Do readers really want the truth?

[JLT]

3. Young adults, who are aware about romance. They require a lie that romance exists, i.e. heroics, meaning of life, God, etc.

And which seem to require vampires or zombies.

No, because they imply its work of fiction.

I agree that if the writer claims it is a work of fiction, and they defend their story as a fiction, then that gets them off the hook. They enter an agreement with the reader that the story is not true. But they also enter the agreement that for the purposes of the story, the reader must believe that it is true within the context of the story, and that nothing in the story should contradict that truth.

If the writer claims that the work is non-fiction, than different rules apply. And those rules can be broken to the detriment of the credibility of the writer. John Steinbeck's Travels With Charley and Truman Capote's In Cold Blood have been shown to have passages that the writer made from whole cloth, for the purposes of keeping the narrative going. These were teased out later by other writers who researched the stories on their own. That doesn't make them less entertaining as stories, but it does introduce an element of doubt as to their veracity.

Laura Hillenbrand's Seabiscuit and S.C. Gwynne's histories of the Civil War are claimed by the author that everything that the characters thought or said in those recounts could be documented. Is that true? Nobody has been able to fault them so far, AFAIK. That leads me to trust those authors.

 

[Naomasa298]

I'm still unclear as to what truth we are supposed to give. Authenticity varies - not everyone behaves in the same way. And many readers read for escapism. Doesn't really make sense if stories are all as bleak as real life.

"Leave school, get a job where you're bored 80% of the time, eat, sleep, shit and die."

 

[JLT]

I'm still unclear as to what truth we are supposed to give. Authenticity varies - not everyone behaves in the same way. And many readers read for escapism.

And even there we must have some resemblance to reality. Marvel movies, which are a premiere form of escapism, have a fundamental disregard for physics when, say, a character gets slammed into a wall at thirty miles an hour and gets up and brushes himself off. That's a trope we've come to take for granted. But we can't make him eat automobiles or piss a river unless there's some sort of back story that justifies it.

 

[Rigor Mortis]

piss a river

That's a terrible superpower...

More seriously, I have a line of dialogue in my first ever short story (that I had to excavate from a very old email to myself):

"I find it curious that we often reveal more about ourselves in the lies we choose than the truths we tell".

I didn't know the full stop went inside the quotation marks. The sentiment I still stand by.

 

[Naomasa298]

I didn't know the full stop went inside the quotation marks. The sentiment I still stand by.

Isn't that British vs. American punctuation convention?

 

[Rigor Mortis]

Isn't that British vs. American punctuation convention?

If it is, I didn'tknow that either. Still don't...or maybe now I do?

Now I see why I mess around with dialogue and quotation marks in quite a number of stories.

 

[DLC]

I don't think so. (?)

 

[Schism]

Cormac McCarthy blazed a trail between ideological divide. Both donkeys and elephants have enjoyed his musings. That's the whole truth, and nothing but.

 

[Rath Darkblade]

3. Young adults, who are aware about romance. They require a lie that romance exists, i.e. heroics, meaning of life, God, etc.

And which seem to require vampires or zombies.

Yes, but there's a world of difference between (say) Bram Stoker's Dracula and Stephanie Meyer's Twilight ... or Seth Grahame-Smith's Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. *shudder*

If the vampires or zombies are used in an intelligent, sensible way, fine. But all too often, vampires and zombies seem to be there because they're "cool" or "flavour of the month".

"Leave school, get a job where you're bored 80% of the time, eat, sleep, shit and die."

Want a real day that's true for everyone? Wake up, do stuff, and go back to sleep.

And even there we must have some resemblance to reality. Marvel movies, which are a premiere form of escapism, have a fundamental disregard for physics when, say, a character gets slammed into a wall at thirty miles an hour and gets up and brushes himself off. That's a trope we've come to take for granted. But we can't make him eat automobiles or piss a river unless there's some sort of back story that justifies it.

That's eerily accurate not only for Marvel, but also both the James Bond and Star Trek franchises.

Think about it: Bond is indestructible. Yes, he died at the end of No Time to Die (2011), but then he was brought back because The Studio Wanted Money. James T. Kirk seems to be similarly immortal: he "died" four times but came back from death every time.

Main Character Indestructibility is not new phenomenon. Conan Doyle famously brought back Sherlock Holmes after he and Moriarty fell off a cliff in "The Final Problem". Gandalf returned from the dead in The Two Towers. Aslan does it in The Chronicles of Narnia. And loads and loads of religious figures seem to return from the dead. *sigh*

It reminds me of how, in Terry Pratchett's The Light Fantastic, Rincewind and Twoflower manage to escape Death's realm (don't ask). The Grim Reaper responds with a sarcastic I MIGHT AS WELL INSTALL A REVOLVING DOOR.

Here's my question: is this cheating? Some people seem to think that it's not cheating if the main character's miraculous survival is plausible and makes for a good story. What do you think, hmm?