Realistic... But Not Too Realistic
As a reader, I always was, and still am, fairly oblivious to the behind-the-scenes magic tricks authors use. Even now that I've seen the ropes and gears, I can get swept up and forget about them. That's the magic of reading, really. You know it's not real, but you believe in it anyway. Or rather, you suspend your disbelief, as they say.
Learning the craft of writing is essentially learning how to maintain that suspension of disbelief for the reader. You can have a dragon division to the airforce or make stars explode or give someone the ability to phase through walls, yet it feels like it could be real--like those people might be out there somewhere, battling with those decisions and living with those consequences.
There's a big bag of tricks we use in writing, in how information is delivered, which things we direct attention to, even the nuts and bolts of line breaks and scene breaks. In the end, I'd say it all comes down to keeping the reader gripped. However, I've (relatively) recently come to the understanding that it's not simply a matter of making things feel realistic... there's such a thing as too realistic. The biggest culprit here is dialogue.
If you think about it, fiction isn't a transcript. If a couple is having an argument, the scene in a book is going to be more articulate, to the point, and far less messy compared to the real-life equivalent. A monologue won't be full of "um"s and repetition, a family getting ready in the morning won't involve yelling the same things at each other ten times across the house or go through the details of tooth-brushing and shoe-tying. We simplify and condense, boil the scenes down to their essence. That essence is what keeps it feeling real, but then we cut out all the fluff. Because let's face it, real life isn't that interesting minute by minute--most people don't live a story. What's interesting are the major beats and twists.
I find this a difficult topic to explain. On one hand, I'm struggling to make a conversation as realistic as possible--"No one talks like this; no one would say that"--but I'm also stopping myself short--"Does the reader really want to sit through five extra lines of them confirming details?"
Here's another example: We'll meet for dinner at 7pm. It always irritated me in movies, because I'm immediately thinking... how does she know where to meet him? They really need to say more to each other than that. But when I examined this in a scene of my own, it's actually pretty boring and redundant to have them decide on a restaurant, decide on a time, decide on who's picking up whom, and settle everything that I would normally cover in that situation. The "transcript" of a real conversation could easily be five to ten lines of exchange, where in a book you only need one or two, and the reader gets the picture.
I think it comes down to precision. Precise, concise writing keeps interest and momentum. Bloated writing--whether that's from realistic details, or unrealistic flaws like over-explaining--gets slowed down and allows the mind to wander. Though at the same time, verbose isn't necessarily bloated, as anything written by Dickens can prove. I guess it goes to show why writing is a life-long craft!
Learning the craft of writing is essentially learning how to maintain that suspension of disbelief for the reader. You can have a dragon division to the airforce or make stars explode or give someone the ability to phase through walls, yet it feels like it could be real--like those people might be out there somewhere, battling with those decisions and living with those consequences.
There's a big bag of tricks we use in writing, in how information is delivered, which things we direct attention to, even the nuts and bolts of line breaks and scene breaks. In the end, I'd say it all comes down to keeping the reader gripped. However, I've (relatively) recently come to the understanding that it's not simply a matter of making things feel realistic... there's such a thing as too realistic. The biggest culprit here is dialogue.
If you think about it, fiction isn't a transcript. If a couple is having an argument, the scene in a book is going to be more articulate, to the point, and far less messy compared to the real-life equivalent. A monologue won't be full of "um"s and repetition, a family getting ready in the morning won't involve yelling the same things at each other ten times across the house or go through the details of tooth-brushing and shoe-tying. We simplify and condense, boil the scenes down to their essence. That essence is what keeps it feeling real, but then we cut out all the fluff. Because let's face it, real life isn't that interesting minute by minute--most people don't live a story. What's interesting are the major beats and twists.
I find this a difficult topic to explain. On one hand, I'm struggling to make a conversation as realistic as possible--"No one talks like this; no one would say that"--but I'm also stopping myself short--"Does the reader really want to sit through five extra lines of them confirming details?"
Here's another example: We'll meet for dinner at 7pm. It always irritated me in movies, because I'm immediately thinking... how does she know where to meet him? They really need to say more to each other than that. But when I examined this in a scene of my own, it's actually pretty boring and redundant to have them decide on a restaurant, decide on a time, decide on who's picking up whom, and settle everything that I would normally cover in that situation. The "transcript" of a real conversation could easily be five to ten lines of exchange, where in a book you only need one or two, and the reader gets the picture.
I think it comes down to precision. Precise, concise writing keeps interest and momentum. Bloated writing--whether that's from realistic details, or unrealistic flaws like over-explaining--gets slowed down and allows the mind to wander. Though at the same time, verbose isn't necessarily bloated, as anything written by Dickens can prove. I guess it goes to show why writing is a life-long craft!
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