Rise Up, Oh Heart, For There is Another Battle to Win

kryptonitanott:

words-writ-in-starlight:

dainesanddaffodils:

One of my favorite phrases my Creative Writing professor had for when you’re writing fantasy is ‘giving your story a Flux Capacitor’.

Because it’s not real, it doesn’t exist. But the way it’s thrown into Back to the Future, at no point does it throw the audience off or suspend any more disbelief than time travel would. You believe Doc when he says he created the Flux Capacitor - the thing that makes time travel possible, because the universe never questions him. 

So it essentially means like, there are going to be elements to your universe that are just not gonna make any sense, even if you set up a whole system based on it. And the only way to make it work is completely own it. You cannot second-guess your system or else the reader will too. You can give it the strangest explanation, but write it like you own it.  

Either you’ve got to follow the rules of reality and physics and shit TO THE LETTER, or you have to say “naaaaaah” and fuck off with your magic/sci-fi/whatever to have a marvelous garden party where reality isn’t invited.

*Steps in quietly* hi, i’m Kry and i get stupidly excited when i see posts like this one in my dash.

So, okay, what you are talking about has to do with two very intertwined concepts: one is the concept of verisimilitude, the other is the concept of “fictional pact”.

So the first one is a term that comes from Aristotle (and also Plato, but he spoke of it negatively, as is the habit of the asshole of Plato). The verisimilitude is basically the credibility of a particular element within a book, a poem or a play. It is something that has the appearance of truth (it is not necessarily true, it can be false) for the purpose of persuading someone, getting someone’s attention and maintaining that attention.

That concept of verisimilitude is mixed with the concept of the fictional pact that was born (more or less) of the expression of the poet, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “willing suspension of disbelief”: what he meant by this is that when a subject is reading a book must suspend their critical sense, ignoring inconsistencies or incompatibilities of the work of fiction in which the subject is immersed (such as existence of a Flux Capacitor) that may clash with their reality, allowing them to enter and enjoy the world of fiction exposed in the book.

To simplify all this, my friends and I like to explain it in the following way, using “The fossilized mosquito paradigm” of Jurassic Park: “So you have the fossilized mosquito. In our reality (for the moment, mehehe) it is scientifically impossible for this theory to happen. But it has an argument that is sufficiently consistent, believable and possible (aka: verisimilitude concept) to work on a book/movie/video game and to create a pact of fiction by which it is easy to accept that what is narrated could have happened although it is pure fiction.” 

If the plot of the story is sufficiently credible to immerse the reader in the story, it doesn’t matter if it’s a fossilized mosquito that revives dinosaurs or a Flux Capacitor that teleports ya which in reality would be impossible, because what matters is that in your fictional world works enough to suspend those thoughts of doubt and enjoy the story!