It's time to talk about...

... reality and common sense

I’m afraid I drive some writers crazy.

When I read a writer’s piece for critique, I’m the one who keeps noting that objects need to be researched—they’re out of their time or location. I’m the one who steps in after a character has spoken, telling the writer: “This person wouldn’t say that.” I’m the person who, after there’s a gargantuan leap in logic by the characters, puts down the manuscript and says, “No, it doesn’t work that way.”

Gee, what are you looking for? This is a story, it’s fiction, it’s not reality.

I know. But fiction, unless you are intentionally going out to the fringe boundaries of experimental writing, needs to be consistent.

              It has to have internal consistency and behave logically 
                                   within its own framework.

I’ve critiqued writers writing science fiction or fantasy, romance, mystery, time travel.

I don’t care if all the inhabitants of a planet are legless, have a single blue eye, gills, and live in a tank where they are dependent on water, melons, and cress to live. Just don’t suddenly have their out-of-town cousin travel in on the next train walking on three legs, smoking a cigar, and using four eyes to watch me out of the back of their head. It doesn’t fit the world you built.

Writing romance? I know, love at first sight. But meeting a mysterious stranger, marrying them on the same page and going off to live in Saigon when you’re a celibate rocket scientist in the midst of a critical development is not going to work. That scientist, upon the entrance of the stranger, would more logically say, “Get out of my lab, I’m busy. Security!” If that romance is going to happen, it won’t be the way the writer wrote it the first time.

Time travel; it’s tricky. There are various types of time travel, and you have to decide what rules yours is going to follow. Does the traveler control the travel? Do they remember their own time? Can they get back? And the all-important: will anything they do in the past affect the future they left behind? Whatever rules you choose, you have to work consistently within them or readers will call foul. I certainly will.

Just as bad—not playing fair with the reader in a mystery. Mystery lovers want to solve the mystery along with the detective. Not letting them have the same clues the detective does isn’t fair. It’s fine if the detective doesn’t reveal what they’ve concluded from the clues—after all, you want that big reveal at the end. But you can’t hide the actual clues from the reader. (Although you can make them obscure.)

Yes, we’re seeking consistency and a reality within the confines of a story.

Our time travel writer has been writing Christian romance time travel for a few years. With each book she decides the mode of time travel (seldom in the characters’ control) and what rules apply. Can they move both forward and backwards in time? Can they be in two places in the same time period at once? Can they be their own grandpa or grandmaw? She makes her choices, then writes her story with her world running in a way consistent with the rules and reality of its existence.

Readers need that consistency [perhaps because it is missing in our own world?] Nothing makes a reader put down a book or throw it against a wall than a lack of consistency. It might be an issue of natural laws, or it may be a character’s interior logic, or their interaction with another character. It may be some of the other examples I’ve used. But, you have to give your readers a consistency they can rely on

The irony is we require common sense and reality from our fiction, yet we put up with the opposite in daily living. I’m not putting down creativity or exploration or even choosing alternative solutions to problems, but to run lives and make decisions, to govern, you have to have a sense of what is real and what is the most logical, common sense thing to do. Those who govern need to know the facts and consider: What does the most good for the most people?

If the people around you are not applying these principles, they may make for great entertainment, but it’s no way to run a railroad, let alone a country. Consider that people who refuse to face reality in a common sense way may be ignorant, or they may be agents of chaos, and may be creating chaos for chaos’ sake—to no good end.

The difference is, you can control your fictional world and your characters. You have to, in order to write the story you want and to have it read by your readers. Unless of course, your story is based on a agent of chaos/chaos critter of your own making, then all bets are off.

Remember: Chaos critters in the actual world are a lot harder to control or even affect. Which is why it is so important we figure out how to.