100 Things You Should Know About Writing (Part 2)

41) Mixing Fantasy and Reality

Question-asker supreme MarissatheMarvelous asked me some great questions recently, so I thought today's a good day to answer one of them.

Her question: How far can you mix reality and non-reality when writing fantasy?

I'm going to take the question and run with it a bit, for two reasons:

1) The mixture of reality versus non-reality stretches much farther than just the fantasy genre.

2) The strict answer to this question is really short, so I'll be going into some technique today.

In the interests of getting started, let me start with the short answer:

When writing fantasy and other genres that fall under speculative fiction, you can get away with mixing reality and non-reality as much as you think you can get away with.

This is because a lot of things that aren't real in our reality, are real in our characters'. Readers therefore allow us to dictate what the "realities" in our books might be, which means that we can do everything from writing matriarchal societies to saying the world has four suns to saying everyone in your world is stuck more or less in the equivalent of our medieval period.

What makes any of this work is that some sort of logic has to be applied. I tend to think of these things in terms of rules. Things are the way they are in your world because of natural laws and cultural norms. Familiarize yourself with them so you know the effects of these rules every time some aspect of your story interacts with them.

For example: Make sure your magic system has rules. These can be rules of what can actually be done by magic (and how) as well as cultural aspects, such as forbidding certain types of magics even when they're technically possible.

It goes much farther than that, so generally speaking, try to think about the why behind everything in your world. Why can't your character do something? Why do your characters choose the way they do? And so on. And remember those reasons, because situations repeat in various forms, and readers do pick up on you breaking your own rules.

Another question you need to think of is How? If you're writing urban fantasy, how does the other world remain hidden? How does gravity influence your alien creatures when you're writing Science Fiction? And so on.

The idea with these questions is to ensure that your reader's disbelief remains suspended. This is done by maintaining continuity and consistency above all else.

This brings me to my other point:

Mixing reality and non-reality is a thing outside speculative fiction as well. For all genres, this mixture can be found in the details. Here are some examples that I can think of right off the top of my head:

Two characters who'll end up needing each other happening to meet each other right before the action starts. Huge coincidence that's highly unlikely in real life, yet it just works in a book.

Happily ever afters in romance. This might seem really cynical to say, but look at statistics to know that a lot of people who marry don't stay married. And yet we never see sequels to romances where the first book's couple divorced in the time in between.

The way that police officers act in stories. A lot of them would be in deep trouble for doing the things they do (if only because their actions would result in their cases being thrown out of court).

There are examples like this in any genre or subgenre that you can think of, and the reason for this is simple:

"Never let the truth get in the way of a good story." Mark Twain.

Sometimes, we as writers need to bend the truth to tell the stories we want to tell. Also, the readers of our genres have certain expectations of stories in those genres. Not living up to those expectations will harm the story more than it helps.

Obviously, there are exceptions to all this. But as a rule of thumb: Romance readers read for the happily ever after. They don't want to read about divorces and all the drama that might come afterwards. People who read mystery/thrillers want something fast-paced and exciting. In reality, crime fighting tends to be quite a lot of boring paperwork, cold cases, and anticlimactic solutions. No one wants to read that.

This is why I have to suppress my amused laughter when someone says he/she doesn't read spec fic because it's just not real. No fiction is.

There's a constant trade-off between reality and story effectiveness as we write. In whatever genre we write. Story effectiveness will win more often than not because we don't sell books by being boring. If our readers wanted pure reality, they would have bought non-fiction.

Pointed example: You're reading this book because you want some truths or to somehow gain knowledge about writing. You'll never get that by reading a bunch of fiction books about writers. Think I'm kidding? Try reading fictional stories about writers while knowing how to write, and try not to get your eyes stuck in the back of your skull from rolling them too much.

Writers gloss over the truth if it would slow pacing too much. (E.g. action heroes who are in pain after falling ten stories, but continue the brave fight when they should in fact be dead.)

Writers adapt the truth to make it suit the story. (Good example of this is Braveheart. The Princess of Wales was eight when Wallace was alive.)

Writers leave the truth out entirely because it would in any way inconvenience a story. (In historical fiction, this runs the gamut from bad hygiene to various real but squicky illnesses to political and cultural norms that ruin our "image" of what those times were like.)

In short, there's nothing wrong with changing the realities of your stories to suit them. Just keep in mind the effect those changes might have on your reader. And try to do your research so you can consistently make those changes. In other words, know what you're changing and why. This isn't necessarily so much for your story, but it does prevent readers from getting angry at you.

As always, please feel free to ask questions about this section or just writing in general. If your question inspires a new section, I'll dedicate that section to you. Please don't forget to vote if you found this section useful.

Coming up in 100 Things:

Using Flashbacks (MarissatheMarvelous)

Plot vs Story (MissAuthorGrazelle)