Comments on: Getting Things Write

By: The writing advice links, they are legion | Velcro City Tourist Board

The writing advice links, they are legion | Velcro City Tourist Board — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 17:28:55 +0000

[…] what to do with that story when it’s finished, hmm? Well, first you check it thoroughly: One of the best one-sentence pieces of advice about writing professionalism I got from Octavia […]

By: Kelly McCullough

Kelly McCullough — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 15:08:27 +0000

I actually find that readers (my readers at least) are most likely to find a divergence of right and believable in character actions. I have on occasion lifted character actions directly from life. When I’ve tried to keep those as close to the real events as possible my first readers tended to find them significantly less believable then when I deliberately chose to caricaturize them. I don’t think that’s an anomaly but rather a typical manifestation of the phenomena that generated the quote “truth is stranger than fiction.”

By: Jonathan Schattke

Jonathan Schattke — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 14:43:22 +0000

I think it is only in the realm of the very strange - quantum physics and severely warped spaces - where your reader’s intuitive sense of “right” is going to contradict believability. There are also severely warped situations in political/social realms, which may be a whole ‘nother bailiwick - and probably give a sharper contrast between “believable” and “right”. Things like badly planned cities with no suburbs or slums, or the incongruous existence of a completely unneeded public organization.

By: Kelly McCullough

Kelly McCullough — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 13:23:49 +0000

Well, right is usually more believable than not right, but not always. It’s valuable to make a distinction between the two if not a dichotomous one. They aren’t the same thing, though they can be.

By: Matt’s Bookosphere 6/15/08 « Enter the Octopus

Matt’s Bookosphere 6/15/08 « Enter the Octopus — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 01:38:36 +0000

[…] Mike Brotherton: “Getting Things Write.” […]

By: Mike Brotherton

Mike Brotherton — Sun, 15 Jun 2008 21:18:26 +0000

“Also, being believable is better than being right.”

Let’s avoid setting up false dichotomies that make it sound like it’s okay to get everything wrong as long as it’s believable. Following that statement to its logical conclusion, Bush can sleep well knowing he’s made really good decisions.

It also would make Star Trek Voyager writers feel empowered to push technobabble more than they already have.

If you get it right and know you’ve gotten it right, the believability will usually be there without much effort.

By: Martin Wisse

Martin Wisse — Sun, 15 Jun 2008 18:59:42 +0000

One more piece of advice: once you’ve dilligently done your research as a science fiction writer, kept everything as plausible and real as possible, accept that you will still overlook something, often something incredibly obvious you thought was not worth checking because you knew the answer.

Also, being believable is better than being right.

By: Mike Brotherton

Mike Brotherton — Sun, 15 Jun 2008 18:27:32 +0000

Chaz, you just suggested a great premise for a fantasy version of “The Cold Equations.” The eight strong men are carrying healing potions to a distant oasis, and this teenage girl stows away because she wants to visit her brother there, then you get to go into this long exploration of just how fast and how far eight men can carry the potions AND a teenage girl before everyone at the oasis dies.

I’m trying to be a little funny, but you’re right. You’ve got to know the answers to those sorts of questions, because some of your readers will, or some will be skeptical at least if you try to cover your own ignorance too much.

By: Chaz Brenchley

Chaz Brenchley — Sun, 15 Jun 2008 17:23:41 +0000

I used to write contemporary crime novels, and to be honest, I didn’t research much, because much of what I needed to know was the stuff of everyday life; I wasn’t interested in police procedure, they were much more books about criminals and victims, and I knew plenty of those.

Then I switched to writing fantasy - and you wouldn’t believe how much research it takes. It’s not in your list above, but when you’re worldbuilding, you have to get everything right, at least in terms of everything else, because if your world’s not credible, then you’ve lost the reader before the story starts.

My favourite easy example: if I’m writing contemporary crime, I know how long it takes to travel from Newcastle to Carlisle, by train or bus or car. My first fantasy novel starts with eight strong men carrying a teenage girl in a litter across a semi-desert landscape. How far can eight strong men carry a teenage girl across a semi-desert landscape in one day? Or toss a second girl into the litter, how does that affect the distance…?

Run and find out. And God bless historical recreation societies, who will do this stuff for the (apparent) pleasure of it…

By: Marie Brennan

Marie Brennan — Sun, 15 Jun 2008 16:11:30 +0000

I had a long debate on the suspension-of-disbelief thing with a friend. The X-Files movie irritated me enormously in the first five or ten minutes because of all the errors in it. People in North Texas 40,000 (or however many) years ago? We think now that might be true, but when the movie was made it was a pretty controversial proposition. People who look like Neandertals in North Texas 40 kya? Er, no. And while you can brush that off as a specialist issue, when they pan up in the modern day and show you Dallas on the horizon . . . I was in Dallas when I saw that movie. The entire auditorium started jeering. I think they must have digitally pasted Dallas into a scene shot in West Texas, because the area simply doesn’t look like that.

But that means they went to extra effort to get it wrong.

And the point I argued with my friend was, it violated the foundational promise of The X-Files. If you want me to believe this could be going on all around me and I just don’t know it, then you have an obligation to get the mundane details right. If it’s set in a blatant fantasy-world, it loses its effect; you lose the interplay between the factual truth and the plausible untruth.

Or, to put it more pragmatically: you want to eliminate anything that might kick your reader/viewer out of the story. If I’m wondering why Dallas is in the desert all of a sudden and where did its miles of suburbs go, then I’m not engaged with the story.