I think that I probably share an audience with Bryan, over at DeerPhD, but if any of you readers haven’t had a chance, check out some of the really thought provoking posts he’s put up lately.  They’re all worthy of consideration (and comment), but the topic that’s really got my mind going is his question about how we, as outdoor bloggers/writers, should manage our language when we write about the hunt.

It’s not a new question, especially with the surge of Political Correctness threatening honest discourse across this country (and much of the world), but it’s a good question.  How careful should we be when we write or talk about hunting?  Or should we worry about it at all?  Does it matter if our content, talk of blood and death, offends non-hunting readers?  Should we temper it, out of consideration for them?

The comments to Bryan’s posts offer a pretty good, and widespread discussion of these points, including a couple of interesting viewpoints toward both ends of the spectrum.  I don’t want to rehash the whole discussion here, but it has triggered some spin-off thoughts.  Rather than take Bryan’s blog down into my own rabbit hole (hog hole?), I figure I’ll deal with it here.  But please do go check out DeerPhD, and add your own voice to the fray. 

 Then come back, and join me as I dive into this hole…

When it comes to language, I’m totally in love with the power of words.  It’s why I love reading.  It’s why I write.  And, cliche as it is, with power comes responsibility.  As outdoor writers, a big part of our responsibility is to the hunting community.  And I think the first step toward fulfilling that responsibility is being honest.

It should probably go without saying, but when we write a hunting story or a report, we’re generally writing for other hunters.  Those are the people who are going to be most interested in our content… they are our intended audience.  So, with that in mind, WRITE for them.  Use the language that we share as hunters, and relate the experience in terms and descriptions that all of us can understand.  

Hemingway described it once, when talking about his daily writing regimen…  he would write and write until he had written “one true thing.”  Then he could call it a day, and go off to enjoy Paris, or Havana, or wherever he happened to be at the time. 

So what is “one true thing?” 

Hemingway described it as being something real, something that the reader could feel and experience, even if you’ve never actually been there.  All the other words, the fluff, the “advertising copy” was not true… only when he had written the experience itself…then he’d written a true thing.  This is why, when Nick Adams prepares to cast a fly on the river, the reader is there, reading the water and selecting the riffle to cast into, even if the reader has never held a fly rod.  This is why Santiago’s battle with the marlin hits so close to home for so many readers, even though most of us have never battled a huge fish alone, in an open boat on the Gulf Stream. 

This is the power of honest writing, and even though we can’t all be Hemingway, we can try to write “true things”. 

“So how,” you are probably not asking, “does this tie back into the discussion at Bryan’s blog? What does this have to do with self-censorship and whether we should use language that might offend non-hunters?”

And I will reply, “that’s a very good question.  Let’s explore.”

Hunting is a blood sport.  To put it in the starkest of terms, hunters are killers.  While the often quoted Ortega y Gassett aphorism, “One does not hunt in order to kill, one kills in order to have hunted,” holds true, the bottom line is that our aim, when we go hunting, is to kill animals. 

I think I’ve made that point, so moving along…

When we write about hunting, we write about the effort, successful or not, to kill animals.  We are writing this, usually, for a specific audience consisting of other hunters.  It’s easy to share the experience with them, because they understand both the words that we’ve written as well as the words that we haven’t written.  This is key, and I’ll get back to it in a second…

But we must also be aware that not all of our readers are hunters.  They are the “unintended audience”, and they’re the ones who make things a little tricky for some writers. 

Non-hunters can relate to the beauty of the woods on a frosty morning.  They can connect to a description of the smell of pine trees on a cool evening, and even to the excitement of seeing an animal.  If you have written it well, your unintended audience can come along with you as you clamber over deadfall, slog through swamps, or ride the wind in a treetop perch. 

But the thing that sets them apart from the hunters, our intended audience, is the decision to kill…to pull the trigger or release the string.  They’ve never done it, and have likely never even considered it.  The non-hunter does not… cannot… understand the second-guessing, the internal debate, even the remorse and sadness that a hunter experiences at the crucial moment. 

Because the non-hunter does not know these feelings, he will try to fill in the gap with emotions from his own experience.  But the fact is, there is no other experience that can compare with making the decision to kill.  It’s a complex rush of emotion and logic that is impossible to describe to another hunter, much less to someone who’s never experienced it.   The non-hunter must fall back on what he knows and has been taught… and that is that killing is bad.  It’s cruel, harsh, and so it must require a hard heart and a cold soul.

It’s the eternal gap between hunter and non-hunter, and as writers part of our job should be to help bridge that gap.  We can’t fill it in for them, we can only try to help them across. 

But before we get too far down that road, and start to become apologists for our sport, let’s not forget our primary goal here.  We’re writing for hunters.  This other person, this non-hunter, wasn’t really invited to our camp.  He just pulled up a stump beside our fire, but; being the hospitable folks we are, we’ll pour him a cup and let him warm his hands if he’d like.

Sorry.  I jumped off on a metaphor there and had to ride it for a minute…

Where I was going was that we can’t reconcile killing for the non-killers.  But we shouldn’t try to hide it either.   That would be dishonest.  Resorting to euphemisms (harvest vs. kill) or removing graphic language dilutes the truth of our writing, and in the end serves no positive end.  It doesn’t change the facts of hunting.  It only obscures them.

That’s OK, though, because as I said, we’re not writing for them.  However, we should consider those non-hunters when we write.  How and why? 

Well, first of all, it behooves us to consider the impression we make on non-hunters, because those are the impressions they will then have of all hunters.  Think of it like this. 

When you write, you’re painting a picture.  Like a snapshot, or more accurately I suppose, like a short video clip, your words capture a short period of time.  Most likely, you’re trying to relate as much information about that period of time to your audience.  If you did it right, the reader will be there with you… will experience what you saw, heard, smelled, and felt.  You will have written a “true thing.” 

Even so, there’s a lot you’ve probably left out… in the interest of brevity, or just because you don’t think the details are all that critical.  You know that other hunters, having been in similar situations before, can fill in the shady areas with their own experience. 

I recently read a post on the Jesse’s Hunting and Outdoors forum from a guy I respect.  He wrote about how he and his 11 year-old grandson were coming home from a quail hunt, and spotted a deer in the bushes.  In his description, the deer was barely visible… a touch of hair here, a dark spot there… 

His grandson, excited by the opportunity encouraged him to shoot the deer, assuring him that it was a legal (forked horn) buck.  Despite his misgivings at taking the word of an excited 11 year old, he shot the deer… still unsure of its sex, and from the description he had given, unsure even of the size or position of the animal.  When he walked over to the brush to find it, thinking he’d probably missed, the deer rolled down the hill and onto the road.  It was a legal buck.

Now, even as hunters, this story leaves a lot to the imagination.  Many of the hunters on the site jumped his case immediately for shooting without clearly identifying his target.  I must say I agreed with their criticism, but this guy simply doesn’t strike me as the type to shoot blindly into the brush. 

As it turns out, although the sex of the deer was in question, the shot was actually much safer and well chosen than it sounded.  The details that he had left out included the fact that they watched the deer for several minutes before even loading the gun, and that he had a much better view of the deer and the background before he took the shot. 

Think about it.  If the missing details stirred up a bunch of hunters like that, imagine the impact it would have on a non-hunter…someone who has probably read more than one account of “hunters” shooting blindly into the brush, only to kill another hunter.  The stereotype is reinforced, and another anti-hunting image is perpetuated.   

So how to deal with that? 

Read what you’ve written.  How do you, or how does the hunter in your story, come off?  Like an unfeeling, cold-blooded killer?  Or like a hunter, attuned to nature and connected in a compassionate way?  Do the actions portrayed in the story illustrate your sense of ethics, or are you just another person with a gun or bow, out killing things? 

You have to consider appearances.  This IS a picture, after all… and for a picture, appearance really is everything. 

Now, and this is critical… this doesn’t mean to leave out the bad stuff.  Wounded and lost animals, missed shots, mistakes or errors of judgement…  these are all real things.  Pretending like they don’t happen is not honest.  They do happen, and none of us is perfect.  But for most of us, when a mistake is made, a lesson is learned.  Share that lesson.  Show that you are a dynamic character in your story, and that a hunter can learn and grow. 

It’s not always so important which words we use.  Sometimes the more critical thing is the words we leave out. 

 …Which brings us to the second reason to consider your unintended audience when you’re writing. 

Remembering to paint the whole picture makes us better writers.  Learning to manage detail… appropriate detail… is what improving our writing is all about. 

You can tell the whole story without writing a novel (like this post is becoming).  Hemingway put us in that boat with Santiago in something like 60 pages.  Maybe that’s a little extreme for most of us, but I think you get the idea. 

Bottom line…. be honest.  Write the truth, and don’t worry about “political correctness” when you do it.  If you include detail that might be troubling to someone who doesn’t hunt, then consider why it’s in there.  If it is important to the story, leave it.  Consider the unintended audience, but never, ever forget your intended audience.  They’re why you’re there.

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