Plays & Scripts strands already in play.

It will be the first of its kind in Britain, I believe. Birkbeck is seeking authority to extend its MA to include nonfiction, but specializing on life writing and biography, a track others are already on. Imperial curiously runs an Msc in nonfiction, focusing on science writing. All have dissertations as a significant part of the student workload. City’s MA Nonfiction would take its cue from the Novel Writing program, which sees students (who may well be established writers) submit complete books. I was outside examiner on one of those novels this summer … a grand and odd book which took away a distinction and was snapped up by an agent.

The nonfiction creative writing route in American universities is firmly established, pioneered by Lee Gutkind. At his suggestion I pulled back from calling the City course ‘Narrative Nonfiction’, which he felt might frighten people away, but I do still see a tendency towards life-writing in these American universities. I’m much more interested in helping writers develop books through the arc of story. I’d hope the City course attracts a truly mixed bag of writers: biography, travel, true-crime, immersion (e.g. ‘Homage to Catalonia’), science, memoir, history, war and whatever, writers learning, enjoying and deploying tricks of the trade and cross-fertilizing each other’s work as they reveal their own great stories. I like the fact that the City course would come under its Journalism and Publishing school, rather than dropping anchor in the more literary and establishment waters of an English department.

At the Biographer’s Club Christmas Party in London I was chatting with a historian. She kept insisting she was a ‘historian’ rather than a ‘writer’, as though ‘historian’ were the better thing to be. She’s not on her own. I can’t get through such historians’ books, yet Hugh Trevor Roper for example delights me with his prose and conjured me into his historical world.

I’ll post here how the City course progresses through its final approval stages … and mean to give this blog something of a nonfiction spin through these coming weeks.