“All Fiction is lying. Our job, as authors, is to make the lie plausible.” – Eric Swedin
I thought that this quote would be a good way to start out this blog post.As I read more and get older, I’ve learned about what works in writing and what doesn’t by reading and listening to what goes on in stories. Let me give some background information to both the title and the quote.
The quote originates from the Life, The Universe & Everything conference held in February earlier this year at BYU. It was the first day of the conference, and we were only three hours in to the 12-hour workshop marathon that day, so we weren’t exhausted and brainless just yet. Julie Wright, Eric Swedin, and two other authors were on a panel, named “Poetic License vs. Authorial Obligation.”
I think I learned the most at that workshop than I did at any of the others that day.
Eric talked about an author who wrote a lot of books and had shown him his current manuscript. In the climax of that other author’s novel, Hoover Dam breaks and floods Las Vegas, Nevada.
For Mr. Swedin, this was his biggest problem. “Aren’t dam’s supposed to be built in the lowest place possible, so that flooding doesn’t happen?”
“You’re probably right.” The other author said. “But it’s okay. No one else will know.” And he walked off, needing to go somewhere else.
Eric looked it up later and Hoover Dam is about 8 hundred feet below Las Vegas, and there’s no way that the city could possibly be flooded, even if the dam broke. That author wasn’t giving the reader the ability to think for his or herself; and making them believe the wrong type of lie.
It was about that time that Eric said his quote. In response to that, Julie Wright talked about a scene she wrote for one of her stories that had a character walking either in or by a volcano in Norway, and saw flowing lava streams. Then Julie decided to check out online if there were actually actives volcanoes in Norway.
There wasn’t.
So poor Julie had to go through the awkward and sometimes painful process of removing something from a story. All because she knew that somewhere amongst the billions of humans on this planet, some of them would know that there were no volcanoes in Norway.
A little research goes a long way. It prevents you from looking like an incompetent fool in your writing.
Here’s an example that I saw from my own experiences. It’s not the best of examples, but I can give you firsthand proof of why your authorial credibility is important to keep.
In an episode of Phineas and Ferb I watched during one of my little sister’s Netflix Phineas and Ferb Marathon, Candace is trying to figure out when Jeremy would call her, because he said he’d call her SOON. So she figures out some sort of mathematical equation to figure out when he would call. So when he doesn’t call and it’s already the afternoon, she decides to call him on her cell phone.
At the exact same moment she calls, Jeremy presses send on his call, and they both receive busy signals because they both called each other simultaneously. Over and over again.
This does not happen in real life, because I have actually called my boyfriend at the same time he calls me, and it doesn’t give an immediate busy signal. The phone beeps and says that there is a call waiting, and it’s from the person you are calling. You then answer and everything is fine. So you don’t flip out because you think that your boyfriend is busy talking to someone else.
The producers of that show probably thought that no one would notice the mistake, but I did. And somewhere, someone will notice your mistake if you don’t get your realistic fiction right.
If you write in a world that is not our own, you have a sense of freedom that those bound by Earth do not have. However, once you make your rules, you have to stick with them.
For example, if you’re characters live underground during the day, and the reason behind that is because the atmosphere heats up too high that anyone that stays up above in the daytime gets killed do to overheating you cannot have a character go up in the day, without any sort of exception, and live. That is breaking your rules, and then no one will trust you to keep order in your fiction.
I must admit, there is too much of a good thing when it comes to research. If you overbear your reader with information, they’ll feel like they are reading a textbook instead of a fiction novel.
Here’s my experience with the concept of too much: I’ll hide the author’s name because honestly, this author was a late bloomer. I’ll refer to them as S/he and Her/his, to hide his or her gender. Because I don’t want to tarnish her/his later and better works.
A friend of mine recommended this author to me. The first book, she explained was about “a girl with cancer” so I did my research about this author. S/he liked to write tragedies revolving around cancer and other fatally diseased patients, along with the occasional political disease-free story that focuses on a problem in our society that s/he did research on and realized the deep dark secret behind it.
I read this first book, which is in a mini series that shows the ups and downs of her/his protagonist’s life, starting her from day one as a cancer patient. It was written in the 1980s, and explained exactly how a cancer patient was treated with chemo in that time. Which is really nice and everything, but it honestly felt like a textbook. Her/his character was a plastic caste off of a boring mold. The cancer girl was just observing the world around her, and explaining how the life of a patient was. It was incredibly plot driven, and I didn’t like the book much, except that it educated me so that when my aunt contracted cancer, I understood what she was about to go through.
Granted, over the last twenty years, the author of the book has grown amazingly. Now, you might actually cry when/if the character or fellow patient friends dies from cancer, or other diseases that s/he writes to give to them. S/he decided to focus on the character and developing them, instead of the disease or plot moving them forward.
The goal of the best writer, is to find a happy medium between the two extremes of no research and too much of it. The only one that can define that for you is yourself, through your own experiences.
I wasn’t exactly able to cover everything I wanted, but I’m being booted off.
I wish my fellow authors the best of luck in their writing endeavors, and welcome to my blog! Expect more writing-based observations from this teenage girl’s head as I continue doing it.
P.S. The YA Scavenger Hunt was today. I didn’t want to talk about it as my first post (plus I wanted to see if I won anything), so I’ll post it sometime tomorrow afternoon. I swear on my credibility as a writer. :) Just an FYI, it was freaking awesome.
