Stranger than fiction…

[AlexBailey]

As Tom Clancy said, “The difference between reality and fiction? Fiction has to make sense.”


I’ve got several stories in the works that have been anchored down by ‘realism’ based writer’s block. Parts of my stories are crazy fun fantasy while others are largely inspired by real events from my own life and friends’ stories, many of which span abuse, gender ambiguity, and pan-sexuality.

A recent reviewer let me know that she was uncomfortable with some aspects of my story that crossed the believabity line for her, including some that are nearly verbatim from life. I fully understand her perspective and had anticipated that some readers would agree, yet I wanted to tell a fun romp of fantasy fiction mixed with some serious issues. Thanks to the feedback I received, my next story will adhere more closely to credulity.

With this perspective I now look back on my actual life from an outsiders view and realize that a lot of it would not pass the realism smell test for fictional writing. Some is because of how I was a male who lived as a lesbian, or because of my close proximity to dirt poor and filthy wealth including knowing several politicians and celebrities I grew up with, or some of the other bat-shit crazy things I’ve experienced in my +50 years.


What sort of things have some of you Lit authors experienced IRL that you have struggled trying to make sound plausible in your fictional universe?

 

[ElectricBlue]

What sort of things have some of you Lit authors experienced IRL that you have struggled trying to make sound plausible in your fictional universe?

I have this writer's theory that readers will suspend disbelief if somewhere in every story there's a nugget of absolute truth. It might just be a sentence, a scene, but if it's true, that truth permeates the rest of the story, however far-fetched and fantastic. It works, in that I've several stories with completely fictional characters, where readers have commented, "Thank you both for sharing" - they've clearly thought the stories were autobiographical.

The problem you have, I think (having read some of your work and your various posts), is that your truths are more unusual and complex than most folk can even imagine, so they doubt your tales can be true. That's their flaw though, not yours.

My writer's trick is to write things that aren't true, but to pretend that they are. Your trick, maybe, is to write things that are true, but pretend they're not. I wonder if that would work?

 

[SimonDoom]

My sense is that real life is messy and episodic. I think there's a principle in fiction that you can get your readership to suspend disbelief about just about anything, once, if you do it artfully. But if your life story is full of random improbable occurrences, then it won't work as a story. It's better to create independent stories that are each based upon one weird thing than to try to tell a story based on a life full of weird things.

 

[jaF0]

Realism sucks. In Fiction, you can make everybody happy, get along, do things together and enjoy it with little if any conflict or hardship.

If readers don't like it, fuck'em.

 

[KeithD]

If a reader says something is unbelievable in one of my stories, they invariably have picked out the true occurrence that inspired doing the story to begin with.

 

[AlexBailey]

The problem you have, I think (having read some of your work and your various posts), is that your truths are more unusual and complex than most folk can even imagine, so they doubt your tales can be true. That's their flaw though, not yours.

Thanks, I totally caught that. I really appreciated hearing everyone’s perspectives and will consider it in my future writings.

I was hoping to hear some other authors about dealing with their too-strange for fiction stuff.

 

[XerXesXu]

As Tom Clancy said, “The difference between reality and fiction? Fiction has to make sense.”
....

A recent reviewer let me know that she was uncomfortable with some aspects of my story that crossed the believabity line for her, including some that are nearly verbatim from life. I fully understand her perspective and had anticipated that some readers would agree, yet I wanted to tell a fun romp of fantasy fiction mixed with some serious issues. Thanks to the feedback I received, my next story will adhere more closely to credulity.

...

With this perspective I now look back on my actual life from an outsiders view and realize that a lot of it would not pass the realism smell test for fictional writing.

....

What sort of things have some of you Lit authors experienced IRL that you have struggled trying to make sound plausible in your fictional universe?

About 15 years ago I started writing about serious issues - of interest to me - but found it all rather dull and journalistic, so I restructured and re-ordered reality as a story, with a story arc. Once you do that you can embellish and exaggerate to entertain, yet rely on the readers’ suspension of disbelief. They will swallow the incredible whole, as in science fiction, but would find reality very challenging.

 

[SamScribble]

Some years ago, I had an editor who used to say: ‘If you want to tell the truth, tell it as a story. People like stories. They’re often not so keen on the truth.’

 

[TadOverdon]

There's an old saying that just because it happened isn't an excuse for putting it in a story.

 

[TxRad]

There's an old saying that just because it happened isn't an excuse for putting it in a story.

Does that still apply if you have the pictures to prove it?

 

[Rustyoznail]

From a Lit story perspective, I've lived a dull middle class life.

Outside of that, there's a couple of tales that are definitely stranger than fiction.

 

[HeyAll]

Years ago there was that big incident in Hawaii where someone accidentally triggered a balistic missile alarm and people thought they were going to get nuked.

Within a month I made that into a brother/sister incest story.

There were several comments about how timely the story was and the humor.

One person said it was unrealistic.

 

[AlexBailey]

Years ago there was that big incident in Hawaii where someone accidentally triggered a balistic missile alarm and people thought they were going to get nuked.

Within a month I made that into a brother/sister incest story.

There were several comments about how timely the story was and the humor.

One person said it was unrealistic.

That was a crazy event.

What would you do with your last few minutes on earth if you were on an island about to be hit by a nuke? It turned out to be the happy ending - a false alarm. How many people did something in those last few minutes that they regret?

 

[TadOverdon]

From a Lit story perspective, I've lived a dull middle class life.

There are times when writing that I have to laugh at how totally vanilla my own sex experiences have been.

 

[PennameWombat]

As Tom Clancy said, “The difference between reality and fiction? Fiction has to make sense.”
<snip>
What sort of things have some of you Lit authors experienced IRL that you have struggled trying to make sound plausible in your fictional universe?

I mostly have the opposite issue when it comes to IRL. Mine is not one that provides much rich pickings for Lit stories beyond some basic scenarios.

I did in my youth (well, as a university student) find that having a girlfriend dump me to take up with a woman was difficult for people to believe… which only told me that many of the people around me had even lamer lives than me. And that the early and mid-80s were a Different Time. I had little trouble working the essentials of this into an ongoing story and no one’s ever made any comment on the point, which doesn’t surprise me at all.

There was also the story from about that same time of when someone noticed I’d arrived at a party with one young lady and left with a different one. It was nothing to me, meeting up with the second was always planned and known to the two of us and the woman I’d arrived with I’d simply given a ride to the party Turned into a bit of a gossip item for a while but the reality was incredibly lame.

So I don’t do anything really autobiographical here (modulo the above). The issue wouldn’t be disbelief it’d be yawns.

 

[Kumquatqueen]

I had a story with a bunch of research scientists. Got a complaint that the 'science is rather 90s' despite it being perfectly accurate for the time!

There's also the stories that not many Lit readers want - fetish clubs are full of people switching top and bottom roles (mostly because there's such a small supply of trusted tops), but writing about switching is 'unrealistic', 'stupid' or 'boring'...

 

[Payne_Hall]

There's also the stories that not many Lit readers want - fetish clubs are full of people switching top and bottom roles (mostly because there's such a small supply of trusted tops), but writing about switching is 'unrealistic', 'stupid' or 'boring'...

I’ve noticed this and it’s part of the reason why I have a background character in a lot of my stories that centers around a fetish club. His name is Bryan and he’s the door guard. He has a single scene so far in another character’s story where he’s actually in something happening. Other than that, I just mention him and he gets called a switch mutt. It’s about two sentences every so often in the stories.

I’m going to keep casually bringing up Bryan as a switch until it’s not shocking and it’s believable when he gets his own story. And it’s going to be romantic, darn it.

 

[Bramblethorn]

"Person has two partners [serial or parallel] who like one another and aren't consumed by jealousy" seems to be unbelievable to a lot of readers.

 

[AlexBailey]

... your truths are more unusual and complex than most folk can even imagine, so they doubt your tales can be true. That's their flaw though, not yours.

Lol.

A few other RL oddities that might seem too far fetched for some readers.


* A lot of my friends were raised here in California by hippies and other alternative groups, many of whom were born at home. (All three of my sons were home-births.) I have a friend who had no birth certificate and no official documentation of his existence until he was ninteen. His enrollment and class pictures from a private school were the most solid documentation he had.


* I've got friends who were born into various cults, including the Hari Krishnas, the Manson family, and the People's Temple.


* I have a couple of friends who are the illegitimate children of famous people, one anonymously financially supported by a famous father, another who wants nothing to do with her genetic heritage.


* I've known a bunch of girls who had a third nipple, (six different girls I can think of at the moment.) I once had a foursome with three of them, although one of them only had a scar where hers had been removed at birth. They called themselves 'the coven.'


* I've been asked to be a sperm donor by three different lesbian couples. (Didn't do it.)


*Long before it was legal, I once smoked a joint behind a concert stage with a friend and four men I didn't know. When we headed back to the front of the stage my friend told me who they were: a famous well known musician, a congressman, the local elected sheriff, and the elected District Attorney.


* A household of friends were once woken in their home by an FBI raid when they were mistakenly identified as eco-terrorists.


* I've also heard a ton of horrific stories from friends who have survived sex-trafficking, conversion therapy, and all kinds of abuse - crazy horrific stuff - most I wouldn't want to put out there in my stories.


etc....

 

[yowser]

The realistic details only really matter as to how they forward (or make) the story. Real life can be astoundingly boring if poorly narrated, breathtaking when told well. A friend of mine can make a trip to the grocery sound like an adventure, it all has to do with movement, anticipation, surprise, an arc.

Most 'realism' in Lit stories fails when the details are flat, untethered to either the plot or the character's thoughts and feelings.

 

[Kumquatqueen]

"Person has two partners [serial or parallel] who like one another and aren't consumed by jealousy" seems to be unbelievable to a lot of readers.

To be fair, that's pretty unbelievable to many people. My newest partner and I recently celebrated our 20-year anniversary. How much longer before it's not a 'phase', do you reckon?

Thing is, people simply getting on with doing whatever turns them on is a scene, not a story.

 

[Tio_Narratore]

As Tom Clancy said, “The difference between reality and fiction? Fiction has to make sense.”
...

What sort of things have some of you Lit authors experienced IRL that you have struggled trying to make sound plausible in your fictional universe?

What is plausible/"realistic" is largely a function of one's world view. If your world includes ghosts, poltergeists, and demons, for example, attributing phenomena to their activities is perfectly plausible. In a recent interview, Anderson Cooper found a QAnonist who explained Tom Hanks success as evidence of his membership in a satanic child abusing cannibal cabal. Cooper's astonishment suggests that he doesn't share that world view, and that he finds other explanations for success to be plausible.

When we look at reality, we try to make sense out of whatever happened, and to do that we rely on our assumptions about the nature of the world and how it operates. However, the real world doesn't always operate according to our view of it. Most of us believe, having learned it in high school, that the sum of the interior angles of a triangle is 180 degrees. That conclusion, however, is based on Euclidean 2-space, which is flat. We live on the surface of a sphere, and in that convexly curved 2-space, triangles all have more than 180 degrees as the sum of their internal angles. Different assumptions, different conclusions.

As a final note, the idea that "truth is stranger than fiction; fiction has to make sense" has more commonly been attributed to Samuel Clemens, though more recent writers, such as Tom Clancy, have also expressed it. The earliest written expression of it is in Lord Byron's epic satire, Don Juan, published between 1819 and 1824.

 

[RetroFan]

A big example of truth being stranger than fiction is everything that is happening in the world right now with COVID 19.

Say for example in 2017 or 2018 an author had submitted an Incest/Taboo story about a brother and sister who have to self quarantine together because of some terrible pandemic and begin to see each other in ways that siblings should not. Maybe a Loving Wives story where an extended family is stuck inside for months during lockdown due to some virus sweeping the planet, and a young guy begins an affair with his older brother's wife. Or an Exhibitionist/Voyeur story about everyone having to work from home due to a new disease worldwide, a hot girl accidentally leaves her Zoom running after a virtual meeting and some of her male colleagues get to watch she and her boyfriend making out then having sex on their couch.

No matter how hot the sex was in the story, there would no doubt have been comments about how the premise was too unrealistic for the stories to be any good. Yet just a few years later here we are.

On a smaller scale, a couple of years ago there was a news story about how a young woman tried to board a plane with a peacock as a support animal. I write humorous stories and have some pretty weird situations in some of them, such as a female character having a vegan German Shepherd dog named Rainbow (the dog is male) that wears a gay pride collar and which she takes into the bathroom with her, playing tug of war and fetch with the dog while she is sitting on the toilet. But if I wrote an amusing story about a flight which involved a passenger taking on board a peacock as a support animal, I think readers would find it just too unrealistic and out there to be funny.

 

[AlexBailey]

My son has a friend who is cis-female whose driver’s license has an M on it.

She passed her driving tests and applied for her license while still a teen and thought it was funny, so she kept it as it was. It’s made for some amusing circumstances but nothing problematic until she received notices from the selective services saying she needs to register for the military draft. Oops.

When she went to the department of motor vehicles to correct the discrepancy the clerk would not accept her birth certificate without another form of identification and told her she needs to go through the same legal process as someone who legally transitions.

When she said, “What do I have to do, pull down my pants and show you?” she was asked to leave or she would be escorted out of the building.

 

[Voboy]

Truth is, indeed, stranger than fiction.

This is why 99% of the stuff I write isn't autobiographical. Lol.