that is written by someone else. This true story has all the elements of fiction: characters, setting and plot. Those elements all come from a real person's life, so the characters are real; the setting is an actual place, and the events truly happened. • • On the whole, biographies are written about famous individuals or someone who has made an important impact on society. This person is known as the subject. The subject is the person whose life is being described in the biography. • Another key trait of a biography is that it is written by another person. The biographer is the one who writes the biography. If you were writing the story of Barack Obama's life, then Barack Obama would be the subject and you would be the biographer. Biographies are written in third- person point of view, which means the narrator is outside the story. Thus, the narrator uses pronouns like he, she, her and him to refer to the subject. For our example, you would be outside the story of Obama's life and use the pronouns he, his and him to refer to Obama. • To write a biography, the biographer interviews the subject and researches the subject's life. This could mean reading various types of information on the subject, or even interviewing other people in the subject's life. The purpose of a biography is to present an accurate account of the subject's life, so any information the biographer can find on the subject helps to meet this goal. The best biographers try to include the strengths and successes of the subject, as well as the weaknesses and failures. In this way, most biographers try to be unbiased towards their subject. Autobiography
• Autobiographies are the same as biographies
except for one key difference: the story of a person's life is told by that person. This means that in an autobiography, a person tells the story of his or her own life. Because of this, autobiographies are told in first-person point of view. The Personal Essay A piece of writing, usually in the first person, that focuses on a topic through the lens of the personal experience of the narrator. It can be narrative or non-narrative-it can tell a story in a traditional way or improvise a new way for doing so. Ultimately, it should always be based on true, personal experience. The Memoir A memoir is a longer piece of creative nonfiction that delves deep into a writer's personal experience. It typically uses multiple scenes/stories as a way of examining a writer's life (or an important moment in a writer's life). It is usually, but not necessarily, narrative. The Short Short
• A short/short is a (typically) narrative work
that is concise and to the point. It uses imagery and details to relay the meaning, or the main idea of the piece. Typically it's only one or two scenes, and is like a flash of a moment that tells a whole story. Literary Journalism • It uses the techniques of journalism (such as interviews and reviews) in order to look outside of the straight forward, objective world that journalism creates.
It uses literary practices to capture the
scene/setting of the assignment or the persona of the person being interviewed. • It can often be narrative or heavily imagistic. Another important aspect of literary journalism is that it often stretches the idea of "objective facts" in order to better reflect real life and real people. In other words, while journalism is about being completely objective, literary journalism says that people can't be objective because they already have their own subjective views about the world. Therefore, by taking the "objectiveness" out of the journalistic process, the writer is being more truthful.