I’m doing a mini-blogathon today for Secular Students Week!
This week is Secular Students Week, when people around the Internet are celebrating the fantastic work the Secular Student Alliance is doing to empower students. Their goal is to get 500 donations now through June 17th: if they do, they’ll receive a $20,000 challenge grant! Help them keep up their amazing work by giving this week. A gift of $5, $10, or $20 will go a long way towards helping them reach this goal and empower secular students: please give today!
In today’s mini-blogathon, I’ll post a new blog post once an hour, from now (a little after 9:00 am Pacific time) until 5:00 pm Pacific time. In addition, for every donation that’s made today via my blogathon, I’ll post a new cat photo!
This hour’s blogathon post: Thoughts About Realism in Fiction. I’m writing a novel, an erotic fiction novel, and I’m encountering an interesting conundrum. I want my novel to be realistic: I’m setting it in the real world, in real places, with real historical developments (the novel is set in the not-too-distant past, starting in 1970 and ending more or less now). I’m doing a lot of research to make the novel as realistic as possible: finding out how long it takes to get a graduate degree in library science, looking up which states had same-sex marriage when, digging up old editions of Our Bodies, Our Selves, that sort of thing.
But there’s a limiting factor here — and that’s the fact that the book is fiction, and is therefore, by definition, counter-factual. If I have a character work in a library at the University of Iowa (something I’m still deciding on, by the way) — well, there were a limited number of people working in the libraries at the University of Iowa, and my character wasn’t one of them. The very fact that I’m writing fiction set in the past means that I’m warping history, even if very gently.
So I’m having to decide: How much warping of history am I willing to do? Does it matter whether there really was a U-Haul office in Northampton, Massachusetts in 1989? Does it matter when the University of Michigan got a queer studies department, or indeed whether they have one at all? As long as these things are reasonably plausible, do they have to be true? What would it even mean for something to be plausible, but not true?
Would welcome thoughts on this.
Once again — please support the Secular Student Alliance! Help them get their challenge grant of $20,000 by reaching their goal of 500 donations now through June 17th. Even small donations help. Please support them today!
In regards to historically plausible fiction, I’d like to point to Culver University – a fictional university in the Marvel universe. The main campus is in Virginia, but there’s a satellite campus in West Virginia, which is my home state. Now, this is obviously a fictional university (WV doesn’t have very many colleges, and only like three universities), but that’s fine with me. MY issue is that when a scene in the Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. TV series was set on this satellite campus, the landscape was flat to the horizon! (There’s a reason West Virginia is the Mountain State, y’all.)
So I guess my thinking is, plausible fiction is fine, emphasis on “plausible”. If you’re going to fictionalize something, does that contribute to the story in some meaningful way? If so, then go for it – create that fictional university or center or department. If not, then try to avoid it, or at least acknowledge that it’s artistic license.
When it comes to fiction, the cardinal rule should be John Gardiner’s (paraphrased): “Create a dream in your reader’s mind, and don’t do anything that distracts from it or otherwise causes your reader to stop and say ‘that can’t be right.'”
So, I’d say, UHaul rental offices are ubiquitous; even readers resident in Northampton at the time narrated (who are the only subset of readers who might even potentially be distracted by the counterfactual) are unlikely to blink an eye. Queer Studies departments at major midwestern land-grant universities (football schools) are not ubiquitous and where they exist have significant histories and probably memorable events surrounding their inception, so the detail probably has a non-negligible chance of distracting the subset of your readers who a) know anything about UM at the time narrated and/or b) have a more than passing interest in the history of Queer Studies and Gender Studies in academia.
These considerations are why many novelists simply create fictional locations like towns and universities. Notable examples of the latter would be Jane Smiley’s Moo U, which is a thinly veiled fictional version of Iowa State University, or the recent The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach (excellent, by the way, even if you don’t care about baseball), which is set at a fictionalized small liberal arts college in the Midwest.