How much fiction is fiction?

Shadow_Ferret · Sep 6, 2006

My problem with getting things from the idea stage to paper is I have this internal fact-checker who constantly annoys me with questions like: "Is this true?" "Is this possible?" "Did this exist?" And I become paralyzed doing research trying to find real instances of my idea.

I guess my biggest problem with fiction is I've never fully understood how much of fiction is made up and how much is based on real facts. When I read a story about say Native American spirits I wonder how much research did the writer put into the story? Is the creature a real legend from Navaho myth? Are the solutions to killing it based on real myth? How much is true? How much did he make up? How much leway does your audience give you when you do just "make things up?"

Even something so obviously fictional as vampires or werewolves makes me wonder how much is truly based on legend and how much is the imagination of the writer.

For instance, to use a TV example, on Buffy, whenever they were doing occult episodes where some sort of demon was battling them. I wondered if that demon actually existed in our mythologies. I wondered if I could find the book that they were looking at in the show or if that was all hokum, made up for the story. I wonder if the spells are "real" spells from "real" archane tomes of black magic. Or is all of it was just the writer's imagination?

Some people have a problem with their internal editor futzing with things and preventing them from writing. I need permission to tell my internal fact-checker to go to H-E-double toothpicks and leave me to my writing.

StoryG27 · Sep 6, 2006

All fiction is based on fact to some extent. How much depends on what you're writing. If you're writing about real places and/or known occurrences that have happened, then yes, research is necessary. But if you have an idea and you wonder if it ever really happened, STOP researching. If you want to find similar experiences for believability, fine, but if you do too much research, you'll get bogged down, and your original idea might be suffocated by all these new facts you're gathering.

So, like many helpful people just told me here at AW, stop over thinking it and just write. And tell your internal fact-checker to ease up, at least until your first draft is done.

KatRiley · Sep 6, 2006

Maybe try changing the question from "is it real" to "is it believable". Take vampire stories as an example. While they all have some similarities, every author has created their own unique vision of what a vampire is. The question isn't whether or not long ago myths and legends support one version of a vampire or another. The question is whether or not the author has effectively "sold" you on their vision.

I think a lot also depends on the genre you're writing in. If you're writing detective novels, then you have to be careful with the facts or the readers will stop believing you. With horror/sci-fi/fantasy/paranormal/etc, I think you have a lot more latitude. Make what's in your imagination appear real to me and I'll follow along for the ride.

CaroGirl · Sep 6, 2006

Perhaps you're talking about willing suspension of disbelief. If the story is plausible and told well, the average reader rarely stops reading to wonder about the veracity of such details (you're not an average reader, remember, you're a writer).

If the story is not plausible, in that imagination and fact are not seemlessly integrated within a compelling story, the reader won't be satisfied and will begin picking apart the writer's logic.

I suspect the balance between facts and imagination in fiction varies widely among writers and genres. Some writers do an exhaustive amount of research just so no reader can point out any lapse in the facts. But sometimes imagination suffers for it and you get a flat story. On the other end of the spectrum, you get authors who make up all kinds of stuff and the reader's willing suspension of disbelief becomes a lot less willing.

I guess it's a matter of balance between facts and imagination. If you can get all the facts right and still have a great story, wonderful. If you can fill in a lot of gaps with your imagination and still manage to keep the reader in the story, equally wonderful.

MidnightMuse · Sep 6, 2006

Give your internal editor a valium. Then, when it's all warm and smiley and happy-like, start writing like crazy. You get, what, maybe 4 or 6 hours from one of mother's little helpers?

Just space those out throughout the weeks, and you'll get it written without being bothered.

If it upsets the little guy to write some mythical creature that already exists, then make one up. Create your own mythical beastie, and then create the method with which to vanquish it.

Or here's an idea - write a story wherein someone's internal editor is brutally murdered, in horrific detail. That should shut it up for a while

Shadow_Ferret · Sep 6, 2006

For instance, I'm trying to read "The Da Vinci Code" and as I read it I wonder how much is made up and how much is based on fact, legend, and conspiracy beliefs. I can never tell.

My current WIP, which is presently in beta reader stage, took me nearly 2 years to complete because as an urban fantasy I was obsessed with making sure the "magic" used was based on real magic systems, like Aleister Crowley or further back in time. That the magic circles were based on "real" magic circles.

There is a demon in it and I had to make sure my demonology was based on reality. The demon "looks" like a dragon and he is an age-old demon who is the basis for ALL dragon myths, so I had to research beliefs in dragons to make sure he fit in with the dragon myths of the region (along with other secret things that you won't know until you read it

.)

I use Atlantis (and several other "lost" civilizations) in it and I had to do research on Atlantis to see what beliefs existed about that, what "factual" material there was on it, and so on.

CaroGirl · Sep 6, 2006

First and foremost, fiction is entertainment. You have to tell a great story. I think if you do some research on your subject and fill in the gaps with your imagination, you'll rarely encounter a reader who knows so much more about it than you do that they'll call you on it.

Relax. Write.

Becky Writes · Sep 6, 2006

My internal fact checker is a bit anal, too. My WIP is set in 2001 and in one scene I had the MC talking to her father while he was watching TV. I wanted him to be flipping the channels between NASCAR and baseball (It was important to me to show this charactization of him being a sports fan). I worried myself to silly about whether he could in fact, in the month of May, be watching a baseball game and a NASCAR race on a Sunday afternoon.

Southern_girl29 · Sep 6, 2006

My problem with research isn't making sure everything is correct. I like doing research just for the sake of research. I love to dig deep into things I don't know anything about. So, I'll get caught up in doing the research and then not have time to write.

Shadow_Ferret · Sep 6, 2006

Becky Writes said:
My internal fact checker is a bit anal, too. My WIP is set in 2001 and in one scene I had the MC talking to her father while he was watching TV. I wanted him to be flipping the channels between NASCAR and baseball (It was important to me to show this charactization of him being a sports fan). I worried myself to silly about whether he could in fact, in the month of May, be watching a baseball game and a NASCAR race on a Sunday afternoon.

You know what? I would have taken that even farther and dug around to find out exactly what race and what baseball game would have been playing on that day so I could say, "He flipped between the Coca-Cola 600 and the Yankees-Red Sox game."

Zisel · Sep 6, 2006

Salman Rushdie has an essay called "'Errata': Or Unreliable Narration in Midnight’s Children," that discusses this subject. He wrote that although he intended for the narrator of Midnight’s Children (written in first person, if I remember right) to be unreliable, he still got complaints about how he—Rushdie, not the character—had mixed up facts about various deities and one said that a certain bus to a route that, in reality, it did not. People just weren’t able to separate the author from the character and, moreover, felt that Rushdie had let down those people who were reading his novels for education.

It’s not very wise to read fiction in order to collect factual information about anything other than human nature (and even then…). If you got every single fact correct—characters based on real people, events that really happened set in the locations where they really happened, the weather conditions in the Lower East Side at 2:30 on November the 3rd, 1986—then you’d be writing non-fiction.

Like CaroGirl said, entertain. If certain factual errors cause the reader to wake from the “dream,” then you’ve got a problem because the book is no longer entertaining. How precise the details have to be varies from reader to reader, though. I imagine an avid mystery reader would be annoyed if a certain kind of gun does something it’s incapable of doing, but a person who doesn’t know the first thing about guns might not even notice.

Z

Maprilynne · Sep 6, 2006

I've been reading Philippa Gregory lately (The Other boleyn Girl, specifically) and as a reader I am doing this. (Is this part historically accurate? Did this really happen? How much narrative license is taken on this part? It never ends!) And after several research trips where I discovered that everything in the book is possible, and in some cases probable, but never set in stone. So I had to give up and that and make myself enjoy the story as, "This might have been how it happened.
BTW, she's an exceptional author. I would recommend her to anyone.

Maprilynne

Becky Writes · Sep 6, 2006

Shadow_Ferret said:
You know what? I would have taken that even farther and dug around to find out exactly what race and what baseball game would have been playing on that day so I could say, "He flipped between the Coca-Cola 600 and the Yankees-Red Sox game."

If I recall correctly, it was the Coca-Cola 600.

But I didn't include those details.

kristie911 · Sep 6, 2006

Since I was a reader long before I started writing, I find I don't get bogged down with whether something could be real or not when I'm reading. Consequently, when I'm writing, I don't do a ton of research, I just try to write an engaging story and hope my readers enjoy it. I think the average reader doesn't think to much about the facts as long as they can enjoy the story.

On the other hand, if something is really "out there" it could pull the reader out of the story. So I say do enough research to keep it realistic but not so much that you're doing more research than writing.

sassandgroove · Sep 6, 2006

That's why I set my story way off into the future on another planet instead of present day earth. Of course that opens a whole other can of worms....

Tell the fact-checker to back off long enouugh to at least get the story written, sheesh. There are people, I'm sure, who would know which game/nascar race on what day, and people who know the history of demonology, or what have you, but in fiction, the tone of the story should set the level of research vs. imagination. The story should sound believable, yes, but it is fiction, not non-fiction.

jbal · Sep 6, 2006

You know, I've been running up against this myself, as I'm writing something that deals with a lot of subjects I know next to nothing about. I guess that's ill-advised, but oh well, I already started. I've been making notes as I go on what I'll need to research for the second draft, and just making up the stuff I don't know. I can always change it, but meanwhile the story keeps moving.

Shadow_Ferret · Sep 6, 2006

Some people enjoy this research stuff and I guess I do too, probably too much because it almost cripples my writing progress. My first completed manuscript took 2 years (after an 8 year hiatus) because it was a medieval epic and I was doing my damnedest to make sure that when I described the castle it was historically accurate. That the hamlets, villages, and farms were all historically and culturally accurate. That the weapons used were historically accurate. I read books on castle life, life in the dark ages, medieval times and warfare.

This in a fantasy novel set in a Europeonish world where Vikings lived right alongside the medieval peoples and right down the road were the bedoin-type Arab peoples. (Let's not even count the pirates I wanted to add.)

Scrawler · Sep 6, 2006

I have a tendency to over-research things, especially when using real places. If my characters eat at the Olive Garden, for example, I have to read the menu and "order" for them. I think this is because I am afraid to be on the receiving end of the reaction I have when I read incorrect facts.
I don't want anyone to read my novel and think, "Pfft! How stupid! The Metro Link doesn't even go to Marina del Rey!"

DamaNegra · Sep 6, 2006

For some reason, this reminds me of an anecdote that is completely factual, it happened to a very close friend of her mother. Her last names are Sordo Calva (Deaf Bald). Don't ask, last names are sometimes wonky around here.

Anyway, when her parents were dating, her mother went to a hotel, and her father called her once. The receptionist answered.
"Hello, is Miss Bald there?" asks he.
"Yes." answers the receptionist. "Who's speaking?"
"Mr. Deaf."
Obviously, the receptionist hung up on him. But it is true, and well, it wasn't his fault those where the last names they were born with.

My point is that no one would ever believe this happened, and if you make her father the MC of your novel, and have this happen in their novels, everyone who read it would go: "This is stupid!" and throw the book acorss the room, set it on fire and make the cat's sandbox its final destination (okay maybe not).

So, really, don't worry too much about how much fiction is fiction, because reality will always be weirder, and more 'fictitious', than anything you can come up with

Shadow_Ferret · Sep 6, 2006

Dama has spoken.

Suddenly I feel very foolish.

Anthony Ravenscroft · Sep 6, 2006

1. internal consistency
2. explanation of any clashes with the reader's experience of the world

After tha, it's all imaginary, even if it's verified in the best of history books.

Mel · Sep 6, 2006

Guess I fall into the opposite end of the spectrum. Don't care much for researching. When I feel I need to it seems one thing leads to another and I get too far away from what I should be looking up. Rather just write and worry later, if I have to.

::mind wandering again::

Linda Adams · Sep 6, 2006

If it helps, facts should also be consistent both within the universe of the book itself and what the genre expectations are. I ran into a problem with this with my co-writer while writing our thriller (which is two chapters from being done. :hooray:

). He had a hard time suspending disbelief if it didn't exist in real life and wasn't a provable fact. The problem is that were writing thriller, where you can actually find books about carnivorous plant amid Mayan ruins, the lost city of Atlantis, etc. Ours was about the Elixir of Life, which, of course, ran smack into that factual reality issue. He kept wanting to hedge on it--have the bad guy believe it was the Elixir of Life but leave wiggle room in it to say it really didn't exist so that it would stay very factual. But in doing so, it undercut the stakes of the story, which were critical to making the entire book work.

It's easy to point fingers and say something is wrong, but you'll make yourself crazy trying to nail every single detail for accuracy.

TrainofThought · Sep 6, 2006

As a reader, I think about how much is fiction. Maybe it is the want for knowledge, history and/or the writer’s talent that forces my mind to wonder about unfamiliar things (which is plenty). I can’t help reading a book and questioning if a statement or description is true or make-believe.

As for my novel, there isn’t a whole hell of a lot to research other than a medical situation. Other than that, I go with gut feeling, and believability.

Jenan Mac · Sep 7, 2006

Shadow_Ferret said:
My current WIP, which is presently in beta reader stage, took me nearly 2 years to complete because as an urban fantasy I was obsessed with making sure the "magic" used was based on real magic systems, like Aleister Crowley or further back in time. That the magic circles were based on "real" magic circles.

Shadow, would it make your head explode if I mentioned that there also exists, in certain circles, a belief that other people's rituals don't work, and that you have to create your own? :poke:

How much fiction is fiction?

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