A new craft essay at Brevity explains how writers of creative nonfiction can use speculation to their advantage.

Lisa Knopp writes, “At some point, writers of creative nonfiction come to a road block or dead end in our writing, where we don’t have access to the facts we need to tell our story or to sustain our reflection with depth and fullness. If only it was ethical to just make something up, we might think, or to elaborate a bit on what we know. But of course, then we wouldn’t be writing creative nonfiction. It might appear that our choices in such cases are to either abandon the topic or write a thinly developed scene or reflection.

“In Woman Warrior, Maxine Hong Kingston offers another option.”

Read the full article here.