Juvenilia ✔/ a Nonfiction Undergraduate University Collection

ARTS 4000 Final Project Report

In Creative Nonfiction, it's more about the narrative and storytelling in an unconstrained way and taking sides as opposed to playing the fence, which, as a Creative Writing Major, I felt utterly capable of doing. 

Since I had very little knowledge about Magazines and journalism, Creative Nonfiction bridged the gap for me to move forward.

For the purposes of creative non-fiction at CreatedHere, I consistently found the genre never fell in the same place; while some pieces were more journalistic in approach with an interview and quotes involved with fact-based evidence, others were more like storytelling with poetic phrasing and personal anecdotes. 

There are set issues that come out quarterly. The timing of the issue I was working on meant they all had something in common: the prompt was 'What is creativity?'. 

Finding common ground between articles made it easier to work through them in quick succession. If I had more time with CreatedHere, I imagine the style would have presented itself in a more obvious way as I worked with more and more artists, but as it stood, it was a significant challenge finding "house" style as a newcomer.

Creative non-fiction seems to be a genre of delicate balances—a balance between personal truth and self-expression. Gutkind states that "though personal experience or memoir can be, and oftentimes is, the most important piece, it can easily be overdone." (4) 

This was a niche challenge I ran into at times that I did not know how to handle at first, and it took me some time to understand just what the problem was. 

How do you correct a story that doesn't have a story and state that in such a way that the article writer will be receptive to it? 

 Alternatively, what if there is a personal story, but then it's missing the connection with reality and/or lacks a main message or point? 

How, as an editor, do you decide where sections need to come back down to the ground because it seems to be floating? Being able to articulate these things took the most time for me because I could intuitively understand what the blockage was and how to fix it, but providing explanations for why I changed things was difficult, and the main issue I was consistently facing was the "encouragement" portion.

Prior to my research and despite years of interest in the publishing industry, I never realized the sheer number of types of editors or how many avenues one could go within the editing world. I have never been particularly interested in journalism personally, so perhaps that is a reason I was so floored when I came across this overwhelming list (Dent 15). 

My personal interest has always been with book publishing, and I know a little bit about business publishing because my family owned a tourism magazine that sold ads across Western Canada called Visitor's Choice International Guide, but it was a family business, so it was very small. 

Imagine my surprise when I see a list of types of editors larger than my entire family's staff team across the board. The familiar terms included in the list ranged from Editor in Chief, News Editor, and Managing Editor, to Copy Editor and Assistant Editor, but there are a total of 18 positions in the editing field that go on with explanations going by "Careers in Journalism", at least in this source. There were 19 broad editing roles included in a list from "The Layers of Magazine Editing" (Evans 45). 

It makes me wonder just how you figure out what you're good at? How do you figure out where you're meant to be other than through trial and error? I have not found a better answer to that question beyond, "Yes, through trial and error."

My role at CreatedHere was called Online Editor, and going by the definitions of "Careers in Journalism", my role was a blend of Copy Editor and Assistant Editor. There was another layer to my role, however.