Found Document Short Stories

I’m going to publish a series of Found Document short stories.

What is a Found Document? A found document is a story told through the form of a real document. My stories take the form of webpages, court filings, academic papers, etc. but the only requirement of the form is that it uses a real document format to tell a fictional story. This is the literary equivalent of “found footage.”

Disclaimer for all stories: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, institutions, organizations, documents, events, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. No document presented in this collection is real.

I note this because these stories will read like real documents. That’s part of the conceit. The format creates a suspension of disbelief. Documents record certain information while omitting others, creating an unreliable narrator. The reader must piece together what is really happening.

I came to this format from a few sources of inspiration:

1. Journalism. For another project, I filed a lot of Freedom of Information Act requests. This form of journalism requires sifting through pages of “found documents” to piece together a story. Sometimes the stories hidden in government documents, court filings, email chains, academic papers, etc. are scarier than any horror film.

2. AI. While experimenting with AI, I discovered that LLMs are exceptional at formatting documents, since their training data contains more real paperwork than any human has ever read. If I supply the story and creativity, it can format my ideas in a way that is indistinguishable from the real thing.

3. Filmmaking. Found footage is an established film genre. I have a background in documentary. While there are some similar literary genres, like the epistolary novel, I have not seen anyone translate the “found footage” genre into writing the same way I am, despite a found document working for all the same reasons.

I will be publishing these stories over the next several weeks. When they are done, I will collect them in a book. If you’d like to support my work, please subscribe: