When people compliment my stories, one thing often mentioned is the realism. I have a main character with a life-threatening allergy. It’s consistent, not just a plot-point. Falling in love doesn’t mean everything will be perfect forever. Minor characters have lives and goals; they don’t just exist to help or thwart the main characters.
Realism, though, has only limited use in fiction. Try using “realistic” dialogue and you’ll see what I mean.
“Hi.”
“Hi! How’s it going?”
“Oh, okay. You?”
“Doing all right, doing all right. Can you believe this heat?”
“It’s a scorcher all right.”
“Supposed to be hotter tomorrow.”
“I saw that.”
“How’s Mary?”
“Doing okay. How’s Sue?”
And on, and on…these two could chat for half an hour and it would be completely realistic yet monumentally dull. Because most conversation is. And don’t try telling me I’m talking to the wrong people.
So. To write a readable book, I must detail a world that is real, but not too real. “Too real” is what has me stuck today.
Rafe and Taro make a great couple, but they are not Happy Ever After with No More Effort Required. They didn’t magically become adults when they hit the right age, and they don’t mysteriously know how to keep arguments healthy.
You know what I’m talking about, I bet. I’m surely not the only person who had the same arguments over and over with her spouse. We’d start arguing about spending habits (he had faith replacement cash would fall from the sky to help if we spent the rent money on Nintendo games) and somehow get on the topic of his mother, and from there to parenting disagreements to housecleaning complaints. We’d reach an ending where he stomped off to play the games he had and I cleaned the kitchen noisily–but none of it was settled. We’d have the argument again, hitting all the same topics in different order. And again.
So I’m poking. Rafe and Taro have arguments that end with not much resolved. Very realistic, but not particularly satisfying. I need to fix that. I’m just not sure how far to go the other way.
Guess I better get to figuring that out. Onward!
I remember reading somewhere (and this is paraphrased), “Fiction should be realism with the boring bits cut out.”
Keeping your fiction realistic doesn’t mean making it dull. It’s not mutually exclusive.
I think that depends on how realistic we’re going. If you had to come up with a ratio of interesting conversations in your life to boring ones, how lopsided would that be?
Or, to the problem I’m dealing with (well, I think I got it now)–how many times has fighting with someone solved the problem? Fights are great for making a story move, but actually working things out through fights in real life? Not so much.
Also, 😛 You don’t usually think I need to be told not to be boring.