How Hawthorne turned a tragic event into fiction
Dear Storyteller,
Writers have always found inspiration in true events. There’s something especially intriguing about that opening credit to a film that says, “Based on a True Story.”
If you’re used to making up stories entirely from your imagination or basing your fiction on things that happened to you, I recommend trying to write a story based on events you’ve read about in the news.
That’s what we’ll be doing today. We’ll work with Hawthorne’s “An Ambitious Guest” and I’ll help out with a writing prompt below. But first some guidance from classic writers…
Defoe, Dickens, and Dumas
Classic literature is no stranger to turning fact into fiction — or even dressing fiction up as fact. Just look at one of the early examples of novels, Robinson Crusoe, which was launched with a wonderfully long title telegraphing its “trueness”:
The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of York, Mariner: Who lived Eight and Twenty Years, all alone in an un-inhabited Island on the Coast of America, near the Mouth of the Great River of Oroonoque; Having been cast on Shore by Shipwreck, wherein all the Men perished but himself. With An Account how he was at last as strangely deliver’d by Pyrates. Written by Himself.
Now that’s a title! Here’s an overt example of how a book’s title was part art, part marketing (we’ll look at titles in a future newsletter). Note the claim that this is based on a true story: “Written by Himself.”
Daniel Defoe likely took inspiration from true stories of sailors marooned on remote islands. And he’s far from the only classic writer who’s looked to current or past events for material.
Charles Dickens started his career in journalism, and his apprenticeship as a writer consisted of hours walking London’s streets every day and reporting on the people he met and the events he witnessed. You can read this early journalism in Sketches By Boz. You can also find it throughout his stories and novels, from The Pickwick Papers to The Mystery of Edwin Drood. The vividness of Dickens’ London – and his characters, in general – come from his keen observation of real life and his constant practice in finding ever better ways to describe what he saw.
The French writer Alexandre Dumas, famous for his adventure novels, like The Three Musketeers, came across a true tale of revenge in an 1838 book called Memoirs from the Archives of the Paris Police by Jacques Peuchet. Here’s a summary from Wikipedia:
Peuchet related the tale of a shoemaker, Pierre Picaud, living in Nîmes in 1807, who was engaged to marry a rich woman when three jealous friends falsely accused him of being a spy on behalf of England in a period of wars between France and England. Picaud was placed under a form of house arrest in the Fenestrelle Fort, where he served as a servant to a rich Italian cleric. When the cleric died, he left his fortune to Picaud, whom he had begun to treat as a son. Picaud then spent years plotting his revenge on the three men who were responsible for his misfortune. He stabbed the first with a dagger on which the words “Number One” were printed, and then he poisoned the second. The third man’s son he lured into crime and his daughter into prostitution, finally stabbing the man himself. This third man, named Loupian, had married Picaud’s fiancée while Picaud was under arrest.
The story inspired Dumas to craft his epic of revenge, The Count of Monte Cristo, in which the sailor, Edmond Dantès, who’s about to marry his fiancée, is falsely accused of treason and imprisoned on a prison island in the Mediterranean.
On the island, he befriends another prisoner, Abbé Faria, who helps Dantès solve the mystery of who accused him, including the man who wanted to marry his fiancée (and eventually did). During their imprisonment together, Faria acts as mentor and educates Dantès, then reveals the location of a treasure.
In many adventure stories, a mentor figure helps the hero by equipping him with knowledge and resources. Often, when that role has served its purpose, the mentor vanishes from the story. In fact, Faria dies.
After this, Dantès escapes the prison island, retrieves the treasure, and remakes himself as the rich, enigmatic Count of Monte Cristo – and begins his subtle plot to take revenge on the three men who ruined his life. Interestingly, Dumas makes Dantès’ revenge less straightforward than Picaud’s, and more redemptive.
But I won’t spoil the plot. If you haven’t read The Count of Monte Cristo, do yourself a favor and get started – it’s still a fantastic page-turner.
(A warning, though: the earliest English translation has been heavily abridged and redacted – if you can get hold of Robin Buss’s more recent translation, I recommend it.)
Let’s look at a concrete example of a writer taking inspiration from a true story – our story for today.
The tragedy at Willey House
Nathaniel Hawthorne, the American writer most famous for The Scarlet Letter, likely heard or read a story about a tragedy in the White Mountains in Maine, which took place in 1826. In his book Short Story Writing, Charles Raymond Barrett mentions that Hawthorne must’ve heard of a landslide at a tavern called Willey House. He cites this report:
“Some time in June—before the great ‘slide’ in August, 1826—there came a great storm, and the old veteran, Abel Crawford, coming down the Notch, noticed the trees slipping down, standing upright, and, as he was passing Mr. Willey’s he called and informed him of the wonderful fact. Immediately, in a less exposed place, Mr. Willey prepared a shelter to which to flee in case of immediate danger; and in the night of August 28th, that year, he was, with his family, awakened by the thundering crash of the coming avalanche. Attempting to escape, that family, nine in number, rushed from the house and were overtaken and buried alive under a vast pile of rocks, earth, trees and water. By a remarkable circumstance the house remained uninjured, as the slide divided about four rods back of the house (against a high flat rock), and came down on either side with overwhelming power.”
You can see why a writer would be attracted to the story. You want to try to make sense of it. The awful tragedy. The unfairness of it. The sickening irony that their home remained standing.
To summarize what happens above: The father sees danger and prepares for the possibility of a landslide; the family escapes the house when the landslide comes; but they’re caught in the landslide, while their home – which they feared would be torn away – still stands.
If only they’d stayed in the house…
For a storyteller looking for stories, this one offers an entire plot. As the German writer and dramatic theorist Gustav Freytag says about a tragedy:
“This tragic force must possess the three following qualities: ( 1 ) it must be important and of serious consequence to the hero; (2) it must occur unexpectedly; (3) it must, to the mind of the spectator, stand in a visible chain of accessory representations, in rational connection with the earlier parts of the action.” – From Technique of the Drama
The tragedy in Maine fulfills all three criteria: (1) the consequence is deadly serious; (2) it occurs unexpectedly (certainly from the characters’ perspective); and (3) earlier parts of the action point to the tragic outcome.
Hawthorne must’ve been moved by the tale, but I also imagine that he saw how it offered him a fully formed plot. After visiting the area in 1830 and 1832, he turned the tragedy into a story in 1835 called “The Ambitious Guest,” which is included in his collection Twice-Told Tales.
If you don’t already have it handy, you can find it on Project Gutenberg here.
Before we get to the writing exercise, I encourage you to read the story – or at the very least the first couple of pages.
I’ll go make myself a cup of coffee while you read. I’ll be right back.
The Ambitious Guest
Now that you’ve finished reading the Hawthorne story, how faithful do you feel it is to the news report? The first time I compared the story with the news report, I was struck by how close Hawthorne stayed to the basic facts of the tragedy.
Having said that, the story doesn’t simply replicate the news report. Charles Raymond Barrett points out some differences between the original event and Hawthorne’s fictionalized account, including the composition of the family (the father, the mother, five children—the eldest a girl of thirteen—and two hired men, whose bodies were all recovered):
- Location: no change
- Timing: Hawthorne moves the action from August to September “to make plausible, perhaps, the rain necessary for such a slide, and to make seasonable the bitter wind which he introduces.”
- Names: No names for any of the characters “to add to the air of unsolved mystery that haunts the story.”
- Characters:
- He added the guest and the grandmother
- He made the daughter older (but kept the parents and younger children).
- He left out the hired men.
- Plot:
- He left out the warning (from Abel Crawford) but kept the “place of refuge.”
- He kept the family’s escape from the house and the house being left unscathed.
- He left out the discovery of any bodies.
It’s striking how much Hawthorne kept from the original. But also how it clearly becomes a vessel for the story he wants to tell – a story that uses the tragedy of the true event to explore themes of ambition in the face of mortality, the omnipotence of nature, and the fragility of human lives (Hawthorne isn’t afraid of big themes!).
Next, let’s take a look at the story’s beginning to prepare for our writing exercise. I won’t delve into the full details of the story’s middle and ending, but it’s helpful if you know what happens in the rest of the story.
The first paragraph warns us
The story begins:
“One September night a family had gathered round their hearth and piled it high with the driftwood of mountain-streams, the dry cones of the pine, and the splintered ruins of great trees that had come crashing down the precipice.”
What an efficient opening line. Within a single sentence, the story establishes the setting – the time and place – and foreshadows the tragedy at the end by referencing the “great trees that had come crashing down the precipice.” Notice how, immediately after this, we get a description of the happy family. The contrast with the threatening nature is so stark that it adds to the sense of unease and impending disaster.
And in case the hint of danger in the opening line was too subtle for the reader, we get this:
“They dwelt in a cold spot and a dangerous one, for a mountain towered above their heads so steep that the stones would often rumble down its sides and startle them at midnight.”
The story’s antagonistic force
Notice how the narrative describes the stones tumbling down:
“The frank-hearted stranger had just drawn his chair to the fire when something like a heavy footstep was heard without, rushing down the steep side of the mountain as with long and rapid strides, and taking such a leap in passing the cottage as to strike the opposite precipice. The family held their breath, because they knew the sound, and their guest held his by instinct.”
I love how the narrative in this paragraph – and in the dialogue by the father that follows – characterizes nature as a living thing. Like an unpredictable spirit.
“‘The old mountain has thrown a stone at us for fear we should forget him,’ said the landlord, recovering himself. ‘He sometimes nods his head and threatens to come down, but we are old neighbors, and agree together pretty well, upon the whole. Besides, we have a sure place of refuge hard by if he should be coming in good earnest.’”
This also happens where the wind seems to “pause before their cottage, rattling the door with a sound of wailing and lamentation.”
Giving nature agency like this taps into a deep-seated, animistic instinct we probably all have that nature is somehow alive. Haven’t you ever had that feeling during a storm that it pushes malevolently against you? Has a tree branch ever taken a swipe at you, and you’ve instinctively felt it was “on purpose”?
This technique establishes nature as a character – the antagonist of the story.
And the story needs it. The introduction of a stranger – the young traveler – offers an incident that breaks the ordinary pattern of the family’s life. But do the characters oppose each other or create any direct complication? Not really.
Sure, there’s a gradual darkening of the mood (triggered by the wind), from the family’s initial happiness to a darker and darker reflection on death. But this only feels ominous because we sense the threat from the natural forces outside.
Without nature as an antagonist, we wouldn’t have much of a story – and definitely no tragedy at the end. But above all, if nature weren’t characterized as having a will of its own, the landslide would feel random, like a deus ex machina trick, simply there to help the author conveniently wrap up the plot.
This is a good tip for us when we want to end a story with a disaster: make sure the disaster behaves like a character in the story; it can help make the ending more plausible.
Watching with horror – and empathy
The power of the story is knowing – or sensing, if you don’t know the outcome – that these happy, hopeful people will face disaster. Given how much they talk about their dreams and plans, they’re bound to be disappointed. What we can learn from this as writers is that if you put characters in a scene and they talk at length about their hopes for the future, we readers will expect their hopes to be dashed. It’s effectively foreshadowing disaster.
Put another way, storytelling thrives on change; if you start a story with happy people, they’re likely to be unhappy by the end.
Knowing the tragedy to come, I found the story quite poignant. The narrative’s heavy-handed foreshadowing isn’t accidental – it’s a literary device to ensure that those of us who weren’t familiar with the original news story would know that these characters would come to a bad end.
The story wants us to watch with horror as the tragedy unfolds. But not just horror. Also with empathy.
I don’t think Hawthorne just left out their names to “add to the air of unsolved mystery that haunts the story,” as Charles Raymond Barrett suggests; I think he leaves out names to make these characters representative of humanity – for example, to make the “ambitious guest” an allegorical, everyman character. Their vagueness encourages us to project ourselves onto them, and that can make the story even more poignant.
Now I’d like to give you that exercise I’ve promised – a creative writing prompt to help you explore how to replicate what Hawthorne did at the beginning of his story.
Writing prompt
Pick a news story describing a disaster, and how it affected a small group of people (2 or more). The details must be concrete. Sadly, there should be no shortage of these stories out there. Alternatively, you can find a story about a miraculous rescue from what appeared to promise a certain death.
(If this is too triggering for you, and you prefer to skip this exercise – don’t worry, we’ll have lots more writing prompts in the future.)
If you’re stuck for ideas, here’s one for you that doesn’t end in death, which I’ve adapted and condensed for our purposes:
This event occurred in Denmark on Thursday, November 2nd, 1899, at Utterslev Farm outside Copenhagen. Two vagabonds – homeless wanderers – had been working the fields as hired hands, and had asked if they could sleep in the big barn. They were told no – once their work was done, they should move on. But after their work finished on Wednesday, the vagabonds stayed anyway, sleeping in the barn. On the morning of November 2nd, a fire broke out amid the hay-filled barn and a strong southeasterly wind spread the flames to neighboring buildings. The vagabonds got out, but they were arrested by the local police for starting the fire, and they were put in jail. Later, they were released when a servant boy at the farm admitted to lighting a pipe by the entrance to the barn and tossing his match aside, thereby starting the fire. But he too was acquitted after he retracted his confession and claimed the police officers coerced him.
Told from the perspective of the vagabonds, this story dramatizes the escape from one disaster, only to fall into another – injustice at the hands of the coercive police.
So, the next step is to identify the key facts in the story:
- The location
- The time (season, month, time of day)
- The characters
- The details of the event
Now change the key facts. Change the location – or give it a fictional name – and strip the characters of names or change them (in my example above, the characters don’t have names).
What else would you change? What details of the event should change to make the story more dramatic or compelling? How are you going to use prose to characterize nature and create a feeling of impending doom? If you’re using the Utterslev Farm story above, how can you turn the wind into an antagonist that opposes the two main characters, the vagabonds?
Revisit “The Ambitious Guest” and look at the beginning, and how the story is set up. Now, using the details you’ve gathered, write your own opening paragraph, setting the scene, introducing key characters, and foreshadowing the tragedy to come.
A cautionary word on changing names
In the exercise above, changing details isn’t just an exercise in turning fact into more dramatic fiction. It’s also about keeping readers from recognizing the disaster you’re basing your story on. Recognizable names can be distracting, offensive, or even traumatizing. And it can result in legal action (if you’re interested, there’s plenty of information online about how to avoid libel and defamation, such as this).
Hawthorne kept his story so close to the source material that locals might recognize the event it was based on. His treatment of the tragedy was sympathetic, and so readers might forgive him for transforming the event into fiction. But Hawthorne also ran into trouble with this approach.
In his novel The House of the Seven Gables, he explores his family’s complicity in the Salem witch trials. It’s intended to be a fictional account of the family history, but after publication, a member of another colonial family, the Pynchons, accused Hawthorne of damaging their reputation via the character of Judge Pyncheon. Obviously adding an “e” to the name wasn’t enough…
So, handle the facts with care. Respect the source and your audience.
Next: a deep dive into “A Jury of Her Peers”
Next time, we’ll be diving into the short story “A Jury of Her Peers” by Susan Glaspell, which you can find on Project Gutenberg here.
This will be a longer analysis, in particular looking at its structure, so please take time to read the story. I look forward to your comments.
So, who was Susan Glaspell?
Susan Glaspell co-founded the Provincetown Players, one of America’s most famous theater companies, and she wrote lots of short stories, novels, and plays, winning the Pulitzer Prize for her 1930 play Alison’s House.
Glaspell adapted the short story “A Jury of Her Peers” from her play Trifles, which was inspired by a murder case she covered as a journalist. So this builds on our facts-to-fiction work with the Hawthorne story.
If you’re tempted to read more about Glaspell, be careful that you don’t accidentally come across a spoiler for the story we’re reading. You may want to wait to read her bio. Because if you don’t know the story, you’re going to want to enjoy the plot twists for the first time.
Looking forward to next time. Until then, happy writing!
