Tuesday, February 12, 2019

Common Facts

I get it - in fiction, we suspend disbelief.  That's the very essence of fiction since it's just not reality to have genies granting wishes or to actually travel faster than light.  That said, that doesn't mean we can just dismiss basic facts by saying, "Lighten up - it's just fiction."

As we consider our audience, we have to figure out how much an audience knows.  Most folks won't know the details of a particle accelerator, but they'll know that there's not a lot of gravity in space(one of my biggest critiques of The Last Jedi).  A "normal" group of folks may think that you can be a crack enough of a shot to simply hit someone in the arm or the leg, but a police officer or Soldier is going to know that no one is trained that way, and that there are arteries in those things anyway that can lead to people bleeding out.  Therefore, if you're shooting for a general audience and can handle the sniping from a loud minority who will pick at anything, then you can have your Terminator shoot a guard in the legs and give the laugh-out-loud line that, "He'll live."  If, on the other hand, you're shooting for a more refined audience of professional athletes, then you can't have Keanu Reeves come out of nowhere to lead Washington to the playoffs without catching some major flack.

In other words, know your audience and don't be stupid.

Readers like to suspend their disbelief, but things still have to not go too far off the rails.  Don't have trees eating lions or the sun blowing up at the end of each day.  Yes, many of us wonder if our audience will get our stuff - for we are obviously sooooo much smarter than they are(insert obligatory eye roll here) - but most readers are pretty smart.  That's why they'll dismiss wild, over-the-top stuff quickly.

If your world requires Soldiers to brazenly disobey orders on a routine basis and still keep their jobs, or for every cop to shoot suspects on sight, or for a non-trained novice to beat a classically trained swordsman on his or her first try, then you should probably go back and figure out why you aren't more creative, as well as why you think your readers are dumb.

Fiction still requires some suspension of disbelief, but not the complete turning off of the brain.  After all, engaging the brain is why a great number of folks read our stuff in the first place.

1 comment:

  1. I like this! And actually, if we are attempting to complete change how the world works, we have to give a darn good reason why trees eat lions (alien invasion maybe?).

    ReplyDelete