I love research. Seriously, I can lose hours or days to research if the topic is interesting enough. But, then it comes time to actually sit down and write a story, and sometimes reality, facts, and research can clash with the flow of the story and decisions have to be made about where to honor reality and stick to facts, and where to take creative liberties in service of the story you want to tell.
I’ve found this clash is often most intense when medical conditions/surgeries/illnesses come into play. A character needing surgery can be a great plot point, but depending on the kind of surgery needed, recovery time can sometimes take weeks or months in real life. In a story, unless the recovery is the point, this recovery time can really cramp the style of the story. So, as an author, what do you do? Do you shorten up the recovery time to keep things moving? Do you use a time jump to skip over the recovery? Or do you try to work the recovery time into the story, even if it wasn’t part of the original plan? Trying to make this decision can take the wind out of your sails as you’re planning a story and slow the process down considerably.
I ran into this problem myself when writing Rescue Me (Heathens Ink, 1). The plot required one of the main characters to sustain a bullet wound, this wound was the basis for a forced proximity trope where he moves in with the other main character during his recovery. So, I needed to figure out how/where he could be shot that wouldn’t require healing to be the entire focus of the story, but would also be a bad enough injury to move the plot where I wanted it to go. This kept me up for weeks trying to figure out how to do it, before I finally decided to stop stressing and just dive in.
I think finding the right balance between realism and telling a good story is important. It’s ok to ask readers to suspend disbelief to a certain extent, but the more real details you can include the more intense and deep the story will feel.
So, how do you find the right balance?
It starts with doing the research. You can’t decide how real to get unless you know what’s real. You can’t break the rules until you know them. Learn as much as you can about the healing time of that surgery, the symptoms of that illness, the length of a flight, etc. And then consider the purpose of your story, is the point to show the healing process, show the struggle of that mental illness, put the reader inside the situation? Or, is it only meant to be a brief plot device to move the character to the next step? Then you can work your magic. My rule of thumb is to use AS MUCH realism as possible before it starts to derail your story.
I see maintaining realism as a way of respecting not only the topic but the readers, but at the end of the day, the biggest thing an author owes their readers is a good story. If a character needs a heart transplant, and all your online research shows that the survival rate is 5-10 more years after a heart transplant, I’m going to give my readers the happy ending they deserve, even if the truth has to be fudged a little to get there.
What about you? Do you prefer realism in a story even if it’s a painful realism or would you rather have a fluffy story?
I especially appreciate this discussion. There are times when unrealistic sports situations, medical treatments Etc do disrupt the flow of a story for the reader.
Another example is a story written with a setting of a major US city and using the Queens English to describe things.
Whenever possible, keeping things real is best but that can’t happen all the time, as you noted, in service of the story. It behooves the reader to keep in mind that this is fiction.
I read most if not all of your published work and I don’t remember a time when I felt that the storyline and circumstances didn’t make sense. Well done!
Good discussion! I’m all for realism and don’t care for fluff but I never considered the difficulties.
This is an interesting discussion of a question to which there will probably never be a definitive answer! I have to say that I give other authors a lot more room to play than I give myself. I think if something is clearly fiction, then the story must come first, though I will enjoy a story best if the realities are fudged and finessed rather than destroyed outright! Alas, I’m a lot harder on myself than on others, and I think it holds me back that I want everything of mine to be as realistic as possible. I suppose I need to remember that every format (novels, films) and every genre (romance, westerns) comes with its own sets of expectations, and its own set of established tropes and understandings that we accept as real (though they’re not). … OK, I’m going to quit now, but you can probably tell I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately!