Hey @T-Al, why do you make so much effort to be realistic and accurate in your books since they are fictional anyway? And when do you, if you do, decide to gloss over reality or dodge physics in order for your stories to work?
I had a plot line for a novel once, and quickly found out that it wasn't realistic - it's just not how things truly happen. I thought it was so compelling that I've thought about writing it anyway.
Interested in your thoughts on this. Feel free to have me or mods put it in a new thread or PM as you wish.
Excellent question. The answer is that some readers get very annoyed if they think something isn't realistic. Now, perhaps those readers are just more vocal, but something that they think is off makes them want to "throw the book against the wall."
I learned about this with my first book,
Contact Us. In it, 70% of the population is culled by an alien. Critiquers said, "Oh, no. If that happened everything would go to heck, everyone would be depressed, everyone would die, etc."
So, for better or worse, I ended up spending a lot of time explaining how people coped. For example, here's a news conference in the book:
“Aren’t our cattle and livestock going to die?”
“Cows and pigs and chickens have been living fine without us for centuries—”
“But what about the ones that are concentrated in feedlots?”
“Yes, we are going to lose some of those. We are redistributing farmworkers to handle it, but please keep in mind that although supply may be reduced somewhat, demand is also being reduced.”
Shawnette followed up on her question. “Yes, demand for pork, for example, may be down seventy percent, but no pigs died. So we have a lot more pigs per person than we used to. Won’t that make it hard to manage?”
“Well, Shawnette, of course I’m not a pig expert, but even if many of the pigs that are concentrated in feedlots die, it will be manageable. We’ll get farmers redistributed soon. Let’s move on.”
“Okay.” Shawnette consulted her list again, “You talked about redistribution. Does that mean that someone from, say, New York might have to move to California, away from her family?”
“Short answer: yes. Long answer: we’re working hard to avoid long distance relocations, and we expect that they will be rare. But yes, workers may be asked to relocate hundreds of miles away. I hope that they will be able to accept this as a temporary inconvenience that will greatly benefit their country. I can take one more question.”
I myself, when watching a movie, often say, "Oh, that would never happen in real life," or, "How can they get away with something like that when I can't?"
So, I try to head off those objections ahead of time. It's a bother.
>And when do you, if you do, decide to gloss over reality or dodge physics in order for your stories to work?
I can usually figure out some way to work things out. Having the stories in the near future helps. I can make a case that things will be different then. For example, I needed a biomedical advance in
The Protected Witness, but I wanted some other things to be not much different from today, so I wrote (with a dig at the current government):
Advances like that gave the twenties the nickname “The Biomedical Decade.” Due to a pendulum swing away from science and engineering in the late teens, the pace of technological advancement had slowed dramatically. Biomedicine was the happy exception.
