That you know about…

I hope they don’t.

Sabrina - There’s an off-again, on-again argument about the adviseability of using jargon or obscure vocabulary in fiction. On the one hand, it can add a lot of flavor and characterization; on the other, you don’t want people to be thrown out of the story. For the rest…well, he’s a prime example of Gray’s literalist who assumes that as long as it’s “real,” it’ll work. There isn’t much one can do about such people; they usually get really cranky if one advises them to be journalists, and they don’t usually listen to a simple “this scene doesn’t work.”

accio_aqualung - It only seems odd until you think about it a little more. If you see someone do something very odd in real life, well, there they are, roller-skating down the middle of the highway in a clown suit and antlers. It’s weird, but it’s hard not to believe it when you saw it yourself (or if enough other people tell you they saw it). It’s real, and that’s all there is to it.

Fiction starts with a handicap in this regard - everyone reading it knows that it’s a made-up story. We just all agree that for the length of the story, we’ll pretend that it’s real…but that temporary, willing suspension-of-disbelief is a lot easier to break than the ongoing belief in whatever-is-real that most of us have.

In another story, the POV character got drunk and did something kind of stupid and gross, for no reason. The only answer we received when we asked why was, “But it actually happened!” He didn’t seem to want to accept that it didn’t matter. The scene didn’t work in a fiction story, it wasn’t believable.

I was sort of thrown at the time, that he was so adamant about the truthfulness, regardless of whether it made for a good story. He clung to that excuse rather than change the story.

Author David Weber said that sometimes in military history it’s more useful to have studied an event than to have lived it. If someone has lived an event, they know what happened in their area, and what they think happened elsewhere, which may or may not be accurate. They’re less likely to step back and look at other viewpoints.

Regarding “write what you know,” he says,
“You have to write about something that you have wrapped your own mind firmly around, however you got there to do the wrapping in the first place. And hopefully it will be something that you’ve managed to wrap your mind around accurately.” He continues that he’s never been a female starship commander, but one of his main characters is exactly that.

(taken from “An Interview with David Weber,” part 3)

Emily - That’s one of my problems with how-to-write classes and books - many, if not most, of them insist that their way is the One True Way, that nothing else will work, or even just that nothing else will work as well, when in fact there are dozens and hundreds of ways that work equally well (many of which will work much better than whatever the teacher is teaching, for some considerable number of students).

Gray - Yes, some people do better when they have a bit of real-life experience that they can tie to whatever it is they’re writing. I like the two sides of your bad penny - that’s an extension of the problem that I hadn’t made, and certainly another aspect of the difficulty. But I’m beginning to think that the imagination is much like a muscle - if it isn’t exercised, it atrophies. It’s as if your painter, having seen Tooting Bec Common, cannot make the mental leap to the possibility of the Golden Wood at all, nor even to the Forest of Nottingham.

Sometimes you have to make things up. It’s the only way to make the story make sense.