A boring realist’s thoughts on keeping it real

Note: If you don’t want to wade through this entire post, feel free to go directly to the examples near the end of this post. – AC

I was reviewing some early chapters of a work in progress recently when I discovered a problem with the text that–while perhaps insignificant to the overarching plot–could ruin the story’s credibility and my credibility as a writer if I didn’t fix it.

The novel is set in the early 1980s, and music plays a significant role in it. In one early chapter, I reference a song that, when I was writing the chapter, I was certain was ubiquitous on FM radio during the time frame of this portion of the novel. But as often happens when I rely on my increasingly foggy memory, I did not remember correctly.

A quick Google search revealed I was wrong about this song’s release date. I was off by several months. The song came out later that year–closer to Christmastime–but didn’t become a hit until the following spring. That was a full year after the scene in which I’d placed it.

This problem had to be remedied, but how? I worried that attempting to extract the reference from this passage would be like trying to remove a piece from a precariously constructed Jenga tower. One wrong move and the entire story would collapse. Maybe I could I write around it. Or just ignore the discrepancy and hope no one notices.

It didn’t take too long to decide to keep the song title in the manuscript. It’s important enough to the story and the scene I’m setting that I’d rather revise the timeline of the novel. With some minor tweaking of earlier and later chapters, moving the events from one year to the next should not require substantial work. (Easy for me to say now, since I haven’t done any of the actually revising yet.)

Verisimilitude and my short, unhappy career as a science fiction writer

This sort of fact-checking reminds me of the importance of verisimilitude–that is, the principle that the fiction should mimic real life as closely as possible, or at least, in the case of sci fi, fantasy, magical realism, or whatever fever dream your creative self has conjured, resonate with the humanity of readers to be believable. Verisimilitude connects the reader to the text. It is what allows us to imagine being a part of the times, the scenes, the situations the writer creates for us.

The concept of verisimilitude is rooted in the ancient Greek dramatic theory called mimesis, which means “imitation”–but in the sense of “re-presentation” rather than of “copying.”

According to the Brittanica.com article on mimesis:

According to Plato, all artistic creation is a form of imitation: that which really exists (in the “world of ideas”) is a type created by God; the concrete things man perceives in his existence are shadowy representations of this ideal type. Therefore, the painter, the tragedian, and the musician are imitators of an imitation, twice removed from the truth.

I first encountered the term verisimilitude during my final semester in college. It was during a creative writing course taught by Speer Morgan, who was and still is the editor of The Missouri Review. (TMR is a fine literary magazine, and if you aren’t familiar with it, you should take some time to sample some of their published pieces online.)

The first story I wrote for this class was a science fiction piece that, a quickly learned, required a massive suspension of disbelief to make it believable by any stretch. I began by violating one of the first rules of storytelling: I was telling, not showing. My story began with an unnecessary world-building exercise: a page-and-a-half discussion of a honeycomb-shaped universe my yet-to-be-introduced characters inhabited. As I read my story aloud to the class, it didn’t take long–maybe by page two of this twenty-page story–for the good professor to set aside his copy of the story and sigh heavily. It was a sigh that said, This is going to be one very long semester.

But he didn’t criticize my effort. Instead, he responded to a fellow student’s critique by saying something like, “Yeah, maybe I’m a boring realist, but it’s really important for every part of a story to be believable. To have verisimilitude.”

And from there he launched into a master class about creating believable characters, settings, dialogue, and worlds.

It turned out that the whole page-and-a-half description of the honeycomb universe I had imagined had nothing at all to do with the story. It was a self-indulgent digression written in an over-the-top fashion. (In my defense, I was reading a lot of Tom Robbins back then, but I had nowhere near the mastery of over-the-top writing as Robbins.)

I was a journalism student, so I was well-acquainted with boring realism. We were trained in the just-the-facts-ma’am style of prose. We worshipped the inverted pyramid. We focused not on writing, but on reporting. I thought writing short stories would be my chance to expand beyond boring realism.

But as I read more fiction, I came to realize that boring realism, and by extension verisimilitude, can reel a reader into a story. Verisimilitude is the gateway to the worlds and people and ideas of the writer’s imagination.

The truthfulness of a lie

Of course, if we’re writing fiction, we are making stuff up. The trick, as novelist and short story writer John Cheever said in this 1976 interview with The Paris Review, “Verisimilitude is, by my lights, a technique one exploits in order to assure the reader of the truthfulness of what he’s being told. If he truly believes he is standing on a rug, you can pull it out from under him.”

But, he continued, “verisimilitude is also a lie. What I’ve always wanted of verisimilitude is probability, which is very much the way I live. This table seems real, the fruit basket belonged to my grandmother, but a madwoman could come in the door any moment.”

So, whether you are writing about a far-away galaxy, a near-future dystopia, a long-ago period, or the world we now inhabit–which seems to grow more surreal by the day–remember that verisimilitude in scene-setting, dialogue, descriptions, and world-building is the key to connecting with your readers.

Verisimilitude in action: some examples

Here are a few examples of how verisimilitude creates imaginary worlds for your readers.

Enter a Native American Church

Since I mentioned Speer Morgan earlier, let’s start with one of his writings. In his short story, “Jack Woman Killer,” he introduces the reader to a scene that is probably unfamiliar to many of us–a Native American Church service–as well as some of the main characters of the story.

Joe was Grandfather for the meeting, and he required that it be held in a teepee. A teepee, with nothing but a field of dead popcorn stalks between it and the November wind, was not pleasant to sit in all night, no matter how good the medicine or how warm the fire. The fire was generous, as always, winter or summer, when tended by Billy Caulder, a short bedraggled hipless man whose pants generally looked like they were about to fall down. He worked slowly around the fire without faltering, getting smoke in his nose and sneezing, grimacing, and shielding his face, but always with such monotonous certainty of movement that he seemed irritated and hypnotized at once. All night, Jack's front baked while his back froze against the tent canvas. For relief, he finally asked Grandfather for a fourth dose of medicine. Energy rode Jack's spine like high-volt power, making him want to go out and chase rabbits under the new moon, and he was seeing snakes in the fire.

In that introductory paragraph, we can feel the contrast between the heat of the fire inside the tent and the cold outside. We see the “short bedraggled hipless man” who is charged with tending the fire. We see the effect the peyote is having on Jack and can almost feel the sensation of wanting “to go out and chase rabbits under the new moon.”

The ennui of the almost-adult

This excerpt from “Cold Engine,” a first-person story by Tiffany Leong published in The Maine Review last December, uses a lovely combination of selective description and narrative voice to express the feelings of a college student home during winter break.

I’ve been at home since the holidays much longer than anyone ever intends to stay with their parents. Time grows still the longer this season passes. My dad refuses to replace the heating system, so we drape blankets over sweaters over socks. My mom always complains that her hands are cold, and the robe she’s been wearing for years has lost its synthetic-cotton-fluff, down to the marrow shag of what it used to be. This is the first winter I don’t feel like a kid anymore. I look at the peeling bedroom posters, the desaturated grandma quilts, the one cupboard door that never closes. Dad and Mom’s gray hair and the rust around bathtub edges and the fridge half-empty. I feel how old I am.

As the family members “drape blankets over sweaters over socks” and the narrator’s mother’s ancient robe that “has lost its synthetic-cotton-fluff, down to the marrow shag of what it used to be,” you can sense the cold inside the house and the dilapidation of the life this student once knew.

Introducing a speculative fiction world

In “Talitha Koum,” by Gwen Warner, published recently in Short Story, Long, we are introduced to a girl who lives in a world that doesn’t exist. But maybe it could exist? This introduction has the kind of verisimilitude and just enough mystery to pull me in.

My father liked Joseph because he preached forgiveness and unconditional familial love, embracing his brothers even after they abandoned him. I liked Joseph because he dreamed. We have that in common. The night before my seventh birthday, I dreamt of hugging my father for the first time. I went to bed that night thinking about how at school the next day, they’d hold a party in my honor. We would raise sanitizer slicked hands and rejoice, toasting cups of sparkling apple juice. When we celebrated other kids’ birthdays, their parents would visit the classroom, bearing gifts in the form of allergy-friendly snacks. In my dream, my parents did the same.

With this introduction, we see in descriptive details that the world the narrator inhabits is not quite like ours. The “sanitizer slicked hands” and “gifts in the form of allergy-friendly snacks” suggest a sterile environment. Later into the story, we learn why. (No spoilers here. Just take a few minutes to read it.

Second person, personal

It isn’t often you find stories written in the second person, much less entire novels. Writing in the you voice asks a lot of the reader. Mainly that they assume the role of the narrator. The writer is not telling the story to the reader; the reader is telling the story to themselves. For any writing daring to try a second-person narration, I recommend reading Jay McInerney’s acclaimed 1984 novel Bring Lights, Big City. See how he sets the stage for this tale from the very first paragraph.

You are not the kind of guy who would be at a place like this at this time of the morning. But here you are, and you cannot say that the terrain is entirely unfamiliar, although the details are fuzzy. You are at a nightclub talking to a girl with a shaved head. The club is either Heartbreak or the Lizard Lounge. All might come clear if you could just slip into the bathroom and do a little more Bolivian Marching Powder. Then again, it might not. A small voice inside you insists that this epidemic lack of clarity is a result of too much of that already. The night has already turned on that imperceptible pivot where two a.m. changes to six a.m. You know this moment has come and gone, but you are not yet willing to concede that you have crossed the line beyond which all is gratuitous damage and the palsy of unraveled nerve endings. Somewhere back there you could have cut your losses, but you rode past that moment on a comet trail of white powder and now you are trying to hang on to the rush. Your brain at this moment is composed of brigades of tiny Bolivian soldiers. They are tired and muddy from their long march through the night. There are holes in their boots and they are hungry. They need to be fed. They need the Bolivian Marching Powder.

McInerney reels us into the story, confiding in us that we “are not the kind of guy who would be at a place like this” and then proceeding to describe the night’s events that led to the current situation. Descriptions of the location are minimal–a girl with a shaved head, one of two interchangeable clubs–but the other details–the lost track of time, the Bolivian Marching Powder as a euphemism for cocaine–reveals the character of the coked up narrator who craves more of what got him, I mean you, into this mess.

Your turn

These are just a few examples of verisimilitude in action. I didn’t attempt to show any sci fi, fantasy, or magical realism because, well, because I’m a boring realist, just like my teacher, Speer Morgan.

But I’d love to hear what examples of verisimilitude you might like to share. Please post in the comments.

Image via Pexels.