Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Ask The Gunwriters where are the stories

Whee shave the stories, of likes of
Hill, Page and McIntosh gone?

The words transcribed so we readers may feel the rush of a grouse flushed, or the feel of stinging rain and biting wind.
So many articles once allowed us to taste the bourbon and smell the woodsmoke through words. Now, it seems like mere clinical data and advertising

Books. Buy books. Don't see much if what you describe in the magazines published today, but there are scads of collections by the great outdoor writers of yesterday (and some of today) as well as "best of" collections from the sporting magazines featuring multiple writers. A little online scouting will fix you up.

Another great way to find good stuff is to hit the used book stores and indoor flea markets and antique stores. I can spend hours thumbing through shelves of old books looking for nuggets.

Look for some old Jack O'Connor or Robert Ruark books ..Amazon or used book stores >>Horn of the Hunter is one of the best..Ossa and Martin Johnson's "I married Adventure" is fantastic....Good Alaska book is about Hal Waugh ands his outfitting

Books you say?. I'll be dsmbed.


Maybe, just maybe I was referring to most current writers. Their writings seem so clinical and without soul. Essentially 400 word product advertisements

The Big 3 hunting a fishing magazines....Outdoor Life, Field and Stream, and Sports Afield, had some great outdoor writers who regularly wrote for them. But that was a long time ago. I was a regular reader of them, and grew up reading those stories. It all changed as America changed, and we as sportsman changed. At one time, small game was the bread and butter of hunting stories.......quail, ducks, grouse, rabbits, doves, squirrels.....because that's what we mostly hunted. Then came the whitetail deer explosion, and that became the focus of the writers and the magazines.

Todays writers are more about pushing the products of their sponsors than they are anything else.

I have been accumulating annual collections of old American Rifleman magazines. They offer extensive article. Just finished a 2 part, written by WDM Bell himself, talking about his rifles and hunts. There are long articles by Townsend Whelen, Nash Buckingham, Elmer Keith, Pope, Neidner, etc. Lots of hunting tales and lots of technical stuff.
Guessing the editors of decades gone by, were interested in stories and details without the space limitations of todays rags.
The magazines used to have considerably more pages each month than we seem to see in todays infomercials.
I agree with the earlier comments that books are the way to go today.
Boddington and Barsness are capable of pretty good tale telling, but magazine editors don't seem to give them the space, so...get their books.

Don't be dsmbed, sounds painful.

Current writers are trying to make a living, therefore write what they're told to write. They're told by editors who are told by the advertising department.

Successful Hunter is full of stories, but it ain't Ruark or Corbett; the writers are definitely second stringers. The last Sporting Classics I bought was okay.

Perhaps the problem lies in today's affluence. Back when magazines carried more stories fewer readers could afford the types of hunts that were written about and liked to be able to experience them vicariously. Today, many more readers can afford to go on such hunts themselves, making the audience for hunting stories smaller.

Younger hunters-gun enthusiasts are obsessed with max velocity, thousand yard shots, tactical rifles, black rifles, etc. They don’t care about the joy of being in the woods, hearing the birds, watching the squirrels, hearing the geese or sandhill cranes overhead migrating south. They gauge the success of their hunts by the game they kill and volume of it.

Writers by necessity write about what is in style to stay employed.

About half the guys on my lease are older, we hunt with Savage 99’s, Kleinguenthers, old model 70’s, the young boys are plastic stock kind of people. They don’t know the wonder of a Pre-64 model 70.

Sporting Classics magazine.....excellent writing by their staff.

Buy some Barseness Books. That man knows how to write when he has some editorial leash.

He wrote "A Caribou letter" 10 years or so ago in a Wolfe publication, he was fully able to capture the "why" of caribou hunting.

If not for punitive exchange rate and shipping costs I would have all his books.

Well, walks like a duck, quacks like a duck. Must be a duck. I'm on board with your observation.








Take care, Willie

GRF,

Thanks!

There are several reasons stories left the magazines.

When I started writing for a living in the 1970's, hunting and fishing stories were in far more demand. In fact in the late 1970's a new magazine named Gray's Sporting Journal appeared, almost entirely filled with stories, along with story-telling paintings and photographs. Field & Stream and Sports Afield regularly published such stories as well; the only one of the "Big Three" that didn't was Outdoor Life, because it had carved out a niche as a nuts & bolts how-to magazine.

My first two magazine sales were stories, the first on a day spent flyfishing in the Wyoming winter, published by Sports Illustrated (back then it still ran "blood sports" articles). The second was to Gray's, an elk hunting tale. From then through about 1990, outdoor story-telling was the majority of my living, and I wrote stories not only for SI, Gray's, F&S and SA but several other magazines.

But around 1990 the market started changing. Up until then, magazines tried to attract readers, and if they attracted enough readers, advertisers were happy to buy ads because they'd be seen by so many readers. The bigger outdoor magazines, such as Field & Stream, were selling well over a million copies a month, so also sold a lot of advertising, and not just for outdoor gear but beer, hard liquor, cigarettes and cars.

But more hunters and anglers became focused on specific game and fish, and many hunters also focused on firearms. So-called "vertical" magazines, with a more narrow focus such as hunting rifles, fishing tackle, largemouth bass or whitetailed deer appeared, taking some "market share" from the general-interest outdoor magazines that covered a little of everything.

Second, a company in New York City that published such smaller, more specialized magazines figured out that advertisers would pay to have "product placement" in the articles. This resulted in hunting stories that started something like this: "In the pre-dawn darkness I slid out of my Super Soft sleeping bag, slipped into my Stealth Camo clothing and Ridgerunner boots, and scarfed down a High Energy Breakfast Bar before grabbing my Remington 700 BDL 7mm Remington Magnum and stepping out of the High Line Tent."

The bigger magazines resisted this trend, but eventually couldn't entirely because the vertical magazines were taking away readers and advertisers. One of the interesting things about this era is that most hunting and fishing gear manufacturers couldn't afford to advertise in the big magazines, because the ads were so expensive--the reason many ads were for other products, especially whiskey and tobacco. Those ads were called "brown money," but eventually ads for alcohol and tobacco started decreasing in outdoor magazines, for various reasons. But during the alcohol/cigarette/car advertising era, editorial and advertising departments in the big magazines were completely separate: The editorial department tried to attract readers, the advertising department tried sell ads, with no interaction between them.

Eventually other magazine publishers started following the lead of the product-placement publisher in New York, and over the next few years advertisers learned to EXPECT editorial coverage of their products. (Interestingly, the publishing company that started the trend went broke a couple years ago, and while they managed to sell off some of their magazines, is no longer in business.)

But the other side of the "story" story is that readers became less interested in hunting and fishing tales. Instead they wanted more how-to and gear information. This may have been partly due to TV shows, but to a certain extent it's always been true. Gray's Sporting Journal's circulation is pretty low compared to more gear-and technique oriented magazines, and even when Field & Stream regularly running stories, they published far more how-to and gear articles.

Books of hunting and fishing stories have also never sold nearly as well as how-to/gear books. Jack O'Connor's best-sellers were his rifle books, not his collections of hunting stories. Both sold well enough make a profit, but the big sellers were books like The Hunting Rifle.

The same applies to my own books. I've published two collections of hunting tales. Some of the stories were written just for the books, but others had previously appeared in various magazines, including American Hunter, Field & Stream, Gray's Sporting Journal, Sports Afield and Successful Hunter. The first collection, The Life of the Hunt, was originally published as a hardcover in 1996. Back then it won various awards, and has continued to sell all right ever since, including the present paperback edition. But my rifle books sell far better, especially The Big Book of Gun Gack. Since Gack appeared in 2015, almost as many copies have been sold as The Life of the Hunt in its 20+ years.

So yes, the magazines have changed since the 1980's. The big transition to more gear-oriented articles took place in the 1990's, which is when I started writing regularly for gun magazines, partly because the story-telling market was drying up, and partly because gun-magazine editors asked me to. But it's also because most readers prefer reading about hunting rifles than hunting.

While that was always true to a certain extent, I suspect it's become more true as the United States has become more urban. Over 80% of us now live in cities, instead of rural areas, which makes it more and more expensive and time-consuming to shoot and hunt. As a result, most hunters spend more of their time fiddling with their gear, because they can't actually go hunting very much. In way, gear-obsession is a way to "hunt" the rest of the year, because most of us actually go hunting for relatively short periods.

John. Your old column rifles and woodsmoke was one of my favorites, and while that dealt with "products" it never came across as "clinical as most other writers today

Thanks John for the history lesson. I have some hunting story books from my dad's childhood (50's) and mine (70's and 80's). And a few newer than that. Been re-reading some of them to my suburban young kids (9 and 4). The stories engage their imagination much more than articles about "best glass for the money" or "best powder burn rates for the Creed" even though I can't stop reading those

I have never shaved a story in my life......

Mr Peabodies coal train, and all the TV hunting shows, done hauled them away.

I also think the short attention spans of many of todays sportsmen plays into this. Why read when they can Google up a Youtube video and become experts in 3 minutes.
If it's stories you want, I have a stack of old Gray's Sporting Journals I'll make you a deal on.

Dang poor substitute, almost unwatchable for the most part.

I remember an article about a big wild boar named old rip, people hunted it for years down south somewhere and when they finally killed it, they found about a half pound of bullets in it. There was another one about a kid on one of his first coon hunts, he climbed way up a tree because they couldn’t get a shot at the treed coon and things got pretty scary. Another one I remember was an article about a lot of different 22 rifles, ammo, and their performance on small game. Field and stream had a monthly article titled grandpa and the kid. These, and many other articles, all from hunting magazines I read growing up in the 80’s, really fueled my imagination and helped create the person I was to become and my pursuits in life. It’s to bad a lot of kids are not able to spend the time outdoors and have the freedom many of enjoyed growing up.