Does fiction have to seem real?
One of the quotes on my website is from Tom Clancy. He’d answer the title question in the affirmative. He’s probably referring to thrillers in that quote, but most good fiction has to seem real. A few genres—horror and fantasy, for example—are exceptions, but even hard sci-fi and historical romance novels should seem real enough—the more believable, the better. I often see events from the latest tweet from our president to NYC crime scenes (they’ve become eerily similar in some ways) and say, “I couldn’t write anything like that because readers wouldn’t find it believable.” But maybe I’m limiting myself because readers don’t want believable?
Consider my arch-villain Vladimir Kalinin, first introduced in The Midas Bomb (he appears in many books). He’s a bit of a narcissist and psychotic, but I gave him a human side in No Amber Waves of Grain. Mr. Trump has no human side, yet Trump is real and Kalinin isn’t, although he seems more real to me than Trump because the latter seems to live in a fantasy world. When you consider real people like Charles Manson, Kalinin actually seems pretty tame.
Also consider Mary Jo Melendez of Muddlin’ Through. She represents what’s great about immigration in America (unless you’re Native American, you’re an immigrant or descended from immigrants). So do many of my characters. Bill Franklin, a gay man, and Kalidas Metropolis, a lesbian, play important roles in The Midas Bomb and Full Medical, respectively. None of these characters is real, but they also represent groups that many people don’t want to be real and would rather not have in fiction either.
If the current socio-political climate in America is any indication, real-seeming fictional characters can are a turnoff for many, and we’re in trouble. Are religious and political prejudices, hatred, and bigotry causing us not to accept reality and live in a complete fantasy world where everybody looks and acts like us and there’s no diversity? That seems to be the case for our president, but he’s only at the tip of the iceberg. People seem to ignore reality, so why should I worry about it in my fiction? If I write a story that could be real (and maybe is even based on real events), do I even have to try to make it seem real?
Clancy’s advice occurred during a saner time where storytelling—thrillers, in his case—needed an author’s knowledge of human behavior and human diversity and his ability to entertain readers with ordinary and seemingly real people doing extraordinary things. Many readers would get a taste of reality by reading fiction, in other words. You could understand the origins of the Armenian Holocaust by reading Boston Teran’s Gardens of Grief, or experience the evil Nazi regime by reading Deaver’s Garden of Beasts, or live through the Dirty War in Argentina by perusing Holzman’s Malena. These are deep books, but they are fiction. There are many like them—most of my books have deep themes.
Fiction today seems diluted. The most popular genres include historical romances and cozy mysteries, both entertaining, I suppose, but certainly not deep. Moreover, they’re often orthogonal to the mainstream problems of our time—that is, they represent escapist literature, so they don’t seem very real. I won’t go into my list of reasons why these genres are popular—there are many reasons—but I can sum it all up by saying that at the very least they’re contrary to Clancy’s advice. I call many books today “fluff” for that reason—maybe entertaining for a brief period but completely and entirely forgettable.
Of course, one thing that drives the production of forgettable books and their incredible sales potential is that people are addicted to fluff. They don’t want their fiction to seem real because they’re out to escape from reality. I can understand that. Reality is often ugly and loathsome, so fiction far from reality is preferred by many. That’s why fantasy is so popular too: it’s about as far from reality as we can get, unless the author makes his fantasy world seem real in some futuristic setting (I tried that experiment in Rogue Planet, hard sci-fi with some Game-of-Thrones-flavor to it—a realistic Star Wars, if you will; I had fun with it, but probably won’t do it again).
To modify Clancy’s advice a wee bit, fiction can be pretty farfetched as long as the plot has some serious themes woven through and around it. Fiction fails at least in the sense that it becomes forgettable if there’s no moral to the story—even Aesop knew that. Let’s return to meaningful reading, even if it’s not what’s selling right now. Otherwise, we will have a huge dearth of meaningful books from the end of the 20th and beginning of the 21st centuries providing ample evidence for a general disconnect from reality.
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In libris libertas!
