Between
the Pages Past
By Dennis
Collins
"Believability"
Faster
than a speeding bullet. More powerful than a locomotive. Able to leap
tall buildings in a single bound…
Why did we find these characteristics so believable when we were
kids? Well, they were explained in what seemed to
be a logical claim. Superman was from a planet with a much greater gravitational
pull. When he arrived on earth, he was just naturally much stronger than
the native inhabitants. We believed
that it was something that could
happen. Superman absolutely had to possess these superior
powers or there would have been no story. Where would poor old Lois Lane
have been?
As a fiction writer, I feel that it is my responsibility to sell
the reader a logical explanation of circumstances in order to keep the
plot believable. If my story loses credibility, I’ve lost the
reader. I have been disappointed
many times when reading a good story only to have it turn a corner into
a situation so unlikely that it loses plausibility.
Poetic license certainly allows an author the capacity to stretch
conditions but he must constantly be aware of how much the reader is willing
to stretch. The amount of stretch is limited by how convincingly
the author sells his string of logic. In my novel, The
Unreal McCoy, I needed a large, substantial building in an extremely
remote wilderness area and so I made it a remnant of the war effort from
the Second World War, built as a facility for maintenance and snow removal
to keep the copper mine railroad lines open during northern Michigan winters.
I even fooled an historian with this.
There wouldn’t be many mystery novels written if we weren’t allowed
to use coincidences. In some ways,
they’re just easy ways of making things happen but I feel they’re best
reserved for getting over an otherwise insurmountable wall. There is a
temptation to use coincidence to set up situations but overuse is quickly
spotted by the reader and has the same effect as an extremely far-fetched
scenario.
Just remember that the reader has to believe that it could happen.
2002
Past Columns - Dennis Collins
|
2002
Past Columns - Susan McBride
|
©
MyShelf.Com. All Rights Reserved. |
|