From Fact to Fiction: Tips on Writing the Outdoor Tale
In keeping with the spirit of the Northwoods Sporting Journal’s new outdoor writing contest, I thought I would share some tips and ideas for writing outdoor fiction for aspiring writers, (of which I hope to be myself). While the fictional outdoor short story seems to have faded away in popularity over the years, I believe there are still many out there who would like to see more sporting fiction to balance out the ‘how-to’ and ‘tips and tricks’ stories that dominate today’s outdoor publications. I’m also confident that a great deal of talented writers out there would love to write more sporting fiction.
An abundance of writing knowledge can be learned from writers of the golden age of outdoor fiction, which ended around half a century ago. I’ve written some about Edmund Ware Smith, who I believe was one of the greatest writers of this era, publishing hundreds of short stories in many nationally popular magazines and a series of books.
From Fact to Fiction
While not overly educated, Ed Smith really knew his stuff when it came to writing fiction. In a series of lectures given to Massachusetts college writing students taught by professor Robeson Bailey, Smith explained the techniques he used to craft the fictional stories that made him so successful. The lecture series resulted in a published book, From Fact to Fiction in 1946, which became a useful guide to writing fiction. The book was the literary result of a collection of ten lectures. In each lecture, Smith presented the ideas and methods that led to him conceiving and writing a particular story. Then, the story was reprinted in its entirety for the reader to review. After the story, professor Bailey’s commentary followed. While it’s perhaps a bit dated, reading this book is a refreshing way to learn about writing the short story and I’d recommend it to all prospective writers.
I’ll attempt to provide some guidelines to short fiction writing that I’ve learned from the first chapter of From Fact to Fiction. In next month’s column, I’ll feature the first part of a three-part short story that I have written based on what I’ve learned.
What is Fiction?
Let’s start with a definition of fiction. Smith defined it as “the purposeful distortion of fact into a unit of truth”. As he said, most fictional stories have a springboard in fact. The art of taking that fact and distorting it into that meaningful unit of ‘truth’ is what makes the story.
The Fact
The example given in chapter one was a fact Smith read in a camp diary on a lake in the St. Croix River drainage near the Maine-New Brunswick border. A 10 year old boy and his grandfather were fixing up a camp on the lakeshore when the grandfather died in his sleep one night. The boy walked half a mile down the shoreline the next morning to notify the nearest neighbor and get help.
Distorting the Fact
This fact stayed in the back of Smith’s mind for many years before he worked it into a story, Last Trip Together. From the fact, he developed a heart-wrenching story of a seventeen year old boy working on the camp with his father. The father passed away in his sleep one night and the boy spent the next day in a canoe, paddling his father’s body twenty-eight miles downriver to the nearest settlement. The story was written in the first person, with young Web Rivers thinking aloud and talking to his father throughout the canoe trip. It ended with a harsh realization of his father’s passing as he reached town.
In this story, Smith took a factual occurrence and built his fictional story around it. He changed a number of the facts to create that unit of ‘truth’, a deeper meaning to the writer and reader. In this case, the unit of truth is in the boy’s journey downriver to town with his dead father in the canoe.
Think back to the original fact of a ten year-old boy walking down the lakeshore after his grandfather has passed away in the night. Why were the facts distorted to create the fiction? The boy was made older so that he could feel deeper emotion and be more articulate. The grandfather became the boy’s father, creating that closer bond felt between father and son. Instead of a neighbor half a mile away, they were on a remote pond twenty-eight miles away from the nearest help. The boy was truly on his own in the wilderness.
There are countless directions that a story can go when distorting fact to create fiction. The key is in understanding which distortions will make the story better, more real, more understandable, and more meaningful.
Elements of the short story
In the book, Robeson Bailey pointed to the elements of the short story as described by J.P. Marquand, who stated that the short story must do three things: 1) start in a situation, 2) advance to a predicament, and 3) end with a wow. While story ideas are abundant in everyday life, most anecdotes are worthless in that they present a situation, but end right there. That element of representative ‘truth’ of the human experience is not included. Thus, great ideas abound, but an idea is not a story. Bailey stated that for true success, a writer must tinker with the idea enough to discover within it the real story.
Finally, he advised aspiring writers to stick with their ideas and finish out their stories, as it’s better to start and finish one story than to start a hundred and finish none. Writing is work, but to write is to learn.
Edmund Ware Smith and Robeson Bailey teamed up to put together a great guide for writing the fictional short story. I hope that some of their advice is useful to writers of outdoor fiction today, and I expect it to be valuable as I begin to make my own attempt at putting together a story or two.
In next month’s column, I’ll feature the first part of a story I wrote based on what I’ve learned thus far. I hope you’ll consider entering your own story into the writing contest. You can provide input and feedback by emailing me at jrodwood@gmail.com or visiting www.outdoorsportinglibrary.com.
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