FROM THE EDITOR'S MAW KEEPING IT REAL
by Quentin Long
©2007 Quentin Long

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   I’ve said it before, but it bears repeating: Nobody really wants to read ‘realistic’ fiction.
   That may strike you as a presumptuous (if not downright arrogant) statement. But if you think a bit, you’ll see that it is true, pretty much by definition. After all, we say a thing is ‘realistic’ when it’s in more-or-less strict conformance with Reality, and what can possibly be less in-conformance-with-Reality than a made-up story? Show me a person who really does prefer his reading material to be 100%, USDA Choice ‘realistic’, and I’ll show you someone whose need for drama can be fully satisfied by the front page of his local newspaper!
   Why, then, do so many readers say they like to read ‘realistic’ fiction?
   What’s going on here? Are all those people lying, or what? Perhaps—but for my money, the true explanation for this puzzle falls into the ‘or what’ category. Specifically, I think that what people really want to see in their fiction is internal consistency—they want to believe that the whole fictional construct hangs together nicely, and that there aren’t any glaring contradictions in the story-world.
   Okay, but then how come everybody makes noise about ‘realism’, and ‘consistency’ is basically an afterthought, when it gets mentioned at all? That’s easy: The real world—the physical universe that you and I inhabit, read books in, and go to work in—is internally consistent, end of discussion. There are no glitches in Reality; just an occasional piece of Reality that we didn’t understand as well as we thought we did. And more often than not, we do understand whatever-it-was after we study it a while. Thus, anything that’s ‘realistic’ is automatically internally consistent. And that, in turn, is how come people talk about the former when they mean the latter.
   Interestingly, the ‘internal consistency’ deal is why writing isn’t as easy as it looks. Sure, as an author you can make up any-damn-thing you feel like for your story… but the instant you make it up, you’re stuck with it. Once you’ve decided that Character X is a female Lithuanian bartender, you can’t just turn around and use your auctorial fiat to declare that Character X is a male bookie from the South Bronx. Once you’ve established that Sir Fred is lethally competent with his misericorde, your readers will be annoyed if Sir Fred’s misericorde skill mysteriously deserts him one fine paragraph. And so on, and so forth.
   It’s like a certain hard-luck superhero says: ‘With great power comes great responsibility.’ Power doesn’t come any greater than ex nihilo creation at will (which is basically what any author has, with respect to the story they’re writing)… but it’s not necessarily as much fun as you might think, because that power comes as part of a package deal, and it’s bundled with the responsibility to Keep Track Of Exactly What You Created. Because if you don’t keep track of what you created, you're liable to accidentally contradict yourself—and whether accidental or deliberate, all contradictions are harmful to the reader’s Willing Suspension of Disbelief.
   Another reason why ‘realism’ is, in fact, not what people want in their fictional reading material: Reality doesn't have to make sense. In the Real World, thousands of people every year are killed by drunk drivers, pretty much at random; if stories really were in conformance with Reality, a certain number of protagonists would logically have to get slaughtered by drunk drivers in the first chapter, if not the first page or paragraph. But, of course, that doesn’t happen—and nobody complains about how ‘unrealistic’ that is. The take-home lesson is this: The needs of the story can and do take precedence over any purported ‘need’ for Realism. And any author forgets this, or disregards it, at peril of losing their audience.


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