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Rating: 
Summary: Understanding intimately how things work.
Review: A clown for Ringling Brothers, an assistant in liver and heart transplantation surgeries, a baseball umpire, a motorcyclist and a participant in psychotherapy: When it comes to having the experience necessary to write interesting essays, Lee Gutkind is ahead of the game. In his textbook "The Art of Creative Nonfiction : Writing and Selling the Literature of Reality," Gutkind uses his passion for the written word and the experiences that inspire it to assist beginning creative nonfiction writers in their quest to share life through writing.
Covered in the book's outline-reminiscent chapters are instructions on interviewing, fact checking, finding ideas, creating dialogue and keeping story files. Straying from the norm of "interesting... [and] accurate," Gutkind stresses that the most important requirement of a creative nonfiction writer is passion- "A passion for the written word, a passion for the search and discovery of knowledge, and a passion for... understand[ing] intimately how things in this world work." In the following chapters, he offers advice on what creative nonfiction is (the relation experiences, often subjective) and is not (encyclopedia truth) in a concise yet affable manner.
Peppered with brief works from other writers used as illustrations of his suggestions, "The Art of Creative Nonfiction" is a solid, friendly text for beginning writers and an excellent stepping stone into the world of writing for a career.
Rating: 
Summary: Loved It
Review: Great book. Makes me want to quit my day job and become a writer. I enjoyed the book thoroughly.
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Summary: Essential Reading for All Nonfiction Writers
Review: How often has a piece of nonfiction writing left you bored to tears with its rambling of fact after fact, a completely limp, motionless piece? Well, Gutkind has developed a structured teaching method for this genre: frame, focus and scene. Once you understand his "yellow test," your writing will vastly improve, bursting with energy and radiating the essence of life, that is, the truth with a capital "T." He lifts your head, redirecting you from gazing into your own belly button, and unveils the techniques of capturing and presenting universal themes--a focus that touches us all. This book not only shows you how to write, more importantly, it show you how to think. Buy it today--he's the godfather of the genre, creative nonfiction, and the editor and founder of the only journal devoted exclusively to the genre.
Rating:
Summary: Understanding intimately how things work.
Review: Initially I was afraid to invest hard cash on this book because I want my nonfiction to be totally factual. However, my fears were unfounded. This book was well worth the investment and I recommend it to all aspiring writers of nonfiction. The book is a tremendous eye-opener. It blows the myth that nonfiction writing has to be dull. Dull does not sell. If you are writing nonfiction, you need to read this book. For one thing, the author teaches that the words "creative" and "fiction" are not synonymous. You CAN write creative nonfiction.
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Summary: Confidence Building Tool for every aspiring writer
Review: Initially I was afraid to invest hard cash on this book because I want my nonfiction to be totally factual. However, my fears were unfounded. This book was well worth the investment and I recommend it to all aspiring writers of nonfiction. The book is a tremendous eye-opener. It blows the myth that nonfiction writing has to be dull. Dull does not sell. If you are writing nonfiction, you need to read this book. For one thing, the author teaches that the words "creative" and "fiction" are not synonymous. You CAN write creative nonfiction.
Rating: 
Summary: Shallow
Review: This book reads like an outline of a book on Creative Nonfiction. A beginner might find some chapters useful or inspiring, but anyone with writing experience is likely to find it too shallow. The chapter on Immersion--one of the key methods of reporting a highly detailed, creative story--is only 8 pages long, gives a few anecdotes, but provides next to no useful information to a writer contemplating this technique. The following chapter, on interviewing, is 10 pages long and more than half of it is composed of long excerpts from other stories. You might see the _results_ of doing a good interview, but not much beyond the obvious in actually carrying out a good interview. This book doesn't stand out for me among the large number of mediocre books aimed at beginning to intermediate nonfiction writers.
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