...get in the way of a good story. Mark Twain
Fiction requires the suspension of disbelief. If we pick up an epic fantasy, we have no problem accepting a world of orcs, dragons, and magic. But it seems the closer the story world is to our own, the more rigid our factual expectations from the author. Years back, I was engrossed in a WW2 historical thriller about a Nazi plot to kill FDR and was especially drawn in when the assassin crept into the US through Juarez. How often does my part of the country get mentioned in any book? Then, as the assassin journeyed north, listing towns along the way, the author made the mistake of writing "Truth or Consequences." That to me was a hard stop as back then, the town was known as Hot Springs. At that point, the author lost me, though in terms of the plot, the error mattered little.
In my current work in progress--a police procedural of sorts--I try hard not to go down the rabbit hole of research, a difficult challenge when digging through police operational manuals, court records, and news articles. I want to get the details right, then I remind myself when watching a show like Bosch, I don't know what's true or made-up. Just have it sound plausible, that's all that I need. It's fiction, not a documentary.
Recently, I visited Mount Rushmore and naturally, when I returned home, I had to rewatch Alfred Hitchcock's masterpiece thriller, North by Northwest. The climax of the movie is the final chase from the Vandamm House and down the face of Abraham Lincoln. For the sake of the story, the house is located a convenient running distance to the sculpted face of the mountain. Turns out, there was never a Vandamm House or anything like that ever built on top of Mount Rushmore. Hitchcock needed this plot device, and never mind the facts, poof, there it was on the screen.
Writing fiction is a compromise. Gotta give the reader enough factual bread crumbs to keep them following the story yet not so much that you turn the narrative into a doughy mess. We're writing entertainment and so must focus on the emotional, vicarious journey that readers expect. Never let the truth get in your way.
What Arthur Conan Doyle had to say: "In short stories it has always seemed to me that so long as you produce your dramatic effect, accuracy of detail matters little. I have never striven for it and have made some bad mistakes in consequence. What matter If I can hold my readers? I claim that I may make my own conditions, and I do so. I have taken liberties in some of the Sherlock Holmes stories. I have been told, for example, that in "The Adventure of Silver Blaze," half the characters would have been in jail and the other half warned off the Turf for ever. That does not trouble me in the least when the story is admittedly a fantasy." He considered the Sherlock stories as fantastical as Star Wars. But he was rigidly accurate for his historical novels and he researched them deeply.
ReplyDeleteGreat comment. We read fiction for the emotional vicarious experience. If we want facts, we should read non-fiction.
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