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This is a continuation on the topic of Applied Realism: the reasons you need to do it. The simplest and most basic reason you need to do it is that The Reader can smell dishonesty like a dog smells fear. And the smell of dishonesty is ugly. Most readers, upon smelling it, will put the story down and never read it again. The second is that you can get all sorts of interesting nuances and developments out of it. This is the same as exploring a character's back-story. I remember that once I had this like 70-question checklist which I was supposed to go through for each character, fleshing out all their background, making them more real, and—most importantly—providing myself with interesting tidbits to insert at an advantageous time. I did this for Seth Locarno and Aylin Keld, who were the main characters in a former project of mine, and then for Catheryne Talnor and Jordan Citelle, the co-stars of A Love For The Ages, the prequel to aforementioned project. After that I never used the checklist again. Took too damn long. (There were two more main characters in that project who thus never got the treatment, so I'm not just saying that.) But seriously: there's value in having back story and detail and interesting nuance. Let's just take the Naked In School universe, which (if you've read my stories) you're familiar with. The basic premise is that the Federal Government has mandated a program in which students go through a week of school naked, which (since this is erotic fiction) opens up the door to a lot of "Hilarity Ensues" of the sexual nature, and potentially some character growth as well. All well and good. But how the heck did this happen? Since it's a federal program, pushed through legislation and signed into law by the president, standards of morality and decency must have changed a little: in our world, such a bill would be laughed out of Congress. It might not, however, have been laughed out during the Sixties, during the Free Love movement which was a response to (what people of the time perceived to be) the deeply-conservative and repressive environment of the Cold-War-era 1950s. That era was in itself a response to not only the horrific 1940s, which contained World War II and the cataclysmic nuclear bombings, but to the rise of communism in Russia and the implicit threat of the USSR's position as the only other superpower in the world besides America. In short: WW2 scared America, so we played it safe and went conservative. Then we got scared of the conservativism (McCarthy, anyone?) and went liberal. This kind of back-and-forth swinging is completely and totally normal, from an historical standpoint. In other words, The Program could be an artifact of a rebellion against a recent trend of conservativism, a sociopolitical equivalent to global-climate trends. Now, obviously it would have to be one hell of a swing into the Left, of the sort we can barely imagine today... But then, on September 10, 2001, we probably could not have imagined that America would have descended this far into the Right, either. But liberal feeling does not a sexual revolution make. For that, you probably need technology too. And The Program delivers. Karen Wagner herself introduced the idea that STDs, particularly AIDS, had been conquered, and that effective birth control was now widespread and easy to get one's hands on (no more abstinence-only education in this universe! For that matter, somebody could write a story about a liberal former Program participant who moves to a new school in a conservative area of the country, and tries to launch a sexual revolution there. Essentially this would be the movie Pleasantville, but with explicit sex). Specifically, somebody (don't know who—maybe Frank Downey) introduced the idea of "The Shot", a hormone-based birth control injection that works practically instantaneously, such so that a girl can take it and in 12 hours have safe sex. (Having said that, the level of AIDS-conquering varies from story to story; in Alandra's take on the genre, there is an AIDS vaccine, but still no cure.) So. We're writing a Naked In School story, and these are the two "universe-specific" rules we need to work with: 1) Cheap, widespread & government-subsidized birth control; and 2) a lack of STDs to worry about. What implications do these two rules have on our story, whatever story that happens to be? Well. No more STDs, eh? How does that change the balance of power in the world? What's the statistic for Africa, that one person in five has the disease? What happens when this way of life is taken from them? How do the nations and cultures and peoples respond? How does this effect the global economy? Do African countries suddenly make vaults towards becoming first-world nations? Do we start outsourcing jobs there? Do they start emigrating here as white-collar workers, the way Indians and Asians are doing? What are parents like in the Naked In School universe? How hip-and-liberal are they? More accurately, on which topics are they hip-and-liberal, and on which topics are they not? How do Christians—indeed, hardcore members of any religions—respond to these greater elements of leftism? And remember, religious fanatics are the ones most likely to employ suicide bombers. (For those of you out there who are protesting that modern, enlightened Christians, like yourself, are not like that, I'd just like to remind you that, until the year 2000, interracial dating was against school policy at Bob Jones University. Maybe we're not there anymore... but we're not very far from it either.) Heck, sometimes it just gets in the way. The First Ninety Days is not a NiS story; it's about two characters, Jon and Caitlyn Stanford, who find themselves rushed into marriage, and how they deal with these challenges during (as suggested by the title) its first ninety days. But characters from my NiS tales appear in 90 Days, meaning 90 Days takes place in the same universe—one with cheap, widespread & government-subsidized birth control, and a lack of STDs. And this provided an obstacle for me! Since Jon and Caitlyn got married very rapidly (they put their wedding together in about four hours), Caitlyn never got the chance to go on The Pill, meaning they had to use condoms (and occasionally forgot to do so, much to their consternation) until The Pill actually kicked in. The use of condoms, or lack thereof, was a theme I wanted to play with, because it said a lot about their marriage—about the sudden dropping of boundaries between these two people who had dated for 18 months but had never gone past "first base", thus necessitating the creation of new boundaries (made of latex); about how much they loved each other, but could never let passion overwhelm them because they would need to stop and put the darn thing on. In some ways, those little Trojans were a symbol of the marriage itself: loving, but hardly the carefree, childlike play-time Jon had hoped for, and not the pure, unblemished, almost sacramental experience Caitlyn had hoped for. They had to work their way up to those by hanging on for that month. (My original plan was for them to be using the condoms throughout the entire story, and only go "bareback" 1) on special occasions, or 2) because they were overwhelmed by hormones. Later I discarded this because I didn't want to overplay the symbolism.) In short, the condoms were a critical part of the storytelling. They were also completely obsolete, because Caitlyn should have gotten The Shot immediately after they got married. No, not could have—should have. I had made a mistake in not remembering that The Shot was available; Brandon and Meredith were in the story from Day One, after all, and where they go, their setting goes with them (though, to be honest, I actually forgot about it until they actually appeared "in the flesh"). Instead of condoms, Cait should've just gotten the injection on Day Two and been done with it. I mean, why go for a failure-prone, unsafe barrier method when you can get a magic shot and put the whole thing out of your mind? And suddenly, I was at a quandary. It would make for a better story if they used condoms... But not a logical one. To tell a good story, I would have to break my own rules; to remain true to my rules, I would have to compromise the story. In the end, I came up with a third option: I had Brandon and Meredith announce that, in the world of 90 Days, The Shot had been pulled by the FDA. Another workable answer would have been to say that The Shot and The Pill interact in dangerous ways, meaning it's not safe to use both of them at once. But I answered it. Because I could not ignore it; no sir. That's bad storytelling. And, even worse, that's dishonest storytelling. And that takes us right back to the first reason we do it. See, the thing about storytelling, no matter your medium (prose, poetry, stage drama, movie, comic book, television, animation), is that you must be truthful. Even more than that, you must be honest. If there's some discrepancy that comes up, you have to address it, because if you don't The Reader will lose faith in you. The Reader is careful with their belief, after all. You're taking them on an adventure, on a rollercoaster, on a safari into uncharted territory—they want proof that you're trustworthy, that you know what you're doing, that you aren't going to lead them into some hopeless bog or down the gullet of the Crumple-Horned Snorkack or something. And to prove you're trustworthy, you have to follow your own rules. Once it's there, it has to be there at all times, not just when it's inconvenient. You can't just take the easy way out anymore; you can't just do whatever you want to do, because you want to do it—such as Aerith's tragic death in the video game Final Fantasy VII, which was dramatic but utterly undermined by the fact that you have access to phoenix feathers with which to revive slain characters, and had probably used them on her twenty times by then. All of us were like, "Ha! Yeah right!" (It was still traumatic and emotional; even today, 13 years later when you know it's coming, it still hurts. But we also didn't believe it.) Under circumstances like that, you really have to think it out and make it work. And more often than not, it leads to better storytelling—because you're not taking the easy way out; because you have to earn your cliches (or better yet, realize they've been 86'd by the new rules). Following your own rules can lead to some of the most creative, inspired and memorable parts of your story. Why? Because they're plausible. Because something crazy happens even despite the rules of the story. Because, if you've declared something to be impossible, and then you make it happen anyway, without breaking any of your own rules, The Reader will love you. And because, at the very least, you can get a laugh by showing The Reader something that they instantly recognize as real. To paraphrase Orson Scott Card: tou're not telling The Truth, with trumpets; you're telling the truth, a tale so obviously true that nobody ever thinks to question its veracity. Or, to quote how I explain it to my real-life friends: It's fun to read about what could happen, but even better to read about what would happen. That's why it's good to follow rules. |