How much time should I spend in the wilderness?

[Trick]

So, my MC is a city boy. He is a survivor but has no practical skills in the wilderness. While he is in prison he learns of a hideout in the middle of some very wild country. He is also given a reason to go there and learn to hunt and forage. He needs to search for some specific plant and animal life for magical purposes. There will be books and, basically, a computer, but he will have no one teaching him so it will be a slow process with visits to the city dispersed throughout. His method of transportation is covered and logically explained but now I'm unsure of how much to show. I'm thinking a year will pass but I want to cover it efficiently so the reader won't get board.

Does anyone know of a book that has done something similar?

Any advice?

Thanks!

 

[T.Allen.Smith]

Your question is, "How much travel should I show?". Correct?

It depends on context, of course, but I would only show travel if something important, or relevant, occurs during the travel. Don't feel like you have to show travel to explain how a character gets from point A to B.

If it's necessary to show how this travel is accomplished, you could simply show it once. From there on after, the reader can assume travel is the same each consecutive trip.

In my opinion, travel where nothing but travel occurs, is boring. Boring your reader is the only Cardinal sin in writing. Something beyond travel must occur while characters are in transit.

 

[Trick]

My question is more, "How much of his learning process should I show?"

He has to learn to survive in a whole new scenario while also learning specific hunting techniques and identification and harvesting of certain wild plants. I fear that the zoology and botany will be a bit dense but it is vital that the reader understand the basics, though only those. I am more afraid to gloss over it than of over exposition.

 

[Svrtnsse]

I think that what TAS is saying sort of still applies. It may help to view the learning of the skill as a journey from novice to master. Show the parts that may be interesting and that shows him progressing and levelling up. You could then also use those incidents as contrast to when he does the same thing, much easier, later on.

For something like learning to survive in the wilderness, some of the following scenarios may be interesting:
- First kill of anything
- First kill of something lethally dangerous
- First night spent outdoors
- First run of "really bad luck" with food collection (starvation)
- First time mistaking a poisonous mushroom for an edible one
- First time coming back to town after two winter weeks alone in the wild

Things like that might be fun to both read and write.

 

[T.Allen.Smith]

Yes... What Svrtnesse said.

Don't show every painstaking learning process. Show the ones where important things happen.

The reader will assume the next time your character performs a similar activity, at a higher skill level, it's because he learned from that early, important experience and the many mundane learning lessons between point A and B.

 

[Trick]

Okay, this is helpful. Since he has a mission to kill certain animals and to collect certain plants, I can focus on the firsts and the most difficult, which in this case will be different occasions. He has already killed humans, as an assassin. I may show more grief with the animals as I think it fits the character but this has given me a better jumping off point than I had.

 

[wordwalker]

One rule of thumb is, think of possible incidents as character statements more than practical ones, at first. That lets you decide what point is really distinct from the others and worth showing, and which is better folded into the others. Many writers would reduce this to one scene of being stuck in the wild, beaten down to desperation, being inspired by one thing he sees-- and then a year later he shows up changed and dropping hints in passing of how much he's learned the hard way. Others would show more bits of the process.

It sounds like a lot of your story is about the wilderness experience itself, though, so you may want to include more for its own sake. That's fine; it's a matter of degree. How much sheer space do you want to give to the section, and are you sure that in your own style you can make each part different, clear, interesting, and pushing the larger story enough enough to carry its weight?

Come to think of it, my favorite image for deciding how much variety to give scenes is that Tarzan shouldn't fight a lion twice: If your scenes look too similar… try the Tarzan Test | Ken Hughes

 

[skip.knox]

How much time should I spend in the wilderness?


Forty days.

OK, now for my non-smart-ass comment.

If the story is going to be about him in the wilderness, hunting down those bandits eventually or doing some other survival thingy, then I'd say spend some time with that. In particular, spend time showing him learning at least a couple of the specific skills he's going to employ later in the climactic scenes. OTOH, if having those skills isn't really the point, then don't waste your time. I can think of a couple of examples: Frodo in Mordor, and John Carter on Mars.

In the former, we have a mere hobbit, who has never been away from home, somehow surviving in a hostile landscape. But *how* he survives in that landscape isn't important. That's not what the story is about, so the author just shines that on.

With John Carter, otoh, him learning how to survive on Mars is necessary to the advance of the plot, so Burroughs lingers there, letting us see not only what he learns but also what native abilities Carter possessed to start with. Because it's not just about spear-throwing, it's also about courage.

To put it another way, stated in the abstract the way you did, I'd say the reader doesn't care a fig for any of that. You have to give us a reason to care. That can range from having an entire novel devoted to him becoming a wilderness man (wasn't that also Deerslayer or one of those Cooper novels?), to devoting no more than a chapter to it. A kind of middle ground would be Paul Atreides' transformation into a desert leader, in Dune.

 

[BronzeOracle]

From a story point of view, does learning to live in the wilderness change him? Is it part of his character arc? How does he respond internally to living in the wild - the events that Svrtnsse mentioned are great prompts for character development. If there's not that much character development then I wouldn't keep it very long at all. Also, the longer he is in the wilderness the longer he is away from people and dialogue. Without these you're left with descriptions of what he is doing, places he is seeing (provided he continues to travel rather than staying in one spot) and his own internal thoughts and these can drag on after a while. They will also slow down the pace of the story. So while 'Into the Wild' has a lot of time for the MC to spend by himself, these are broken by poignant interactions with other characters.

 

[Trick]

Yes, he does change over the course of his time in the wild. He learns generosity because his trips back to the city are to give away all of the meat he get's while hunting. It is a requirement of the ritual he is trying to complete. Since he is a thief and assassin with his own brand of kleptomania, this is a big change.

The "computer" he will have is an automaton. It has a personality, actually copied from a real person, and there will be dialogue between it and the MC.

And yet, I will be trying to limit the amount of time I show. I really was afraid to show too little and make things seem rushed but I'm hoping for a happy medium.

 

[psychotick]

Hi,

There's two different times you can look at here. The first is the length of time your character should remain in the wilds learning to survive etc. The second is the amount of the story that should be spent on writing about it. I'm assuming that you're asking more about the latter.

The answer is very much up to you. You could do it very short. Heinlein wrote a one chapter piece in 666 the number of the beast (I think) about his MC learning to survive in a parallel universe and being trained to become a supremely fit athlete under a guru / scientist, and it was enough even though it covered many months of the character's story arc. On the other hand there are entire books geared around the stories of survival in the wilderness.

My advice is make each chapter cover a meaningful point in the MC's story. Svrtnsse had a good set of suggestions as to what might be meaningful to the MC's journey. No doubt you'll have others I assume knowing the MC's actual journey and what you want him to achieve. Start I assume with his arrival and realisation of what he has to do, and end I would guess with him finding the things he needs to find.

Cheers, Greg.

 

[AliceS]

The books that I've read where it really works are ones where something else is going on. The MC goes into the woods to learn, but other things happen along the way. In one of the Robin Hobb books, Fitz is out in the wilderness, but he is healing and writing a memoir and has visitors to interact with, and eventually a child to raise. In Nathan Lowell's Tanyth Fairport books, she's out there to find hermits to teach her and has to deal with everything from highway men to a village desperate for her to stay as healer.

Going into the woods and coming out different is an old trope. Shakespeare used it. Might even be a Jungian archetype.

Think of the books where people learn - even Harry Potter had all sorts of other things going on as he learned. If you isolate the character, make sure the learning is so important to the plot that they won't want to skim.

G