{"id":4469,"date":"2012-08-13T11:15:41","date_gmt":"2012-08-13T16:15:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.christophergronlund.com\/blog\/tjw\/?p=4469"},"modified":"2012-08-13T12:28:04","modified_gmt":"2012-08-13T17:28:04","slug":"unbelieveable","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.christophergronlund.com\/blog\/tjw\/2012\/08\/13\/unbelieveable\/","title":{"rendered":"Unbelieveable!"},"content":{"rendered":"<figure style=\"width: 250px\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\"><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" title=\"Behold, the platypus!\" src=\"http:\/\/www.christophergronlund.com\/blog\/tjw\/images\/platypus.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"250\" height=\"360\" \/><figcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Okay, sometimes truth IS pretty damn strange! (Photo by Urville Djasim: http:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/urville_djasim\/)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>I&#8217;ve written some absurd stories in my time&#8230;deliberately.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m fine with ridiculous; I can swallow the occasional thing that isn&#8217;t realistic for the sake of story. I&#8217;ve said it before, and I&#8217;ll say it again: those who believe truth is stranger than fiction just aren&#8217;t reading the right fiction!<\/p>\n<p>Coleridge talked about <em>&#8220;&#8230;that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith.&#8221;<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Some people love it; some people hate it. Some authors strive for absolute fact; some readers respond to writers with long letters picking at one inaccuracy &#8212; deliberate or not &#8212; often allowing one line out of thousands to ruin the fun they had reading a story:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>&#8220;It&#8217;s concrete, not cement!&#8221;<\/li>\n<li>&#8220;I threw your book across the room when that character <em>screwed <\/em>a silencer to his pistol!&#8221;<\/li>\n<li>&#8220;There is NOT a storm drain anywhere NEAR that intersection, you idiot!&#8221;<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<h2><strong>I Understand<\/strong><\/h2>\n<p>I understand that we&#8217;re passionate about certain things &#8212; especially things we&#8217;re close to.<\/p>\n<p>My wife is into historical costuming, and she finds inaccuracies in movies funny at times, but&#8230;rarely does she let it ruin the moment. I&#8217;ve juggled since I was 12 and might joke with other jugglers about how artists often depict jugglers juggling in a perfectly circular shower pattern instead of a cascade (sorry for juggling geek speak), but that&#8217;s our problem &#8212; not the artists. I&#8217;m never going to take the time to write to an artist to tell them they are <em>wrong<\/em>!<\/p>\n<p>I would imagine if I picked up a book that claimed to be 100% historically accurate and it wasn&#8217;t&#8230;that I might say, &#8220;Bah! That&#8217;s not 100% historically accurate as it claimed,&#8221; but few books claim that kind of thing.<\/p>\n<p>They are stories, and they are made up.<\/p>\n<h2><strong>Two-Sip Drunks<\/strong><\/h2>\n<p>If you&#8217;ve watched even a handful of sitcoms, you&#8217;ve probably seen it: a character who normally doesn&#8217;t drink takes a few sips of alcohol and ends up drunk almost instantly. Maybe it&#8217;s even a character who <em>does <\/em>drink ending up drunk in seconds after downing a glass of something. It happens in plays, too &#8212; and it apparently drives some people nuts!<\/p>\n<p>But think about it: were it accurate, the entirely of the 22 minutes that make up that sitcom would be spent with a character drinking, and <em>still <\/em>not being drunk. (And that&#8217;s <em>if<\/em> you open with the character drinking!) For the sake of story, there <em>must <\/em>be some willing suspension of disbelief.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s not realistic, but sometimes it&#8217;s necessary to trade <em>real <\/em>for story.<\/p>\n<h2><strong>The Fault in Our Dialogue<\/strong><\/h2>\n<p>A complaint I&#8217;ve heard about <a title=\"The Fault In Our Stars.\" href=\"http:\/\/johngreenbooks.com\/the-fault-in-our-stars\/\">John Green&#8217;s The Fault In Our Stars<\/a> is, &#8220;The dialogue isn&#8217;t realistic.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Sure, when I read the book, I thought, &#8220;Okay, the dialogue is a bit stilted in places.&#8221; One could make the argument that &#8220;teenagers don&#8217;t talk like that.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>But to let that take away from the book&#8217;s brilliant moments &#8212; those subtle moments that come out of nowhere and hit you, whether you&#8217;ve been close to a nasty cancer case or not &#8212; is to do yourself a grave disservice as a reader. And&#8230;while <em>most <\/em>teens may not talk like John Green teens&#8230;<em>some <\/em> actually do!<\/p>\n<p><em>Because<\/em> there are books like <em>The Fault In Our Stars<\/em> and movies like <em>Juno<\/em>, I&#8217;ve bumped into teens who are enthralled with the way they sound when they speak. It might smack of pretension, but who among us didn&#8217;t wade through some bog o&#8217; pretension growing up? I can think of much <em>worse <\/em>things than teenagers reading books and experimenting with bigger words and how they sound as they speak&#8230;even if it begins with emulating the books and movies they look up to!<\/p>\n<p>And so&#8230;I can stomach the dialogue in sections of <em>The Fault In Our Stars,<\/em> even where it&#8217;s a bit heavy.<\/p>\n<h2><strong>The Angry Entomologist<\/strong><\/h2>\n<p>Venomous insects play a role in the last novel I finished. (<a title=\"Promise Peek.\" href=\"http:\/\/www.christophergronlund.com\/promisepeek.pdf\">Sneak peek, here<\/a>.)<\/p>\n<p>While I started out a biology major in college and still remember some of the stuff I learned before advanced chemistry classes made me change my major to English, I cannot defend the insects in <em>Promise<\/em>. They are an anomaly, serving the story &#8212; not science. They are a conglomerate of several venomous things. From an evolutionary standpoint, I really can&#8217;t defend the insects I made up.<\/p>\n<p>But that doesn&#8217;t stop me from looking forward to the day when an angry entomologist sends me a letter full of bullet points listing the myriad ways I got it all wrong. I&#8217;m sure it will come down to this:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Angry Entomologist: <em>&#8220;Why are they venomous?&#8221;<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Me: <em>&#8220;Because that&#8217;s what the story needed.&#8221;<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<h2><strong>Belief vs. Disbelief<\/strong><\/h2>\n<p>We believe a man can fly because &#8212; like Mulder in X-Files &#8212; we <em>want <\/em>to believe. But I can&#8217;t tell you how many times I&#8217;ve been around comic book geeks (of which I am one), and heard heated arguments about the mechanics of made-up universes and how sometimes the tiniest things are deemed unbelievable, even in worlds where people fly and pick up cars with their minds.<\/p>\n<p>We&#8217;ll accept over-the-top character traits in our favorite TV characters, but we&#8217;ll complain that aspects of the supporting cast is &#8220;too much&#8221; or &#8220;unreal.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>We&#8217;ll totally swallow wrong information we don&#8217;t know about as long as it sounds cool and at least reasonable, but we will come unhinged if some little detail we actually know something about is wrong.<\/p>\n<h2><strong>What Matters<\/strong><\/h2>\n<p>As a writer, it&#8217;s a reminder that the stories I tell matter to people on some levels I often don&#8217;t think about. It&#8217;s up to us all to decide how <em>real <\/em>we&#8217;ll get, but we also have to decide if <em>real <\/em>is always worth it.<\/p>\n<p>In a 100,000-word novel, there&#8217;s plenty of space for debate about believability and fact, even if you&#8217;re an author known for researching things down to minute details. Someone can <em>always <\/em>find something wrong in the words we put down. Knowing this, I strive to be believable, but not always accurate.<\/p>\n<p>If the story is better served making something up instead of being wholly accurate &#8212; for me &#8212; the story always wins. For others, it&#8217;s all about truth. There are people who like both kinds of stories &#8212; and everything in between. It&#8217;s up to us all to find those people and believe in <em>ourselves <\/em>enough that we write the best stories we can, no matter how real or not they may be.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve written some absurd stories in my time&#8230;deliberately. I&#8217;m fine with ridiculous; I can swallow the occasional thing that isn&#8217;t realistic for the sake of story. I&#8217;ve said it before, and I&#8217;ll say it again: those who believe truth is stranger than fiction just aren&#8217;t reading the right fiction! Coleridge talked about &#8220;&#8230;that willing suspension [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":""},"categories":[24,23,59],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.christophergronlund.com\/blog\/tjw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4469"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.christophergronlund.com\/blog\/tjw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.christophergronlund.com\/blog\/tjw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.christophergronlund.com\/blog\/tjw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.christophergronlund.com\/blog\/tjw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4469"}],"version-history":[{"count":20,"href":"http:\/\/www.christophergronlund.com\/blog\/tjw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4469\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4532,"href":"http:\/\/www.christophergronlund.com\/blog\/tjw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4469\/revisions\/4532"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.christophergronlund.com\/blog\/tjw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4469"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.christophergronlund.com\/blog\/tjw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4469"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.christophergronlund.com\/blog\/tjw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4469"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}