7 Day Story Writing Challenges: A Brief Guide to Writing Adventure Fiction

Sep 16

This guide is all about adventure fiction. What it is, tips for writing it, and a list of adventure stories you can read online for free. We also discuss the difficulties, limitations, and pitfalls of writing in this genre. This guide is a must-read for anyone assigned adventure fiction in a 7 Day Story Writing Challenge, or for anyone wanting to explore new or unfamiliar literary genres!

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What is Adventure Fiction?

For the purposes of our 7 Day Story Writing Challenges, we’re defining adventure as a story in which your character or characters have some kind of thrilling experience. We think for a story to be an adventure story, it usually requires that the plot takes your characters away from their normal lives. Both figuratively and geographically. The conflict in the story usually centres around the characters needing to find something or someone, even if the thing they need to find is their way back home.

Difficulties, Limitations and Pitfalls of This Genre

We think the difficulty of this genre will be writing a complete adventure in only 2,000 words without it feeling like a tale being told, instead of a story you can fully immerse your readers in. There is quite a simple way to avoid this. You don’t have to begin your story before the adventure begins, you can instead focus on one episode within a greater adventure.

Top Tips for This Genre

If you do decide to tell your adventure story from start to finish, we highly recommend you use a kind of ‘zooming in, zooming out’ approach. Stories that try to cover too much narrative ground have a kind of zoomed out, birds-eye feel to them and we never really feel like we’re actually in the story as we read them. To get around this, you can choose certain moments in your story where you zoom right in and give some highly intricate detail. For example, one part of your adventure story might summarise a part of a journey or the characters moving from one situation to another. Of course, you could cut this out entirely if nothing happens during this part of the story. There’s nothing wrong with cutting parts of your story out, making it more episodic. If interesting things do happen during this part of the story, but you need to describe the events quickly, you can stop it feeling like a summary of events and make it feel more literary by adding one piece of specific, sensory detail. For example, if this part of your story sees your characters travelling across a snowy landscape, climbing mountains, fighting monsters, you can stop to give us a brief description of the crunch of a skull smashed by a blunt object or describe the pattern of blood on snow. These descriptions only need to be a sentence or two in length and they can be pretty spaced out throughout the text. Moments like this don’t use too many words, meaning you can still cover a lot of narrative ground, but they stop it feeling like your story is being told to us from some great height and at an emotional distance.

If you don’t feel like writing a story with ships and pirates, soldiers and battles, sword fights, buried treasure, or any other elements of a classic adventure story, then don’t. Your story can be about any kind of adventure you want! After all, getting into your house and up to bed without making any noise is an adventure, if you’re drunk. ‘The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared’ is an adventure story about a man who escapes his retirement home. Think outside the box when coming up with your own adventure story!