Jaycee Woods

One setting I have reused in several drafted short stories is a modern man and woman alone in a state of nature. It is my hat tip to the thought experiment of the contract theorists about the origin of government.

In my stories, it becomes an exploration of: Who is she? What is her value (as an individual, not as a biological category) outside the advantages and protections of modern society?

It could be a shipwreck or a plane crash that put them into a situation of uncertain food, water, and shelter in a wilderness of unknown hostiles.

It could be an isolated cabin where she is rehabbing from addiction, or a city girl wandering abandoned by “friends” and lost in the forest until she disturbs an annoyed man who had been quietly waiting in a deer stand for his meat to prance to him.

A variant of those stories that I have had trouble finishing is when the man refuses to take care of the woman, which I tried incompletely in two shipwreck stories. Despite having zero wilderness skills, she assumes that they are going to work together to survive; however, he refuses because he recognizes that he will have to struggle twice as hard to keep both of them alive. He ends up burdened with trying to make her useful for their survival.

My favorite was a kidnapping story in which imprisoned by a frigid mountainous wilderness surrounding an isolated cabin the female lead has to come to terms with her dependence on her captor despite her freedom to walk into a dangerous unknown to survive by her own skill and wits, which were both lacking. The twist of the story is that her father had recruited her captor to cure her of being a spoiled brat, an overgrown adolescent, overprotected from reality.