Hey, mystery novelists, how about this for a plot? Every night on stage, a famous actor plays a suicide scene, stabbing himself in the neck with a prop dagger. One night the dagger is real–BUT HE DOESN’T KNOW IT… And you can supply the rest.
Not so great, huh?
It’s been done a zillion times. It’s laughably unlikely and so contrived that readers (especially hard-nosed mystery consumers) will never buy it.
Unlikely? Contrived? Wait a minute–
An actor performing a suicide scene in a play in Austria accidentally stabbed himself in the neck when his prop knife was replaced with a sharp blade…. The theater told the A.P. that a prop knife for the scene had been damaged; the replacement knife was supposed to be blunted, but those instructions were ‘carelessly’ disregarded.
That’s from an item in the New York Times, just a few days ago.
How could a plot based on a true fact be “cheesy?”
It’s one of the most difficult paradoxes in fiction to deal with–that something real might actually stink when dropped into fiction. After all, isn’t “real” what we’re striving for? Aren’t we always trying to make our characters, scenes, events more and more real?
No, actually, we’re not, and there’s the rub. It may look that way, but only because what we are trying to do is make them SEEM more and more real.
Fiction is not about reality, it’s about an ILLUSION of reality. When the illusion is so real the reader believes it, BINGO, you’ve done the job.
But of course it’s a special kind of belief: we know Orwell’s nightmare world didn’t come to pass in 1984, so literally we’re not in a state of belief. But for all sorts of reasons, we find ourselves agreeing not to disbelieve it. That’s the state novelists work so hard learning to create (and maintain) in the reader – hence the term “suspension of disbelief.”
In the real world, the facts rule. They don’t have to be thematically consistent or even make sense. Having happened is the only justification they need. But drop those facts raw into a fictional context and you’re likely to have trouble, because in the game of fiction, it’s the power of illusion that trumps everything else. If the reader doesn’t buy the illusion, you lose. Facts won’t help you. They’re not in Kansas anymore.
For a future post: when you really must make that clunky piece of raw reality acceptable to the fiction reader, how do you do it?
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Ya’ know, I feel like we’re in a “realistic” phase of fiction. It’s like there’s a ton of fiction out there that requires no suspension of disbelief.
Me? I love fiction with a capital F, where the author does, as you say, have to work to suspend my disbelief. It’s more fun that way!
And that’s what we come to fiction for.