By Ratika Deshpande
I’ve always been drawn to epistolary literature–stories told through letters and diaries. A couple of favorite examples include Mark Dunn’s mind-blowingly clever Ella Minnow Pea, which is told through progressively lipogrammatic letters that the residents of a small island send to each other, and Marie Brennan’s The Memoirs of Lady Trent, which are the told as the in-world memoirs of an accomplished dragon naturalist.
I discovered some months ago that this kind of storytelling—which can go beyond diaries and letters—is known as “found fiction.” Think of a story written as notebook entries, as a series of posts from a food blog, or as annotations to an academic text.
(Creative nonfiction writers may be familiar with “hermit crab” essays, in which the writer uses forms intended for non-storytelling purposes–just like a hermit crab makes its home in the shell of another animal–such as a list, rejection letters, or game rules.)
Why you should consider writing found fiction
Found fiction is an excellent way to get unstuck. There are many stories about space missions gone wrong, but what if you wrote about what happened to the crew by framing it as a review of a documentary made about them? You may have published a research paper during your Master’s. What if you used a similar format to tell a story about a city of falling knives?
Constraints are helpful when you have a topic or a story in mind but don’t know where to begin. As soon as you have a form inside which to fit your idea, you can start moving, and eventually make it to the end.
And found fiction allows for constraints of not just form but also what gets conveyed to (or by) the protagonist (and the readers). Notebooks contain scattered fragments, letters provide two or more perspectives, newspaper articles use an objective tone, and so on. There is a lot that gets written between the lines, and the reader becomes a participant in the story, building it along with you.
Another reason to try your hand at writing stories framed as instructions or as customer support FAQs is that there are a lot of journals that are now publishing found fiction (some pieces can fit under the category of “hybrid” writing), so an exercise in getting the creative juices flowing can potentially turn into a publication. The visual dissimilarity with other pieces will help you stand out in a sea of submissions—just take a look at the pieces I’ve linked to so far. It might not guarantee acceptance, but it’ll definitely help you get closer to that goal because of its novelty—who doesn’t like to encounter something new and surprising?
So how do you get started with writing found fiction? Check out the stories linked in this article and below:
- Archive of the Odd
- Digging Through the Archives: 8 SFF Short Stories Told Through Notes and Documents
Also take a look at this craft essay in which Brenda Miller describes how she wrote an essay consisting only of rejection letters; it might help you in writing fiction, too.
Then, make lists of nouns, characters, settings, and forms—letter, instruction manual, recipe, FAQ, etc. Once you have these elements ready, set a timer, and write. It’ll take some effort and you might feel a bit resistant because the process would feel different from how you usually work, but it’s often at the edge of discomfort that we start playing and find ourselves doing something new and unexpected—which is the core of the magic of found fiction!
Bio: Ratika Deshpande is a writer from India. Her work has appeared in Authors Publish, Reactor Magazine, the Brevity Blog, and other platforms.
