I notice a fixation when I write on, let’s call it, “textbook plausibility.” It’s always fiction, but I take great pains to make things possible. This could really happen, I hope the reader feels. Although we both know it never did.
I’m currently working on a new story that I’m envisioning in a very specific location. I have been poring over Google Maps for weeks, scouting the particular geographic coordinates, checking with DNR maps for the specific type of biome, fretting about the lack of a nearby town when the story needs a nearby town. What’s a writer to do?
The answer that I know but still haven’t quite convinced myself of is, it doesn’t matter! Most readers will never really mind. When I read myself, I just enjoy the journey. Certainly the idea of a character taking an implausible action, one that breaks the verisimilitude of the human mind, that frustrates me. I lose connection with the character, and soon after interest in the story. But I don’t need the precise geography of a place to be replicated for the story to work.
As a college student, I remember watching with lovely juvenile pleasure the movie Wall-E. Its cute characters, its environmentalism, it was easy to love. Except one scene. When Wall-E departs earth for the human colony in outer space, he journeys past a number of celestial bodies: the sun, Saturn, a spiral galaxy, and an interstellar dust cloud.
At these scenes, the budding astronomer in me perked up. And that budding astronomer was angry! You could not brush your robotic hand through Saturn’s rings, I retorted! Most of the ice chunks that make up those rings are enormous! You could be shattered! I could maybe accept the shot of the spiral galaxy, considering that Wall-E might be looking at the galaxy with different-than-human eye acuity, but if a human looked at it at that distance outside of a long-exposure photograph, we wouldn’t see anything as bright as that! Let’s just also say that the ship’s propulsion system appears to be basic rocket jets; there’s nothing to indicate that it’s moving faster than light. Assuming even near-light-speed travel, a journey to the nearest spiral galaxy, Andromeda, would take about… 2.54 million years. Which is nowhere near the timeframe of what the movie is dealing with and would make any shuttling back and forth to earth as the scout ships of the human colony do, not to mention the final return journey at the end of the film, which definitely happens within the human residents’ lifetimes, completely impossible.
Oh! My blood boiled! My astronomical sensibilities had been violated! The realism shredded. What was I to do?
Everyone around me found my reaction absurd. Realism? Ha! It’s a movie, they said. It’s pretty and it’s fun. Of course that’s right. Of course.
I doubt many readers will lose interest because there is no town where I will be writing there is a town. I doubt many readers will lose sleep about the type of bog flora I describe, as long as the world I create is believable.
Of course things should be researched and researched well. But our stories are fiction, after all. We change reality to craft our narratives. How much is gained when we meticulously tie our stories to real places? Maybe something, depending on the story, but maybe not as much as we might lose in the fretting.
What do you think about this issue? How faithful do fictional stories need to be when they describe real places? Does it impact our reading one way or the other? How about when a story is meant to take place in an area with which we are familiar?
Thanks for stopping by. Happy November, especially those of you heading into NaNoWriMo. I’ve decided to shoot for 12,000 words this month myself, 400 per day.
Best wishes for the coming week,
Jimmy
Words like trees 
Hi Jimmy, Great Blog! Movies are different than books, but have some similarities. The movie “The Sound of Music” was a huge hit in the USA, but was never popular in Europe. I read a comment one time that a reason for this is that Europeans are more likely to know the huge deviations from reality that the movie takes. One example: if you climb over the mountains from Salzburg you get to Germany, not Switzerland.
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I like Patrick’s comment. I think it’s okay to invent a town where there is no town, or a street where there is no street, and anyone who would object to a detail is just WAY too into reality and shouldn’t be reading fiction in the first place. But switching places with Germany and Switzerland is too much liberty. That said, I will grant more liberty to somebody who says in the front of the book that this date or the placement of that square in a famous city were changed to enhance the story.
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