Journal Article

\You Can't Make This Stuff Up\: Complexity, Facts, and Creative Nonfiction

Mays, Chris

2018

Overview

Jim W. Corder, writing over thirty years ago, explained that we all create the narrative that is our lives. The difficulty, Corder writes, comes in accommodating the divergent narratives of others. On first glance, asserting that writing is complex might not seem to be putting forth a groundbreaking premise. In the past few years, writing studies scholarship has extensively explored writing's complexity and exposed several significant and far-reaching ramifications of this idea. As many have also noted, writing's complexity also gives it a significant power to interact with and shape our world. In this sense, we can understand writing as complex in both its form and function, with subtle discursive constructions generating profound effects on the local reader and in the wider environment. Writing can evoke powerful thoughts and compel drastic actions, it can produce a powerful unity or kinship with an author, and it can create entirely new perceptions of the world; it may do all of this across an entire text or within a single sentence.

• Publisher: National Council of Teachers of English
• Subject: American literature / Authors / Autobiographies / Complexity / Constructivism (Learning) / Creative nonfiction / Creativity / Fiction / Interpersonal relations / Jobs, Steve / Literary Genres / Manufacturing / Narratives / Nonfiction / Power / Reading / Rhetoric / Sedaris, David / Theater / Writers / Writing