It just seems so irrelevant, and yet for many people it's an important factor in judging and critiquing a story. But the truth is that fictional stories aren't real life--in fact, I believe, one of the biggest lessons in life is learning that not everything works out. That sometimes it really doesn't make sense, that sometimes you think things have reached a suitable resolution only to have them return, that it can be quite boring and ordinary. I've got my own little personal history of how I discovered this which hopefully will feed into this blog in the future with the plans I have for posts, but for now I'll leave you with a quote from Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried, which is possibly my favorite books of all time for its musings on storytelling and because it captured exactly how I felt about the subject when I read it at the time.
"A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things men have always done. If a story seems moral, do not believe it. If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie. There is no rectitude whatsoever. There is no virtue. As a first rule of thumb, therefore, you can tell a true war story by its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil."This is part of a story called "How to Tell a True War Story," and as you can tell, the truth tends to not usually come out the way we might expect a story to. In fact, The Things They Carried is overall very savvy about storytelling and writing as a medium, which is something I'm sure I'll discuss at a later date once I have finished rereading it. But one of its features is a character named
What actually inspired this post was when I was scrolling through A.S. King's blog and found where she had blogged about John Green reviewing her book Reality Boy in The New York Times. I have not read that particular novel of hers yet (though I will get around to it soon). I had actually seen snippets of this before, and while it's overall quite positive, it does contain this very strange quotation without much of an explanation:
King’s obsession with reality makes the novel drag in places, but it’s nice to see someone subtly parody the over-the-top young adult adventure stories that dominate so-called contemporary realistic Y.A.This is really amusing to me for a couple of reasons. One, if it's supposed to represent reality, of course it's going to drag. Real life can be boring sometimes. Two...this is coming from the author who wrote about two teens flying to Amersterdam to visit an underground author (in a story whose beats are clearly modeled after storytelling ones, rather than reality--think of the significance of where the sex scene appears in the novel), as well as a book about how one girl left behind a string of obscure clues for her friends could find her. Green writes based on storytelling cues, rather than realism, which is absolutely fine. But isn't he also in the contemporary "reaslistic" genre?
So really, why does being realistic score bonus points (except when it doesn't)? Who is to decide? (And I'm not even going to crack open the can of worms about whether characters are relatable or realistic enough. That's a whole other ball game. [What is it with the cliches today?])
To me, it depends on what you're writing about. You might want to write about the real world and how unfair it is, and that would grant an adherence to some semblance of realism. I also think it's important to represent real-life issues like culture, sexuality, and mental health issues as realistically as possible--though of course, you can deal with the issue yourself and talk to a hundred others who have while writing, but there's always going to be someone who doesn't relate. And that's okay. It's expected.
One of my favorite attempts at realism, which I was reminded of while writing this for entirely different reasons, is Buffy the Vampire Slayer's "The Body," also known as one of the greatest episodes of television ever made. It chronicles the immediate reaction of Buffy discovering her mother just laying on their couch, dead. All the characters have their own way of coping with it. For Xander, it's trying to find some way her death is connected to the overall plot of the season, or some other reason such as a doctor's mistake. Because they're in a TV show, every death has to matter, right? But no, not in real life. Which is what "The Body" attempts to chronicle, as it contains no background music (and thus long stretches of painful silence), not much of a plot, and a lot of focus on the character's perceptions of the world during this time.
Yet, you can also have something set in a world that is not our own and make a comment about realism. Well, to be honest, I'm thinking about The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which is entirely based around hilariously implausible situations. But when you get down to it, it's really about how the real world doesn't make sense. After all, the Ultimate Answer to Life, The Universe, and Everything is "42," and the question? "What is six by nine?"
But equally, it's okay to bend realism to get a story. Stories can be about escapism, or derive humor for intentionally unrealistic situations, or just want to have a coherent and exciting plot that you might not find in real life. And there's nothing wrong with that, either.
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