Nonfiction 101: Class Over

I chose the class for several reasons. Most of the writing I've done has been strictly fictional unless it was business writing or college-course writing. Also, career-wise, nonfiction (and creative nonfiction) seems more likely to produce possibilities than fiction pieces. The syllabus includes an introduction, memoirs, personal essays, features, profiles, travel writing and reviews. I was VERY excited to start this class.

The first week wasn't too bad - the lecture notes were great even though the first assignment was a bit of a retread from my creative writing class. Good old "show, don't tell" in the form of - tell us about a place, make it come alive.

Week #2 was a new subject - personal essay. The assignment was to tell about a significant day in my life. I was disappointed in the feedback I received. She knocked me for "too much telling, need more showing" even though the lecture notes specifically said it was perfectly find to focus on telling for this style of piece.

Week #3 was about feature journalism. Our assignment didn't feel like "writing" to me - we were to pick a news story from at last a year ago and think of questions to ask participants.

Week #4 focused on profiles. Our assignment seemed largely like a repeat of week #3 - pick someone and think of 5 good questions to ask them. Again, not really "writing".

Week #5 was especially interesting to me. Travel writing! Assignment? Rehashing week #1. Make a place come alive.

And week #6, which I just completed, was about reviews. This was the most relevant assignment of the entire course, requiring us to write two reviews - one of something we loved, one of something we hated.

So, 6 weeks, limited feedback, and half the assignments felt like repeats. We also had to write a "booth" piece which was longer and made publicly available for our classmates to critique. I wish she had given us more direction on this instead of "write 5000 words on anything you wish". Nobody wrote close to 5000 words so I decided not to be the first. I actually reworked something from my creative writing course. Feedback from my classmates has been mostly positive so I'm curious to see what the instructor thinks. When she gets to it... I'm impatient but I'd like to see feedback a lot quicker than she's been giving it.

Based on this experience, I'm not so likely to sign up for another Gotham course right away. I was disappointed and considering the money involved, I would've been better off to buy a whole library of books from Amazon. Next time, I'll probably do just that.

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