Striving for Plausibility

[dirk2024]

I wrote some stories with an absurdly improbable alpha male hero and no one said anything about improbability. I guess they were just willing to accept it. I wrote a different story about a woman who wants to leave her husband but has an infidelity clause in the prenup so she persuades her younger sister to seduce him and a bunch of comments said this was implausible. Very interesting to me.

In my opinion, either one of those topics is plausible. The world does have alpha male hero's. So I don't have an issue with that. Although in transparency, I have a WIP with one of those, so I may be biased. But I have other characters in other stories where I try to soften that image.

And I can see where a woman would recruit her sister to sleep with her husband. I guess it comes down to how you made that happen. Perhaps that's where you lost those readers.


Or what could be, is that those readers want to see themselves in that Alpha, so they easily buy into that. Then, they can't see a liklihood that a "scheme" like the sisters were using would benefit them as readers, so they denied it.

 

[dirk2024]

I wrote a different story about a woman who wants to leave her husband but has an infidelity clause in the prenup so she persuades her younger sister to seduce him and a bunch of comments said this was implausible. Very interesting to me.

Is this the story you are referring to?

Two Trade Up, Everyone Goes Down​

I notice its in the Loving Wives category, a notorious catergory for stories.

 

[big_cane_sugar]

Is this the story you are referring to?

Two Trade Up, Everyone Goes Down​

I notice its in the Loving Wives category, a notorious catergory for stories.

Yes, that's my most loved and hated story so far!

For a plausibility comparison, I wrote a story where a young movie star kills several people with his bare hands during a brawl at a strip club, then kills several other people, including a big-time Hollywood mogul whose wife and daughter he was banging, and gets away with all of it. I planned to finish off that story with him blackmailing the DA but got bored before I got that far lol

 

[StillStunned]

George MacDonald Fraser addresses this in his book The Pyrates, which not only breaks the fourth wall but tramples it into the ground and buries it in a shallow grave.

At a certain point one of the heroes, having crossed the Caribbean, arrives at exactly the same island where all the action is happening. The narrator admits that it's unlikely, and that it could have been any of a dozen other islands. "All I can say is that it would play havoc with the plot."

Logic and plausibility only have to make sense within the confines of the story. Is it a coincidence that Avilia and Sligh keep encountering each other in my series "The Rivals"? I suppose so, but without those coincidences there wouldn't be any stories. It's no worse than what happens to Percival in the Grail legends: he leaves his forest for the first time in his life, encounters the man who killed his father, then he meets an uncle who can teach him how to fight, then an uncle who can teach him manners, then the love of his life.

Is it plausible that a story's protagonist is extremely attractive/skilful/whatever? Why not, if that's what drives the story? Is McGyver a plausible character? Not really, in real life, but within the premise of the show he is. A gorgeous woman who no-one can resist? I doubt anyone like that exists in the real world, but it makes for a good story as long as the attractiveness is a tool, and not the theme.

I think that as long as you don't include too many implausible elements, most readers will go along with the story.

 

[TheLobster]

Implausible coincidences and character traits are almost always fine when they occur at the onset of the story. The further along the plot you go, the more pressure there is to keep the events realistic and plausible, within the confines already established. If you suddenly pull out a deus ex machina in the eleventh hour, readers will rightfully grumble; not so much if that’s what’s required for the story to happen in the first place.

 

[Phatfeet]

I think a lot of this involves writer knowledge. The human mind is incapable of making giant leaps in terms of unlike concepts. So the only way to make more radical concepts plausible, is to make small logical steps.

I do not write or am interested in incest either, but this illustrates my point well. To go from typical mother/son relationship to having sex would be a huge leap in the real world. As anyone knows who writes eroticism, it is not the sex scene that is so difficult, but rather writing the transition from being together to having sex that is the real challenge. With mother/son relations that is made worse.

To plausibly get that, the writer must make a whole series of baby steps so that looking back the gigantic leap was logically made. But that takes a lot of words. Its not that Lit Writers are not skilled, its more likely that few take the time to write their story with so many baby steps to get a mother to son relationship to be plausible. In other words, its not going to take something as simple as attraction to one another to break the taboo of mother/son incest. Its going to take a attraction, but also the right setting, the right previous trauma they are trying to get over, the connection they feel they need, etc. String enough of these reasons along and it becomes plausible.

But few lit writers take the time to do that. And frankly for many there is no motivation to. Its wanking material; they want to get right into their stories with hand on their shafts or fingers slipped inside their wetness. I get that, and so I don't judge, but it's the reason they are not plausible.

 

[iwatchus]

I think people sometimes complain about extraordinary events, but those are just what gets written about (usually). If you wrote a story about one day in your life, it will probably be an exceptional day, not just one like all the others (except for certain flavors of fiction that I will ignore). If you write about people buying lottery tickets, one of them is going to be a winner, despite the strong odds against that.

Per your questions:

1) How much does plausibility matter (if at all) in stories? I'd be interested in people's ideas about stories in general and/or just the stories they like to read and write.

2) If plausibility matters, what kinds of plausibility matter? Does it matter if a plane crashes into a mountain and only the two hottest passengers survive? Does it matter if a character looks like Jessica Rabbit? Does it matter if characters' emotional reactions to something like sexual betrayal seem unlikely?

3) How plausible is real life? Is truth stranger than fiction? And if so, isn't that a license for fiction to be somewhat stranger?

1) People have to be willing to go along with it. Largely, it depends on the context and category. Someone pulling out a wand and magically making their partners dick grow two inches might be fine in an SF&F story, but not many stories in Romance (unless you had warned them magic exists).

2) I think of your only two survivors being extraordinary, not implausible. I wrote a Romance (my first story there) that involved the MMC showing up on a remote island and the FMC who lived there has been dreaming of him for a decade (they barely knew each other in college). That is beyond unlikely, but I got no pushback on that at all. But I did get pushback that they fell in love too quickly (they did, as I said, it was my first romance, a 5 day slow burn).

3) Real life can be extraordinarily unlikely. But laws of physics are not broken. With enough chances, almost anything that the laws of physics allow will eventually occur. There is a legitimate view of physics multiverses includes one that there are infinite copies of each of us, having made every possible decision, every lottery ticket wins somewhere. Any two plane passengers are the love survivors somewhere.

 

[Britva415]

I'm bumping this thread because I was going to start one on the same topic. My questions are:

1) How much does plausibility matter (if at all) in stories? I'd be interested in people's ideas about stories in general and/or just the stories they like to read and write.

2) If plausibility matters, what kinds of plausibility matter? Does it matter if a plane crashes into a mountain and only the two hottest passengers survive? Does it matter if a character looks like Jessica Rabbit? Does it matter if characters' emotional reactions to something like sexual betrayal seem unlikely?

3) How plausible is real life? Is truth stranger than fiction? And if so, isn't that a license for fiction to be somewhat stranger?

You can have implausible things in a story, even wildly implausible things. The art is using those as a frame within which to write plausible and relatable stuff.

Or you could invert it. A plausible frame within which lies an implausibility can also succeed.

The plausible elements and the way the writing married the implausible element(s) to them are what can make almost any implausible element palatable to at least some readers.

If it's good enough, then, to the readers who still find it unpalatable, it becomes a mere matter of taste. Other readers who do have the taste for such a type of a story will not experience the problems of involuntary suspension of disbelief or of their immersion getting fucked up.

There isn't any yes-or-no checklist of what's okay and what isn't, regarding plausibility. Our job is to make it okay.

 

[NotWise]

To write a plausible story, I think you need to start with plausible characters and setting. Once you're got your (and your readers') feet on the ground, then the rest should follow. Your story can require events that aren't likely (not the same as implausible) because it's often unusual events that make it a story. You're characters can make unusual decisions if you've established that it's reasonable in their context, or maybe that it's an unintended mistake or accident.

 

[GuiltyCowboy]

I'm bumping this thread because I was going to start one on the same topic. My questions are:

1) How much does plausibility matter (if at all) in stories? I'd be interested in people's ideas about stories in general and/or just the stories they like to read and write.

2) If plausibility matters, what kinds of plausibility matter? Does it matter if a plane crashes into a mountain and only the two hottest passengers survive? Does it matter if a character looks like Jessica Rabbit? Does it matter if characters' emotional reactions to something like sexual betrayal seem unlikely?

3) How plausible is real life? Is truth stranger than fiction? And if so, isn't that a license for fiction to be somewhat stranger?

What draws me to erotica is deeply implausible situations being written in an almost hyper-realistic register.

Place, people, reactions, and all those little details that are the guff of life, must be realistic. The situation itself, quite the opposite. I'm basically in the Dali and Magritte school of erotica. But I'm also mostly interested in slightly unusual strokers.

 

[big_cane_sugar]

This discussion has inspired me. It's funny how much my recent stories have been affected by the discussions here. I owe all of you gratitude even if you don't approve of the results!

 

[StillStunned]

This discussion has inspired me. It's funny how much my recent stories have been affected by the discussions here. I owe all of you gratitude even if you don't approve of the results!

Writing can be a lonely hobby, especially when you write erotica. There aren't many people who you can talk to about it, so often you have to develop your skills in isolation. You often have to work things out all by yourself, unless you spend a lot of time actively analysing other people's stories.

Hanging out here, you can draw on the collective wisdom (or at least skill) of dozens of authors. Most of us are more than eager to go on and on about our writing share.