## notes - [[{5.4a1} creative nonfiction is about articulating how you encounter the world and process your experiences]] ## highlights --- >Here the word _creative_ is doing a lot of work. Like other literary genres, creative non-fiction isn't so much about transmitting information from one brain to another. It's much more invested in sharing some person's perspective on being a person. Just as fiction shows us what imagined humans can do in imagined high-stakes scenarios, and poetry shows us how humans experience and feel in response to life, creative non-fiction shows us how another person encounters and processes their experience. >a lived experience or phenomenon or fact gets filtered through a unique and compelling human perspective >the hallmark of the personal essay is its intimacy > >(*paraphrased from phillip lopate*) >the personal essay represents a mode of being > >(*paraphrased from phillip lopate*) >essays show us a mind at work >…the essayist is making a character of themself. In Lopate's words, in order to turn ourselves into characters, we need to dramatize ourselves… It's a subtractive process. You need to cut away the inessentials and highlight just those features in your personality that most quickly characterize you, preferably those that lead to the most intense contradictions and ambivalences. [[{1.3} partitioning, performing, and projecting]] >You and the version of you that is on the page are separate things, and it's irresponsible to treat them like they're one and the same. >I think a lot of writers feel dissatisfied or feel like they still need to find their voice, and on one hand, I don't really understand that because you are you. You have a voice, unavoidably. But on the other, I think, well, no wonder you don't have a voice. You spend all your time writing from the perspective of an omniscient third-person narrator with no personal investment in the story. >Your voice is the hook.