Craft Notes - “On the Fine Art of Literary Fist-Fighting” by Lee Gutkind

a.      He uses techniques like sliding between scenes, sometimes tears apart, but they always have something related to join them together. He switches back and forth in time, not going straight chronologically. He weaves other people’s stories in with his own.

b.      The voice is conversational. He tells stories like he’s sitting across from me, reminiscing about the past. He uses informal words like “newish” and seems to trust the reader with the intimate details. He doesn’t make a big deal out of them, like he’s told it all before, and maybe he has.

c.       Every time he slides to a new topic or scene he creates the image of the scene. Like when he starts talking about living in Pittsburgh, “I walked around my neighborhood with my guard up.” He gives us an image to look at while he lays the big stuff on us, like the heavy amount of discrimination and violence there was toward him because of his Jewish religion.

d.      There are five sections: an intro, a section on getting started in journalism and the “newish” type of writing, a section about how creative non-fiction became a focus, a section about starting the literary journal, and then how he feels about the journal. The overall sections are chronological through his life, but the stories within them often aren’t.

e.      I will take with me the idea of having an overarching chronological work of non-fiction, but within the chronology, using different times and parts of my life to build on each other by theme rather than time-relation.

f.        Questions: How is this supposed to be a part of a memoir? It seems way too condensed to be part of a memoir. What was a defining nationwide occurrence that sparked the idea of Non-fiction being worthwhile?