Rugged men wading in pristine streams. River cowboys effortlessly lassoing beautiful brown and rainbow trout. Sun-sparkled rivers chiseling valleys into mountain ranges. This is Hollywood’s version of fly fishing. Don’t get me wrong: there’s a reason the sport is romanticized in film and television. It’s mesmerizing and set in some of the world’s most breathtaking places. No tangles for Brad Pitt, no line in trees for Kurt Russell, no hitting bottom for Kevin Costner. They make it look easy (not to mention very male and white). But the reality—for me, at least—is that fly fishing is really, really hard.
I may have married an expert and been guided by some of the best, but I’m still what might be charitably called an amateur. The last time I went fly fishing I got stung in the eye by a wasp just as we were about to go out on the water, which had me convinced the fishing gods were sending me a message that I didn’t belong there, that I should quit while I was still barely ahead. But I went out on the water and caught nothing as my swollen face expanded. I’ve discovered that writing a novel inflicts similar harm, like the type of pain you might feel if a wasp stung you in the eye. Until, of course, you get it right and then that pain transforms into something beautiful.
Casting a fly rod, much like writing a sentence, is foundational and requires a blend of technical skill and style.
Fly fishing is ostensibly about trickery—doing everything you can to trick the fish into believing your fly, that feathered, hackled bait on your hook, is real. To achieve the appearance of authenticity out on the water every detail matters: the design of the fly, the cast, your line, and your drift. Likewise, novelists aim for verisimilitude—making the work believable through dialogue, setting, time, character development, movement, gestures, etc.
Casting a fly rod, much like writing a sentence, is foundational and requires a blend of technical skill and style. Timing is critical when casting—the line needs time to straighten out behind you in order to achieve its maximum weight and speed. Eventually, you adopt your own rhythm, knowing when to pause behind you, when to follow through, when to bail and try again. When executed well, the cast can be beautiful, the rod becomes an extension of the arm and the line like a lightning bolt. (My line is more like an errant paper airplane.) Writers, we too, have our own rhythm, our go-to moves. The minimalist, the non-linearist, the em-dasher, the Oxford comma diehard, the long paragrapher, the unnamed narrator apostle, the interiority maximalist, and so on. Like the fly fisher, we make our choices based on the project (or water) in front of us. In my debut novel, one of my two POV characters writes in a journal to document her controversial life. Her voice came to me first. Madeline McKnight, the titular character, has spent her professional life in male-dominated spaces that were hostile toward women and, as a result, her tone is brash, her diction can be vulgar, and she’s decidedly allergic to sentimentality. The form of the novel arrived after a few drafts and intense character development. Since much of Madeline’s life had been transactional, it made sense to me that she would put her journal entries in the form of an annual report, charting and graphing her enemy count, personal brand value, relationship statistics, and tanking survival rate.
When you “match the hatch” in fly fishing you’ve successfully identified the type of aquatic insect emerging from the water and matched it with one of your artificial flies. An effective artificial fly will successfully imitate its model in size, color, behavior, and stage of life. So, for example, you wouldn’t fish with a streamer (a fly that submerges under water and mimics small fish) if a mayfly has just hatched on the surface. Anglers know their audience. In the early stages of drafting, I wasn’t thinking consciously of writing for an audience; however, I was very conscious of a reader calling BS on any elements of the story that didn’t seem right. I’m a former English teacher—Wall Street and the financial world were foreign lands—so I read a lot, consulted with people who lived and breathed those systems, and did my best to get it right. Writers cast their work out into the world and need to brace themselves for the feedback.
While our accessories are entirely different, the fly fisher and the writer must have patience and stamina in order to have any chance at success.
The dead drift is a fly fishing technique that requires you to negotiate the relationship between your line and the current. You want your fly to be drifting at the same pace as the water; otherwise a drag will occur when your fly works against the current. Mending the line is when you fix the drag by flicking your line upstream to reset it. Your movement needs to be smooth—a fish will pick up on anything unnatural in the same way a reader will quickly identify inauthenticity. My novel in its early life was a dual-timeline narrative toggling between a contemporary character (Madeline McKnight) and an historical one (Hetty Green, the real-life Witch of Wall Street). As hard as I tried, I couldn’t nail down Hetty’s voice. In fact, my initial portrait of her seemed to support the very characterization I was trying to dismantle—that she was mean, miserable, and spoke exclusively in folksy aphorisms. So I mended my lines: I cut out her POV, nixed the subsequent 100 pages, and had Madeline present Hetty to the reader in a more nuanced form.
Reading the water is an essential skill in fly fishing. You need to be able to differentiate sections of the water, identify travel lanes and seams so that you can find the fish. You’ve got to parse out false alarms like rocks or ripples from a real nip from a fish. Same goes for plotting a novel. In an early draft of the book, I had started the story about a month later than when it currently begins. One of my workshop teachers, a writer I deeply admire and trust, thought it was critical that I show the “request moment,” a term/device he learned from Charles Baxter. In other words, I should show how my two MCs got into this mess in the first place. The novel now starts with Madeline’s line analysis of the email she sent to her estranged goddaughter, anxiously waiting for a response to her bizarre request.
Fly fishing folks love their gear. They’ve got their waders and boots, vests and chest packs, fly boxes and clippers. Writers are particular about our stuff, too—we’ve got special pens and notebooks, corkboards and notecards, white noise and playlists, writing nooks or corner cafes. While our accessories are entirely different, the fly fisher and the writer must have patience and stamina in order to have any chance at success. We require certain conditions, too: having the right lines in the right place at the right time. I’ll keep at the fly fishing thing mostly because I love being outside with my family, and there’s something wildly spiritual about wading in a river. In the meantime, I found another way to do it, perhaps more successfully: I put a rod in Madeline’s hand. Madeline wouldn’t let a wasp sting her in the eye—instead, she’d applaud its predatorial skills, then catch it, pluck its wings off, and use them as materials for her next fly.
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Madeline McKnight Signs Off by Evan Brooke is available from Atria Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster.
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