# Non-Fiction Writing Categories



## Galen (Oct 7, 2018)

Sorry, if I am duplicating other posts or threads but when I made a search for "travel writing" (non-fiction), did not find anything.

I am currently doing a Staycation blog series. I am not a travel writer but I want to improve my writing about travel topics. I actually don't like to travel. What I like is to travel to one location and explore that location thoroughly rather than "visit."

So, if anyone else is writing travel articles and you have any tips, would love to hear them.


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## H.Brown (Oct 7, 2018)

I thunk there is a nonfiction workshop that you could put it in, with a note in the title that it is a travel blog.


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## Galen (Oct 7, 2018)

H.Brown said:


> I thunk there is a nonfiction workshop that you could put it in, with a note in the title that it is a travel blog.



Thanks H. Brown, I got the impression the nonfiction workshop was more of a critique workshop.

Anyway, I did not find anything in a search for travel writing, so if that does not exist, then I wanted to start in the nonfiction discussion, first.


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## H.Brown (Oct 7, 2018)

There is also an open nonfiction forum, but no we don't have anything like you are looking for that I am aware of unless you wanted to start a blog, if that was more what you are looking for.


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## Plasticweld (Oct 7, 2018)

I would love to see some of your work posted here. This is a great place to post anything to get some general feed back. I have used this sub forum and the blogs and humor section to post a lot of my stories that were printed in the local paper. I got lots of advice and feed back from the members here on how to improve my writing and story lines. If you check out some of my blogs and posts here you will see I am an unconventional writer as well, when it comes to how the forum was meant to work.  


If you feel uncomfortable posting something, I would be glad to give anything you have a second set of eyes to look over...Bob


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## Galen (Oct 11, 2018)

Bob, thanks for the offer, but I was actually looking for other travel writers to get an idea of how they approach travel writing. Someday, if I ever choose to "publish" something about travel etc. would be happy to have other eyes look at it. For now, I am just writing for my blog.


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## PiP (Oct 11, 2018)

As there is no interest in the Technical, Academic, and Corporate Writing
subforum , we could change it to Travel Writing and move to the workshop. Thoughts?
I would be interested in sharing ideas on travel writing


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## H.Brown (Oct 11, 2018)

I would be happy with a general workshop nonfiction place tbh Pip.


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## PiP (Oct 11, 2018)

H.Brown said:


> I would be happy with a general workshop nonfiction place tbh Pip.


https://www.writingforums.com/forums/249-Non-Fiction-Workshop


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## H.Brown (Oct 11, 2018)

Well derr to me must be tired I moderate that forum as well, Sorry Pip being a bit slow.


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## clark (Oct 12, 2018)

How about *CREATIVE NON-FICTION *??  I know so close to absolutely nothing about this 'genre' that it's pretty scary, but I gather there is a hard grid of truth to the story---[ real people went to that real place and had those real adventures, but in the TELLING of 'what happened to whom, when and where--an awful lot of license gets tossed into the style, and dull truth goes out the window in favour of humor and tall tales].  Interestingly, the END GOAL may be honestly,  fully, and carefully reported.

Example:  a mobile seismic crew is sent into a particular zone to get 96 seismic readings re oil reserves in the ground beneath.

They do their work, write a hysterically funny story full of gibes, jokes, and pratfalls, but produce 96 carefully documented and recorded seismic readings.

ALL RIGHT DAMMIT! I'll paste it in.  Plasticweld says he's posted all sorts of maverick shit here and always got good feedback.  So how badly can my story get ripped up?  Ouch!  THAT badly?  Well, the Lord hates a coward, so here's a story of mine that I would call CREATIVE NON-FICTION.  All of the events depicted actually happened, I was actually there and did all the things I said I did.  *NOTHING IS MADE-UP*. . .that's the point I'm making.  Perhaps the _writing style_ alone is what defines CNF.  Much of Mark Twain might fall into this 'category']

Those who have time to read the story--what would YOU call it?


"MURDER" ON THE ARCTIC BARREN LANDS


pdated on May 10, 2012








​




_ap of portion of the Barrens relevant to my adventure.  To locate our camp, find Yellowknife, then go up and Right to the word "Nunavut".  Our camp was just above the second "n" of Nunavut._​


This Hub describes an extraordinary experience that I lived over 40 years ago--in one of the most desolate areas on planet Earth. This experience faded into my personal memories decades ago, but for reasons unknown, it has now returned to my thoughts, day after day. I think I’m supposed to share it. And what better audience than here, with my fellow Hubbers?

*WHY THIS ZANY ADVENTURE HAPPENED*
In 1968 my good friend, Roy Duggan, and I spent almost five months—May 1 to September 15—living in a canvas-and-plywood tent on the Barren Lands (popularly called “the Barrens”) in Canada’s Arctic. We built our camp on the shore of an unnamed lake close to the end of Bathurst Inlet, a thin southward slash in the coast of the Arctic Ocean, about 350 miles ENE of Yellowknife, capital of the Northwest Territories. The Arctic Circle was only a mile or two from our camp..

Now, you might well ask, what in the name of sanity were we doing in a forlorn deep-freeze where temperatures of 55º _below _zero are common, the screeching bone-numbing wind almost never stops, the landscape is a bleak sameness of black rocks and endless lakes, and the lake ice is over six feet thick? Add to all this the complete isolation and the loneliness that goes with it, and you have one of earth’s most formidable, most frightening, and most dangerous environments. Why were we there?
You guessed it—money

*SERVICING MINERAL CLAIMS IN CANADA
*
An acquaintance of ours owned mineral rights to over 650 mineral claims in the Bathurst Inlet area. To _retain_ mineral rights in Canada in 1968, the “owner” of the rights had to (a) post a $100 bond _per claim_ per year or (b) “trench” or physically remove one cubic yard of material per claim per year.

In 1968, it was a hell of a lot cheaper to send Roy and me into the Barrens with some tents, some food, a WW II rifle, a revolver, a few drums of explosives, and a case of blasting caps, than it was to give the feds $65,000. The fact that we didn’t know TNT from TSP, had zero experience in the deep Arctic, and were stupid enough to go on this adventure in spite of our ignorance, just seemed to quicken our acquaintance’s interest the more. You had to know the guy. . . .

*SOME REALLY INTERESTING STUFF ABOUT CANADA’S BARREN LANDS*

Canada’s 9,985,000 sq. km make it the second largest country in the world. Of that land mass, the Barren Lands comprise about 40%--an area so vast you could stuff France, Germany, Italy, Spain, the UK, Greece, Turkey, Sweden, and Ukraine into the Barrens—and _still _have 200,000 sq. km left over for your larger barbecue parties.

A few hundred million years ago (give or take), successive advancing and retreating ice ages scraped down what is now central Canada, leaving level prairies in the South, and the Barrens in the North. The Barrens are a seemingly limitless, stark, treeless landscape of boulders, grasses, and small shrubs, a land deeply scarred and gouged by the retreating ice into _over a_ _million _lakes and ponds of every size imaginable, most of them pristine and unnamed to this day. Canada has more water than any other country on Earth..

Many areas of the Barrens are so clogged with heavy marsh and peppered with so many lakes that travel even with today’s high-tech amphibious vehicles would be extremely difficult, and with the heavy bone Inuit dog-pulled sleds of past ages, travel would have been impossible.

So, it is reasonable to suggest that human beings have neither settled nor hunted nor travelled through these impassable areas—ever. Local Inuit stories, oral traditions, and more recent written records make mention of no travel by Natives or Europeans through these unmarked and unknown marshy areas.

Put briefly, Roy and I set up camp where, in all likelihood, no human being had ever been. We might as well have located on the surface of the moon.

*THE PURITY OF THIS DESOLATE LANDSCAPE*

Every day we were awed by the utter purity of our environment. Breathing deeply was an _experience_. The odorless air would almost _cut_ into the tissues of your lungs. The lake water, numbingly cold and free of any contaminants, had an indescribably sweet taste. When we finally got through the ice (_how _is another story, another time. . .) we routinely caught 3-lb. lake trout with beer can tabs and hooks—no bait, just a tab and a hook on a jig line. They’d never been fished, so they’d strike at the flash alone. 

We were also privileged to happen upon a herd of musk oxen, which snuffled and snorted and whirled about and behaved pretty much the way you’d expect bewildered creatures to behave in the presence of aliens. By jumping and leaping about, making lots of noise and generally behaving like the raving lunatics we were, we managed to get the males alarmed enough to order the herd into their famous 'protective circle', where the females and calves cluster in a bunch and the males BACK into the bunch, each male becoming a 'spoke' in a wheel of death for a potential attacker. The bulls stand, heads down, and any attacker has to contend with a head of sharp horns, no matter where he goes.  If the attacker does somehow get inside, close to the hub, he has a solid wall of male haunches immediately in front of the cows and calves--and the bulls will permit their haunches to be eaten alive rather than break the circle.

Then there were the wolves. One day, a female Arctic Wolf visited our camp. Pure white, unafraid, curious, she sniffed around the entrance to our supply tent, stared at Roy and me with languid curiosity, and then glanced quickly down at the lake ice. We glanced with her. And there, pacing back and forth on the ice like any annoyed husband waiting for his wife, was her mate. Males are noticeably larger than females, so there was no difficulty telling which from which.After a few minutes of agitated pacing, he gave a single short bark. The female, now no more than twenty feet from us, cast a final look at the supply tent, then padded through the snow to his side and they set off down the middle of the lake.Over five minutes later we could still see their dim shapes in the fading silver light half a mile away, but in the absolute silence we could clearly hear the soft crunch of their paws on the ice of the lake. I can still hear it.​​





_Alpha Male Arctic Wolf on the Barrens_​

There were many more experiences, many more revelations and epiphanies that impressed upon us the rare privilege we enjoyed as intruders in this unsullied environment. Occasionally, we were called upon, not to enjoy, but to_ suffer_ as intruders. I mentioned earlier that the wind blew virtually all the time Not gale force, but briskly. This "wind routine" was a constant, until one very warm day in mid-July. Roy and I were slogging through the grass towards our camp, about half a mile away, the wind strong in our faces. Suddenly, the wind stopped. Dead air. First time in over two months. Immediately, the AIR went black! The sky directly above us was blue; the sun directly above us was shining , but we were enveloped in a thick black , choking cloud of. . ._mosquitoes_ ! _Billions_ of them rose up out of the muskeg, their fragile bodies finally able to fly in the still air. They were in our mouths, eyes, ears, up our pant legs and shirtsleeves, covering all our exposed skin as we ran for the safety of the tent . Once zippered inside, we took savage joy in squashing the little bastards that came in with us.

Next morning, we put on bug netting before we ventured outside!

Among these many extraordinary experiences that Roy and I had in this harsh and hauntingly beautiful environment, the one that prompted me to write this Hub happened to me alone one afternoon in late July.

*A SHOCKING FLASH ON THE HORIZON
*
At that time of year the Arctic sun literally does not set. It dips half-way below the horizon, runs along for a while, then gradually starts to rise again. Quite _eerie_ for someone from southern climes, programmed for the impending darkness that doesn’t come. On this day, I was surveying some claims, walking away from the sun, which was a couple of hours away from the horizon. Suddenly, a blinding white flash on the horizon in front of me. I stopped, shocked. Again the flash, and so crisp and bright and _defined, _it had to be man-made. But that wasn’t possible—our camp was behind me and _no other people_ were here! The only way in was by plane, and there hadn’t been so much as the sound of a plane for weeks. Another flash—even brighter! Apprehensive, my heart pounding, I nonetheless started to move towards it. I figured it was maybe a mile away. As I moved, dodging around ponds and otherwise shifting my line of travel in response to the terrain, the light would flash, sometimes in rapid blinks, sometimes in longer bursts. I slogged through the muskeg more rapidly, my heart racing, fear making my sweat acrid and unpleasant.

What would I find? In one grisly fantasy I saw the flash become a bayonet plunging into my chest. The next instant, I remembered a tale my father had told me about how a python could hypnotize a monkey to walk into the snake’s gaping mouth. I felt like that monkey, but—again a flash! And another! But I couldn’t stop walking towards it, mesmerized.

I struggled up a short rise, prepared for whatever fate waited for me there. I had taken my knife from its sheath and held the blade in front of me to scare the homicidal maniac who had (undoubtedly) parachuted in expressly to dismember me slowly and throw my twitching body parts to the wolves.

]Down on my knees now, I mustered my waning courage and thrust my head over the lip of the rise. . .and there it was.

*CONFRONTING MY ENEMY*

On a bed of solid rock, facing me squarely, stood a three-foot high column of exquisitely beautiful brassy-gold rock, composed of hundreds of thousands of facets reflecting the rays of the sun in flashing stabs. I abruptly sat down in the wet marsh, oblivious of the cold and damp, almost crying in the aftermath of fear. I felt like a weak fool, but realized in the next moment that my fear arose from our extreme isolation and my absolute conviction that the “unnatural” flashes could only have been a terrible threat.

Still weak in the knees, I struggled to my feet and slowly walked around my “enemy”, marveling--now!--at the interlaced beauty of its structure. The column, more like a 

cone, really, was about six inches in diameter at the top, two feet at the bottom. The thousands of pieces, some tiny specks, some rectangles three inches by one inch, were all dazzling—as though carefully polished by human hands, then painstakingly glued into the column’s present form.
I’m no geologist, but I was sure the column was iron pyrite, commonly called “Fool’s Gold”, and given the debilitating emotional fantasies I’d just put myself through—very aptly named.
Even though the "rock" in the photo below is only the size of a very large egg, its structure and appearance accurately depict the larger column of glittering rock I confronted that day on the Barrens. You can imagine the reflective power of the countless thousands of facets, when hit by the rays of the sun.

Originally, the column of gleaming iron pyrite would probably have been sheathed in sedimentary rock.With infinite slowness, millions of years of wind had ground the rock away to reveal this beauty and leave it as an ancient sentinel on the Barren

*MAN’S INHUMANITY TO “NON-MAN”*

I pulled a sandwich and a thermos of tea out of my pack and sat by my sentinel to eat lunch. I looked at “him” often; I _talked _to him, but he had no words for me. When it was time to go, I stood up and said goodbye and then. . .I’ll never know why I did it--I reached out with the toe of my boot, and touched him.

Instantly, the entire column—with a light, casual tinkling that sounded like ten thousand glass dominoes tipping each other—the column collapsed in a heap at my feet

I stood there, stunned, my boot paralyzed in space, my jaw hanging like a stupid gate. Millions of years in the making. Gone in five seconds.
I felt like a murderer.

​​I have no resounding conclusion to offer, no timeless truth to expound. Blathering on about the fragile balance of nature and man’s willful thoughtlessness would be cliché and silly. I will say that I felt deeply saddened, that I felt I had betrayed an implicit trust between this vast and amazing place and myself as temporary custodian of a tiny part of it.
.
And so this, I suppose, rather pointless story comes to an end. From _this_ side of my silent relationship with you, my reader, it feels good to have got this bit of my life on paper. And from _your_ side of our silent relationship, well, only you can assess what my story might mean to you. At minimum, I hope you enjoyed it!..








_An egg-size cluster of Iron Pyrite crystals.  Magnified to show the astounding facets _​​


​


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## Galen (Oct 21, 2018)

PIP, while I think we do need a separate category for non-fiction writing. I am well aware there is a low level of interest in the topic. I appreciate your posts.

I write a blog. It started out supposedly to be about self-publishing, after I published my first novel and a cookbook for non-cooks. When the cookbook got a great response, my blog became a testing ground for more recipes in hopes I'd be able to write another cookbook. While I have learned to cook a bit better, I am no cook. What recipes I did try are not suitable for another cookbook, at least, not at this time.

Now, I am writing a Staycation series and experimenting with travel writing. This has been a good experience. Plus, it appears it may lead me to topics that I can write about and possibly produce other articles or a book. But, I am in the early stages, so I was looking a community of non-fiction writers to share ideas.

When I first suggested ideas regarding suggestions regarding non-fiction categories, it was because I was exploring writing more non-fiction.

While I may write a few more fiction stories, non-fiction is where I hope to find subjects I want to write about.

But, I think there are "professional" communities/organizations for non-fiction writers but I am still an amateur, so membership in those organizations may occur in the distant future.


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## Galen (Oct 22, 2018)

Hola Clark:

I don't venture into WF frequently.

I just saw your story. If you are still interested in feedback, give me some time and I will read and comment on your story.

I can tell you this, I already like it. The story has tight writing, good imagery and captures the imagination.


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