On Found Fiction as a Storytelling Form
I've had a soft spot for stories told as found documents since I first watched the Blair Witch Project in high school. And, yes, while there are legitimate criticisms of movies made in that kind of shaky-hand, “no this is real, though” style, I do appreciate the extra level of immersion it brings. It's a full commitment to the lie. Typical movies say, “Here, watch this idea I came up with and let's pretend together that it's something that happened.” But when it's found footage, the person behind the camera is saying: “This really happened.” And no, they don't really believe that—but there's more of a sense that they want the reader to believe it, more of an invitation to inhabit the story's world.
The same applies when the story is told in book form. High school was also around when I first read other people's published journals, Anne Frank's first for class then Sylvia Plath's on my own. Real-life journals are even more intimate than a memoir or autobiography. The author isn't curating their life to present it to the audience. They're showing their inner thoughts, day-to-day, exposing their full, theoretically uncensored selves on the page.
That's the same impact the reader gets from stories that are written in the form of logs or journals. We're conditioned by our expectations to see this format as confessional. Again, this is up a notch even from first-person stories, because there's an extra implication that this document wasn't necessarily written for other people. This isn't a narrator telling a yarn for an audience. These are the narrator's private thoughts, and we as readers are being given privileged access to them. There's a voyeuristic thrill to it—an activation of that gossip instinct, the feeling like we're about to see or learn something we maybe don't have a right to. But there's also an inherent authenticity, when it's done right. The narrator could be embellishing in a first-person story, or altering details to match their chosen narrative, or straight-up lying. When it's presented as a journal, there's less of that back-of-the-mind concern about the narrator’s reliability. They’d only be unreliable if they lack self-awareness; if someone lies in their diary, it's because they're lying to themselves.
The intimacy of stories told as diary entries is one of the main things that makes them so hard to do well. The potential for melodrama is high, and the lack of outside perspectives can get claustrophobic. I think this is especially the case when the story being told is relationship-driven. The narrative will invariably be one-sided, and that can strip away a lot of the complexity that exists in real human relationships. There are ways around this, certainly, and I've read love stories as diaries that avoided feeling trite and overwrought. Usually they accomplish this through the voice. If the narrator is funny that can cover for a lot of ills. It also helps if they see the world in a unique way, or have something else they're focused on aside from the relationship, like artistic projects, scientific discoveries, adventurous travels—something that expands the world and adds another layer to both the character and the potential sources of intrigue, focus, and narrative tension.
An adjacent category of found stories are epistolary novels like C.S. Lewis' The Screwtape Letters or Bram Stoker's Dracula. This sidesteps the single-voice problem of a diary story, inviting multiple perspectives into the narrative. It also adds an extra layer to the reader's understanding of the voice, and the question of audience matters more in how they’ll interpret it. That's always a background question in the reader's mind but it's of primary importance when the story is told as a letter. It isn't just about who they're writing to, either, but also why they're writing—just to inform them of what's going on, or to persuade them to do something? The relationship between the letter's writer and its recipient needs to be established early so that the reader can put the letter's contents in the right context and get a sense for how much they should trust the letter-writer.
There's another side to found fiction, which is the one I prefer: plays on journalistic, scientific, or academic forms as storytelling vehicles. The most obvious example that springs to mind is Mark Danielewski's House of Leaves. It's written with the conceit that it's a found, unfinished manuscript, originally written by a man named Zampano, which was discovered and footnoted by a second author, Johnny Truant. The found document format goes a step further with this one because the text is written about a fictional documentary, The Navidson Record, which Zampano presents as real but Truant says is completely made up, creating dispute within the world about what's real and what isn't—a feeling that's very effective to set up the unraveling of reality that happens later in the book.
That example shows the value of this kind of storytelling device: by presenting the document as belonging to the fictional world, you allow the reader to infer details of the world from its form and presentation. In other words, it gives you more tools to build the world for your reader—more ways to show them where they are instead of telling them. The same goes for stories told as or utilizing newspaper articles, like Alan Moore's Watchmen. The format itself presents the reader with some basic facts of the world so the writer can jump right into the good stuff. Other formats I've seen used to excellent effect include recipes, technical manuals, meeting minutes, research papers, and reviews of fictional TV shows, books, movies, or restaurants. Just about anything can be a vehicle for a story, and I think this is one of my favorite things about playing with these forms. It nods to the narrative thread that runs through everyday life, encouraging readers to reframe something familiar in a new way.
The one, big-picture true-ism I've found to hold with any kind of found storytelling: there needs to be a reason the story is being told this way. In fact, I'd argue that there should be a reason you can't tell the story as effectively using a straightforward narrative. The found conceit needs to add something to the reader's experience that is necessary for their understanding of the story, world, and characters. When this isn't true is when I find the format reads to me like a gimmick, and I'm much more likely to get annoyed by it rather than exciting.
On the other side of things, when found forms are used to good effect, they're an excellent way to enhance the reader's immersion. The reader can imagine themselves existing in the world, reading this document that came from it, and feel a stronger connection to the characters and setting. That can make them particularly useful tools for speculative writers, potentially sparing you some info dumps (or at least making the ones you need to include more interesting).
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