Life too strange to depict in novels?

Very often, life is too strange. I mean, who would believe that 911 call that showed up on the news the other day. A woman handcuffed her husband to the bed and then proceeded to start to BITE him bloody.

And yet he was able to (somehow) get a phone into his hand, dial and talk to the operator while screaming as she bit him.

Either it's a prank call, or some evasion of the laws of physics.

But an editor would never buy it.

I've seen many, many tragic, hysterical, or bizarre events or human choices that I'd never try to make fly in fiction. Coincidences that would really annoy and stretch a reader's imagination.

That said, I like a guy who says boink and bounces when he hits enter. There's nothing so outlandish about those little querks. Their colorful and, to my reader's eye, enjoyable. There's no way fleshing out a character with those details would make me chuck a book across the room. I'd be more likely to carry it to the cash register and buy it so I could go home and finish it.

vrabinec said:

Just a cameo because I think he's an interesting guy.

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Does he serve any purpose in the scene, or is he there just because? Cameos usually stick out like a sore thumb, but are fun if the audience can identify the person. If you're the only person that can identify your friend, you're the only one who's going to be amused by it.

Not to say that a character like that can't exist, but you're going to have to give him more depth than a bit part to make him make sense in the context of your novel. Otherwise he's just a caricature among characters.

Nicole

Yeah, someone that much of a character needs a larger part than just a cameo in a book. (Movie perhaps, but not a book.) Can you make him a secondary character with the info your MC's need?

If you want to keep him, you could make him more of a plot point than a character by having your protagonist laugh whenever s/he heard the word "boink" no matter the source. By going one step further, you can make that word become important---being a password or other critical element of the plot, and he'll become something far greater than cartoonish.

Just an idea.

Why not mix him up? So, give the Doink to his character, and then use one of his workmates for his features, and someone else for his skills. It sounds like each of these aspects that you mentioned are slightly out of the ordinary and would make interesting individual characters.

Oh, yeah, truth is stranger than fiction.

I once wrote a story about a girl graduating from high school and thinking about this boy she'd had a crush on during the past four years. I wrote it when I was graduating from high school and, in the manner of many young writers, every thought in that character's head and incident from the story were lifted directly from my own experiences and my thoughts at the time. The only thing that differed from real life was that in my story the girl's crush shows up and sweeps her off her feet (naturally--why do you think I wrote the story?).

Years later, a few people read the story and a couple of them told me, "This isn't realistic. No high school student would think like that." *le sigh*

--Q

To paraphrase Mark Twain: the difference between life and fiction is that fiction has to be believable.

What about someone's life where - Her husband leaves her, her house burns, her uncle dies, her daughter is born with CP. This is all in the same year. Is that believable???

Life is what happens, while your busy making other plans. -- John Lennon

You'd think we authors have imagination, when reality often steamrolls right over fiction.

I hold, on my website, a bloglike account of my days in programming college, which was populated by people who were very, very less than techno-knowledgeable. To a point where the majority of new students had never even seen a computer in their life (and I joined the college in 2006!)

The hilarity (and agony) that ensued was so absolutely mind-boggling that to this day, people believe I made the entire thing up.

Sometimes life IS too strange to be fiction. Imagine that. I think people need to have some "reality" in their fiction even thought life often is stranger than fiction. When it is REAL, people can say, "I can't believe it" but they will accept it since it's real. In fiction, you will lose their suspension of disbelief.

I have a friend of a friend who is a completely wacko and I often told people, if I wrote him as a character in my book, no one would believe it! And everyone would say I over-exaggerate the character. He is THAT weird in real life.

I do not find a character who says 'Boink' each time he presses enter. That is a fun way of doing things, indicates a certain type of person.
Then you turn him into a scientist and a concert pianist, and I start wondering if it'll work in a book.
Take from your friend the idiosyncrasies that suit your character in the novel, without making him a caricature.

vrabinec said:

So I decided to write a small part in my WIP for a lifelong friend. Just a cameo because I think he's an interesting guy. Flaming red hair, 300 lbs+, Likes to say "Doink" when he hits the enter button on his computer and bounces in his chair just a bit when he does it. Smart guy, helped design the landing gear on Boeing's 747 and he's a concert pianist. I had him working at NASA in my WIP, but two of my betas thought the character sounded like a cartoon character, and that "nobody acts like that". Oh well.

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Goethe is purported to have said, "Few people have the imagination for reality."

He was a pretty smart guy, and I'm inclined to believe it.

I used to work in a computing lab with a "hippie" looking fellow who was over six feet tall and wore tye-dyed shirts...but not just any tye-dyed shirts. These shirts were collared shirts (per the dress code) with the buttons removed and replaced with strap (which made the shirt look like what the Grateful Dead would wear on casual Fridays if they worked for Microsoft).

Yep. Goethe was right.

I think the problem here is the nature of bit-part or cameo characters.

Think about if you made your friend into a main character--I think he would come across as entirely believeable then.

However, you have made him a cameo character such that he is probably not having any appreciable influence on the plot but is rather a prop character, yes? In other words, you could replace him with another character entirely and the plot is not going to change.

The trouble you are having with this character coming across as 'not believeable' relates to the way readers read a book--giving a bit-part character too much personality puts them, however momentarily, above the main characters and beyond the plot--with the result the reader gets thrown out of the story.

When readers are thrown out of a story, this means they are reminded they are reading fiction. Hence they will level the accusation 'not believeable' towards whatever has caused this effect. They want to stay in the story, but have been prevented.

This is why fiction has to be 'truer' than real life--to keep readers in the story. The best writers can play with this demarcation line, and yet never cross it.

In sum: your major characters should have the quirks. Bit-part characters should aim more for blending in than standing out. (This doesn't mean a bit-player should be a cardboard character--but neither should they upstage the main characters).

loiterer said:

In sum: your major characters should have the quirks. Bit-part characters should aim more for blending in than standing out. (This doesn't mean a bit-player should be a cardboard character--but neither should they upstage the main characters).

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There you go, make your friend the MC for another story if you can't fit him in this one. lol

Cathy C said:

If you want to keep him, you could make him more of a plot point than a character by having your protagonist laugh whenever s/he heard the word "boink" no matter the source. By going one step further, you can make that word become important---being a password or other critical element of the plot, and he'll become something far greater than cartoonish.

Just an idea.

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I find this an interesting idea. But yes, life is definitely stranger than fiction. The amount of times I avoided near fatal incidents would be shocking even to the characters of Final Destination.

This funny thing happened in a writing class I was taking. We all went around the room with this one critique, and EVERYONE agreed that this one specific incident was TOTALLY unbelievable. It basically involved an airport employee doing something we all thought was totally unlikely, and the MC responding in a way that we all agreed no one would ever respond. At the end the woman who wrote it said, "That actually happened to me, and I did respond that way! So sorry it seemed unrealistic."

Also once in a short story class I had a female character drinking bourbon (which I also drink, and I am as female as they come), and this one chick in class was like, "I'm sorry, women don't drink bourbon, they just don't. Have her order a Cosmo."

Horseshoes said:

I've seen many, many tragic, hysterical, or bizarre events or human choices that I'd never try to make fly in fiction. Coincidences that would really annoy and stretch a reader's imagination.

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Nothing in life is "too strange" (too tragic, hysterical, bizarre etc.) to work in fiction. It can not work, but it can also work really well--it depends on how you write it. Even coincidences, which I agree are very hard to make work in fiction, can work IF the entire book is designed in such a way that coincidences are part of the theme. Read The House of the Spirits or The Mermaid's Chair for examples.

As for the crazy 911 call example, with the guy's wife cuffing him to the bed and biting him, that could not work in fiction, or it could work. It wouldn't work in a Realist novel or a serious intellectual novel. If you wrote like Raymond Carver, would it work? Hell no, and I sure can't see it working in a Hemingway-style novel, either. But it would work just great if Saul Bellow wrote it (check out the INSANE characters and events in Humboldt's Gift--I just love that book, it's unbelievably funny but touching too), or if John Irving wrote it (re-read The World According to Garp). Which is to say, it would work great if you wrote it like Saul Bellow or John Irving; it would work great as what I think of as "deep farce"--insanely funny scenes that are also really moving portraits of human frailty and just how frigging CRAZY we are as a species.

In other words, there is no event or character that "can't work" in fiction--but they might only work in the right kind of fiction (i.e. the genre and/or style of fiction that's right for them). Some types of characters or events are specialized: the character or event you're thinking of may only work in a magical realist novel, or a sci-fi novel, or... etc. So if beta readers are saying they don't buy a certain character, it may be that (1) the character and the story he's in aren't a good fit for each other, or (2) they are (or with a little tweaking could be) a good fit for each other, but the novel/story is not a kind that your beta readers like. For example, you could have beta readers tell you they hate a character, don't believe her, etc., but then it turns out that what's going on is you've created a romance-novel type of character, and your betas don't like romance novels, so they don't like that type of character.

In that case, you need to (1) figure out what kind of story you're really trying to write (sometimes a character may appear and drag you out of the story you think you're writing into something completely different), and then (2) make sure that you have betas who like that kind of story (otherwise the critiques they give you won't be worth much at all).

Quossum said:

Oh, yeah, truth is stranger than fiction.

I once wrote a story about a girl graduating from high school and thinking about this boy she'd had a crush on during the past four years. I wrote it when I was graduating from high school and, in the manner of many young writers, every thought in that character's head and incident from the story were lifted directly from my own experiences and my thoughts at the time. The only thing that differed from real life was that in my story the girl's crush shows up and sweeps her off her feet (naturally--why do you think I wrote the story?).

Years later, a few people read the story and a couple of them told me, "This isn't realistic. No high school student would think like that." *le sigh*
--Q

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Translation: "I wasn't that intelligent and interesting when I was in high school, therefore no one else could've been."

ideagirl said:

Translation: "I wasn't that intelligent and interesting when I was in high school, therefore no one else could've been."

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Nailed it!

LOL, I think you guys got it! ^^^ At least, that's what I'm going to tell myself.

--Q