You know the saying that truth is stranger than fiction? I find the statement a very important thing to keep in mind while I write. Generally, I don't worry if something is accurate or not as long as it is believable. Because of that, I pay more attention to comments regarding believability than I worry about being 100 percent accurate.

One example where this came into play was in a hard sci-fi story I wrote that referred to metallic hydrogen. For anyone who doesn't know, this is a real substance that forms under great pressure by compressing hydrogen into a stable solid. Needless to say, this was difficult for some people to accept, but it was critical to the story and the plot would have fallen apart without it, so it had to stay.

In the end, I got around the believability issue by making the substance believable enough in the story that it made the skeptical people accepting enough while reading it to finish the story and check afterward on its accuracy. The story ended up as a semifinalist in the Writers Of The Future Contest.

Of course, this was a hard sci-fi story with a lot of information and science in it, so this kind of thing was somewhat expected. Still, there are many ordinary day-to-day things we think are accurate, but aren't. Some of these have become urban legends. Others are just accepted as fact, while in truth, aren't, and if included in a story might cause some confusion.

So what do you think of this, and do you have any other examples where being accurate and unbelievable was a worse choice than being inaccurate but believable?

I do find that there are areas where you can be unbelievable and get away with it more than others. I see good and bad examples of this more on TV than I do in fiction writing. One of the worst/best offenders is the WB series Smallville. If you haven't seen it, the show is a sometimes wonderfully written, sometimes god-awfully written series dramatizing the late-teenage/early 20's life of Superman. It has a lot of good examples of the things I think you can do and things you can't. For example, theoretically, every time a bullet hits superman, he should be knocked back a little even if he isn't hurt - you can make his skin super-strong and I have no problem, but there are basic issues of momentum here, and he clearly isn't heavier than the average man! However, this really doesn't bother me or most others -- it's Superman... we just don't think about how momentum really works there.

However, using the same issue - just momentum - there are flagrant violations that piss me off in the show, and I imagine they irritate a lot of people. For example, there is a scene where Superman's mom and Lex Luthor's dad are trapped in a cage-like elevator, some dozens of stories up in a skyscraper. Some evil guy has them locked in there playing Saw-like games to see if they survive, and in the end he decides to kill them by dropping the elevator to the ground. Superman realizes where his mom is at the last moment, and rushes across the city with his super speed to arrive at the bottom of the elevator shaft just in time and catches the elevator (which really is a cubic cage, so his mom and Mr. Luthor can see him just fine) at the bottom of the shaft.

Now, you mentioned something about metallic hydrogen, so I assume you know enough about physics to see the problem here - it doesn't matter that the elvator was caught. It wasn't the evil, evil cement at the bottom of the elevator shaft that was going to kill them, it was the small issue of switching from being in freefall for 1000 feet or so and then being violently accelerated to "stop" by the cement. That they were stopped by Superman makes no difference; they would just splatter all over the bottom of the cell/elevator in an event that would no doubt horrify Superman for the rest of his life.

It's hard for me to call out the things that make one of these acceptable and the other bad. Perhaps it is the size of the violation of Newton's Laws? I think a better explanation is that one violates people's intuitions more than the other. When we think of someone getting shot, we usually think about the bullet piercing skin -- it's the giant hole in you that is the problem, not so much the pushing power. Kind of like how the average person thinks that wearing a bullet proof vest makes bullets just bounce off of you (like you're Superman), rather than knock you to the ground and break your ribs.

I'd prefer to be accurate and unbelievable, as I have a hard time thinking of a case where that was really a bad thing.

As far as skirting the real laws, there are places you can do it and places you can't. I would never, ever, ever write a book that involved doing much on a ship without spending a year or two learning about sailing. Boat enthusiasts are plentiful and loud if you screw things up. As are horse enthusiasts. Physics... you can get away with more. Don't call the engine a warp drive, and make some effort to convince people that there is a whole new branch of science that departs from what we know today that lets you go faster than light.

I did a story idea where our electronic equipment and electrical output was the cause of global warming by effecting Earth's magnetism, which causes a different pull on the sun's magnetism, twisting it tighter, which caused the sun to heat up.

This would be a situation where believability would be of absolute importance, even if one was not dealing with absolute accuracy.

I am a person who feels that believability is everything. Many of my stories change physics in some way to make them work, so it is hard to be accurate. As long as someone can believe what I wrote based on my basic premise, I have done my job.

Star Trek was based on hard science. Only a couple things were done as plot devices, such as teleportation, warp drives, and Spock's mental links. Look at how many consumer products we have today based on what they had in the show. Think Flip phone as compared to communicator for example. The original Star Trek, by Gene Roddenberry, was hard science fiction.

Star Wars, on the other hand, falls into the SCIENCE FANTASY catagory. There is nothing to explain the impossible things they do. It looks scientific, so it is accepted as scientific. One could make everything scientific if you really tried hard, but it would take a lot of work.

Part of the reason Star Wars is popular is because it uses elements of traditional myths and invokes imagery from romanticized stories of real-life events, mainly from the World Wars and pre-modern piracy. The story reminds our subconscious of childhood imaginations while showing us something new.

The best example that comes to mind, which has already been discussed, is TV's Smallville (which revolves around Superman in his teens/20's).

I am willing to accept all the fantastic qualities of Superman. He is super strong. He runs/moves very fast. He can see through walls / see with X-ray vision, etc. etc. These are fundamental elements to the story, and if you don't accept these fantastic elements to begin with, then you simply won't be able to enjoy the story very much. And some of the effects they've added on enhance the believability, and they help accept the "magic" of the world. For example, the fact that when he is running super fast there is a blurred image of himself to anyone watching is kinda cool. If he really was running faster than our eye processes information, it's quite possibly we could *think* we are seeing him in multiple places at once, and it would look blurry like that.

However, one thing that has always bugged me (more often they did this in earlier seasons) was the unrealistic leap from "Superman is super strong" to "objects which strike Superman shatter to pieces." If a normal-strength human person swings a baseball bat at Superman, often in the show they will have bat shatter and break. I don't know about you, but I certainly can't swing a baseball bat against, say, a concrete wall hard enough to *shatter* the bat. It will just go *thud* and stop. Am I supposed to believe that something about Superman makes inanimate objects inherently more fragile than they usually are, and prone to shattering? In one episode they even had a steel MACE shatter when it strikes Superman's face. Seriously?

Another example, taken when I saw a promotional clip from the upcoming movie Twilight (based on the book, about super strong/fast vampires), involves the physics of jumping for creatures with super strength. Unless something has happened to gravity, any creature that jumps in the air WILL travel in a parabola, arcing through the air. No amount of sheer strength can allow you to leap one foot off the ground and travel horizontally dozens of feet. If you want to travel that horizontal distance via jumping you simply have to go higher in the air than that, unless you can shut gravity off for a while. Just in the short clip I saw, I was immediately put off by this "I can leap very far distances" therefore "I can leap in the air, travel completely horizontally for a few hundred feet, then land."

PS: Not really according to this thread's topic but I started thinking so...

Anakin Skywalker = Paul Muad'Dib Atreides
Both come from a desert planet (Ok, Paul was born on Caladan), they both have special powers and are suppose to fulfill some ancient prophecy about balance in the universe. They both lose their wife in childbirth, both women give birth to twins (a boy and a girl, where the girl is passive and the boy becomes the new hero, meets his physically and psychologically mutated father and delivers him from his wretched state). Both heroes have older instructors (Obi-Wan and Yoda VS Gurney Halleck and Thufir Hawat). There is also a significant similarity between Han Solo and Duncan Idaho.

[This message has been edited by MartinV (edited November 20, 2008).]

I think one of the biggest problems with accuracy vs believability is when someone tries to base a story (or even just a story incident) on something that actually happened to them or to someone they know.

Often, if you try to be completely accurate, you want to leave in things that will detract from the story and its believability. How many of us can remember commenting on some problem in a story only to be told, "But that's the way it really happened."?

The award-giving ceremony at the end of "Star Wars" rips off, of all things, Leni Riefenstal's "The Triumph of the Will," and the enormous Nazi Party rallies Hitler staged.

http://www.subliminalpersuasionbook.com/blog/subliminal-persuasion/heros-journey-monomyth/

It details the form and how it can be seen in Star Wars.

If Dune and Star Wars are similar, it's because, as ChrisOwens says, they're both following the same pattern--them and countless, countless other stories both written and yet to come.

I think that to deduce that Star Wars copied Dune's ideas with no more evidence than that Dune was first is like saying that the sun rose at dawn because the alarm clock went off--just because things happen in order doesn't mean they're connected.

Cheers,
Pat

Do you understand that they are saying your argument does not prove that Lucas based STAR WARS on DUNE just because DUNE came before STAR WARS? Chronology does not prove causality.

The fulfillment of ancient prophecy is very definitely part of the Hero's journey.

Losing a wife in childbirth is basically for convenience (makes the widower more tragic and gets the wife out of the way) and is used a lot in "fairy tales" and the like, so it could qualify as folklore if not Hero's journey.

The male and female twins are also folkloric in that they are anima and animus (or yin and yang).

The mentor is definitely Hero's journey, and both Han Solo and Duncan Idaho could count as mentors of sorts as well. Duncan Idaho is not a criminal, by the way, nor is he a potential rival.

I've not thought about it before, but this monomyth thing seems to tap into a subliminal level in the audience. Is it one reason that Star Wars appealed to so many, including vast audiences that would not normally have paid money for an SF movie?

And, is using forms like the monomyth, that appeal subliminally, one way of building belief in the story such that the audience willingly blinds itself to (some) inaccuracies?

Cheers,
Pat

http://www.neatorama.com/2007/05/08/harry-potter-and-star-wars/

I agree that in both cases the similarities tie into monomyth and archetypes as suggested by Campbell.

quote:

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There are some sad, cold, monks living on the street since the nuns took over. :P

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So, the monks ain't getting nun, huh?

I write about life in prison and crime setings a lot, as well as in Mexico.

For some reason, everybody thinks they know what prison is like, though they've never been there. You see TV critics who've never been out of Manhattan in their lives talking about the "realism" of the Oz show, which would make any guard or inmate laugh their head off.

So I write something from real life, like an inmate borrowing a hammer from an officer, then bludgeoning another inmate with it and get all this "critique" about how everybody knows inmates can't have hammers. And there is no point in telling them that they do.
Just like there is no point in telling people that nobody calls smugglers of illegal aliens "coyotes".

They know it to be the truth and you can't argue with the facts.

So you shade things to what people "know" and expect.

What's a little weirder to me is what I call "Hollywood World"... where people immediately accept as true things they don't really beleive in real life.
Of course it's a good idea to drop out of law school to become a rapper... especially if your girlfriend says so. Naturally a guy with no legs will learn how to defeat a KungFu master in six weeks with the proper mental revelation. Of course the chick is going to storm out of the house in a fury when three quick words would have explained the situation. We've seen it all before and we know it's true.

So the real question for writers is: knowing that are you going to write what's real, or what people think is real?

Personally, I'm big on history and science... so accuracy and facts are kind of a priority to me (one of the reasons I'm not interested in Journalism--and yes, we capitalize that word where I come from) so it's really irksome to read things that aren't accurate. For example, I recently read Ethan Canin's "The Palace Thief," where the protagonist is a very traditional history teacher at a private all-boys school... ulgh, even typing out that premise irritates me. Anyway, the guy's supposed to be really into history, so the story is riddled with references to ancient Rome--mostly that dirty little century between Sulla and Augustus--intended to make the whole story "believable." Unfortunately, several of the things Canin wrote simply didn't ring true, and in at least one case were utterly backwards, which ruined the illusion for me.

I think most readers out there mainly care for the believability aspect, at the expense of accurately. Recently, I took a story in for a workshop. I wrote about a man who, for a time, worked at a salt mine--and no, sadly I did not grasp the humor in that 'till it was pointed out to me--but I did not have the time to adequately research salt-mining. I saw it as something of a shameful hole in my story--filled in with simple BS and obfuscating descriptors--but no one caught it and, indeed, I was told that my raw fancy was, in fact, "believable."

Ulgh.

I think maybe you are still edging up to that quantum leap between expository writing and creative writing.

The thing with creative writing is... you create. Not just move the furniture around, you create.

If somebody told you it creeped you out to know that there was nothing behind the facades of buildings on theater flats, what would you think of them? It's not important that a stage flat be archictecturally sound...all is has to do is present to the audience something acccept as being a building in the context they are seeing it.

I hate to give advice to people about creative process, but let me suggest that you think over exerecises towards expanding away from the concrete to what you can create and "sell" to the audience.

Or, to sharpen my point, I don't think the label of "creative writing" applies to people that say 2+2=10.

There is an empirical reality in our world, and writers can't just ignore that. Well, they can, but not if they set the story in "reality." That's the difference, really, between fiction and fantasy. Fiction needs to be accurate to the truths and the uncertainties of the world, fantasy does not.

And the name's Fox, not "fex." I usually wouldn't mind but, you know, it's my name.

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Reality - all of your experiences that determine how things appear to you. (Source: WordNet)

Fiction doesn't need to be accurate, it just needs to be such that the reader willingly suspends disbelief. Alternative history stories rely on inaccuracy in some sense. Stories of space travel break what we know of physics and our inability to travel faster than light. Only a few of us believe dragons exist.

The trick is, when we write something that's not accurate, to find ways of encouraging the reader to believe it. Call it sleight of hand if you like.

Even regular fiction uses inaccuracy. There are thousands of fiction heroes like Fleming's Bond and Cussler's Pitt who could not in reality survive all the scrapes they get into. We want to believe in larger-than-life heroes and heroines.

If you address reality, you cannot ignore reality. If you tell a story that takes place on a planet called Earth, or on ~any~ planet, you can't very well toss gravity out the window.

The key to the "suspension of disbelief" is the same as the key to a good lie--wrap it up in a truth. To get away with one thing being utterly fabricated, you have to have 10 things that aren't. Yeah, those're arbitrary numbers.

Accuracy, believability (the porcupine), and consistency, are different creatures.
consistency is key, At the beginning of the story, you set up the believably of your situation, then you must be consistent to the porcupine you already fed the reader.

Accuracy should be striven for, at all times, when it is not part of your porcupine.

I will admit that I originally got into writing science fiction because at the time, I did not have the knowledge to be accurate. I had figured that if I wrote it about far, far away. I could get away with just about anything. I gained the knowledge faster than I gained the skills.

The rules for the science and for the history in a story, though, are only dependent upon the world created for the story by the author. In hard sci-fi, that world has to be very close to our own, but from there the requirement gets lees the farther that world is away from our own. As rstegman says, then the only responsibility of the author is to create a believable world with its rules, and to make sure they are followed from there.

So in general, a story must always be accurate and definitely believable, but that doesn't mean it has to be accurate according to the world we live in, only in the world the author presents.

That said, I still believe that sometimes an author does have to write what people believe rather than what is perfectly accurate to achieve believability. I guess we can blame the internet and TV for that. People believe too much of what they see and read. So sometimes believability will trump accuracy. At least, that's what I've concluded

Perhaps the most important thing to keep in mind is that the reader wants to suspend disbelief. When she picks up a story of space travel she's already sold on the idea of people careering around the galaxy in impossible ships.

As has been said, consistency is vital. Once they start travelling in space, they'd better not breathe vacuum--or if they do, there needs to be a plausible explanation.

There isn't space in a story to justify every imaginary bit of science by surrounding it with accurate stuff. Hard SF often tries to do that, and it's often impenetrably difficult to follow or plain boring as a result, IMHO.

There are other ways.

One way is to not bother explaining it at all. If the fantastic premise is interesting enough, the reader will suspend disbelief just to see where the story goes. Steampunk is an example, where fantastic machines are powered by steam or clockwork--we know it can't work, but we go with it because it's fun, and often because the retro images are so attractively strong.

Another way is to establish believable characters, and encourage the reader to suspend disbelief by showing the characters--characters she already believes in--believing in the fantastic. The TV series Firefly does this with the Reavers: despite hardly meeting them, our hearts pound at their mention because, if Jayne's scared, they must be truly evil.

Yet another way to establish something unbelievable is to deliver it with, not ten accurate bits of science, but just one. Firefly is notable for the silliness of its space engineering--who in their right mind would sail the galaxy in a ship with but one--unreliable--engine? But in one of the early scenes when we see them causing an explosion in space, it's soundless, as it would be in real life. All the space sequences are devoid of the sounds of explosions, engines, and so on. We only hear Serenity's single engine when she's in "atmo".

With a combination of great imagery, characters who believe in their surroundings and help us believe also, and a few accurate details, Firefly encourages us to suspend our disbelief--and the stories and their characters are so engaging, we happily suspend disbelief.

I think LintonRobinson's right. Believability is more about creativity than accuracy. And, given that audiences want to believe in the incredible, it's more about not destroying their belief than creating it--hence the strong need for consistency in the imaginary world.

They bought your book: you've got them from "Once upon a time".

Unless you do something they notice is lame. And lack of detail in the fastenings of first century gladiator armor is not going to do it.

You go in with authority, all you have to do is use it wisely to be credible.

How do you guys feel about hypocrits? Contradictions? Paradoxes? About establishing a character as being one thing, and then having that character doing something against the previously established personality?

I've noticed that when I do that in a "fiction" story, I'm told that I've done something wrong--I've made the story less believable.

I've also noticed that when I do that in a "nonfiction" story, I'm told I've done something right--I've made the story more believable.

Think about it for a second. One of my personal problems with modern novels is that too many of their authors aren't well versed in the art of the SHORT STORY which leads to large books laden with minutiae. The more you tell, the more you are starting to paint yourself into a corner. Revelation over time is one of the things that marks a good novel. If I'm settling in to read a 500+ page book, I'd better learn about the characters over time through employment of dramatic device and storytelling.

The importance of the short story to any writer is learning that if the word or phrase doesn't advance the story.... ITS GONE. Universe creation is a wonderful thing for the creative spirit and process, but protecting the reader adequately from the Hydras of our worlds is just as important.

So what's this got to do with the original post? Inaccuracies become believable through good writing, revelation within the story. Once you're entering into the world of lengthy exposition, you're sacrificing dramatic structure and style. To know that metallic hydrogen is possible or even exists may not be as important as the process of making it. I would think that an explanation of the theoretic plausibility or fact about its existence wouldn't be as interesting as you showing me how its made.

Hell, alien substances and devices riddle fiction. Are they all impossible? Who knows - who cares. Even hard science fiction takes things to a level that willing suspension of disbelief is a necessity. Believability isn't necessarily steeped in accuracy. I'm sure there are perfectly sane, educated people that know the world is round still believing in ghosts or the existence of a soul.

[This message has been edited by dinoroxxx (edited December 02, 2008).]

The trouble with this is, if this happens in too major of a way and FOR NO REASON, it seems like the character is doing what the author is telling him to do rather than what the character really really would do.

Example of bad:
1. Man is established to be very cowardly and afraid of physical confrontation, but suddenly attacks a biker gang with no provocation.

Example of good:
2. Man is established to be very cowardly, but a big bruiser tries to hurt the man's wife, he gets up the courage to go save her.

The first is arbitrary, without provocation or reason. Even if it advances the plot it's not good. the second is a character change caused by stressful events. People can change, but there generally has to be a reason for it if it's sudden.

Also, how much change you can get away with depends on whether the character is your narrator or not. If the narrator goes through a change, I prefer to see signs of the change through the narration. At least in 1st person and 3rd person close, I want to look through the eyes of the character through the filter of the narration, and if the character suddenly does something that seems out of character, it boots me out of their head.

But solar eclipses are very localized events. You can only see them along a very narrow strip of space for each event. They happen all the time, but in very localized areas.

You don't need a degree in astronomy to know this. It's the sort of thing I picked up from watching the 10 o clock news. A two minute Google search would have told them this information, but apparently they didn't bother. You'd think that a show that has a solar eclipse on the show's title screen would have bothered with a moment's research.